The Time of My Life (7 page)

Cats love a “structured, orderly life,” in fact, and one would think them perfect pets for a busy executive, general, or dictator. But they aren't admired by such people for two reasons, I surmise: cats won't be owned, and they won't be bossed.

Corporation presidents, millionaire bankers, U.S. commanders-in-chief, and European emperors are used to being in control of their environments, and the more powerful they are, the more firmly in con trol they are. If they don't actually own all they survey, they're in charge of it in some other way. And the people with whom they deal from day to day—junior officers, bureaucrats, employees, even wives and children—are expected to obey the word from the top, or at least give the impression of obeying.

So are the animals that
Town & Country
mentioned. Dogs have no pride. They fawn. They cower. They roll over and play dead or jump through hoops or beg for food—whatever they think will make the boss happy. The best-trained horse responds most quickly to bit and crop and spur. The most highly prized par rot repeats the greatest number of its boss's words with the least coaxing.

Cats won't do any of that, and maybe that bothers the presidents of the hundred top corporations.

The cat who lives in my house is a ten-year-old pussycat named Pussycat. Her lineage is nothing to brag about. She originated in an alley in New York City and owes her life to some kind person who rescued her from a pound. Her coloring is ordinary black and white, her only distinctive marking being her nose, which is half black and half pink. One of her green eyes waters—a legacy of her difficult kittenhood, probably—and gives the impression of perpetual boredom. She would draw no crowds at a cat show. A dog of her wretched beginning and present luxury would be grateful, would come when called, would wag his tail. He would solicit my affection. He would worship me.

But Pussycat is as arrogant as any of the presidents of the hundred top corporations. She lounges in the sun in my favorite chair with an air of belongingness that makes me doubt whose chair it really is. She sub mits to my petting and stroking only when she is in the mood for it. She doesn't lie at my feet as a dog would, but sits quietly on the fringe of the house hold's activities, never participating in its silliness, just watching condescendingly, like a long-suffering grandmother stuck with the babysitting. When she wants something—food, water, to go outside—she asks, but never begs. If she desires affection she curls up in the nearest lap and purrs. It's up to the owner of the lap to respond or not.

We who love cats love them not because they're subservient and obedient like the dog, the horse, the parrot, but because they aren't. We're fascinated by the jungle grace that millenia of “domestication” haven't diminished. We admire the totality of their poise, the quickness of their reflexes, the singlemindedness of their leisure.

In the best person-cat relationships, both require space, privacy, silence. There is no owner and no chattel, no boss and no servant. Both are aloof. No question of pecking order ever arises.

When I told Pussycat that the presidents of the hundred top corporations don't like her, she flicked her tail once and closed her watery eye. She couldn't care less.

March, 1979

Rites of Passage at Six Flags

B
ACK IN
THE
EARLY
1960s, when it opened, Six Flags over Texas was educational, sort of. The amusements park was divided into six distinct sections—one for each of the six nations which laid some claim to Texas at various periods in its history—and the costumes of the workers and the entertainments in each section were related, however vaguely, to that nation. Parents who took their kids there could, by fudging a little, justify their expense as “educational” and feel virtuous.

As the park has grown over the years, its historical theme has been diluted. Oh, LaSalle's River Adventure, the Caddo War Canoes, and a few other of the original “historical” rides are still there. The gun-fighters in the Texas section still show us how the state got its reputation for violence, and the rideless Confederacy section is still the most gracious part of the park. But the most popular rides now—the Texas Chute Out and the modern roller-coasters, Big Bend and Shock Wave—have no historical pretenses about them. They're simply updated versions of traditional amusement-park chills and thrills, as appropriate to Coney Island and Atlantic City as to Arlington.

That was bound to happen, I suppose, as soon as Six Flags over Texas spawned Six Flags over Missouri and Six Flags over Georgia—parks whose names make no historical sense at all, whose logic is only corporate—and the newer parks began influencing their parent.

I'm not bemoaning the change. There have always been better places than Six Flags for kids to learn Texas history. But the park has been, and remains, a good place to learn things if you focus on the young, rather than the old.

There must be adults somewhere in its management and operation, but they're invisible to the public. For Six Flags is the kingdom of the young. The rides, the food stands, the maintenance crews all are manned by fresh-faced high school and college students. The performers in its shows are just as young. And the tasks of them all are done with diligence and cheer, a pleasure to watch. Thousands have spent their summers working there, I suppose, and the fact that Six Flags is as bright and clean now as it was the first time I saw it—long ago, on its inaugural day—is a testimony to teenagers' capacity for hard work and responsibility.

The customers are a study, too. In their own kingdom, the young fight less among themselves. They're less sulky. They wait patiently in line for what they want. They don't write graffiti. When their peers are in positions of authority, they don't even talk back. They behave as we wish they would at home.

And parents who wonder what their uncommunicative fledglings really care about can find out simply by reading the T-shirts that pass, for a shirt without a message is a rare thing at Six Flags. They care about their schools. They care about music (divided about evenly between rock and country), they care about their cities, about sports, about beer, about their churches, about hamburger joints. They care about themselves. Those T-shirts that don't advertise some favorite something-or-other advertise their wearers—their
machismo
, their sexiness, their humor, their with-it-ness. Some day, no doubt, some graduate student in sociology will write a Ph.D. thesis on T-shirts as runes of the youth culture. I recommend Six Flags on a sunny day as the place and time to begin the research.

But for the parent who goes to the park year after year in the company of his own young, its excitements and pleasures serve above all as a measuring stick of the growth of the offspring and the equally rapid decline of his own youthfulness. In no time, the child who stared from his stroller, fascinated but baf fled by the colorful goings-on, is being lifted aboard the little airplanes that fly in smooth, sedate circles and the merry-go-round's gentle, unscary horses. In a season or two, when the planes and horses begin to bore, the kid's thirst for excitement is satisfied by the attacks of the plaster Indians along LaSalle's river or the mild horror of the tub ride through the dark cavern. And in another year or two, he or she can be per suaded to risk the log ride down the rapid water and, after its thrills become merely exciting and not terrifying, ask to make the trip again.

These are rites of passage, as real and important as pocket knives and lipstick, and the doting parent notes each one in his mental book of memories. There comes a time, though, when the passage is complete, when it's the children who do the cajoling, daring the old man to attempt the Texas Chute Out with them, or the Big Bend, a time when Dad would rather sit and watch, when he's glad the line for the Shock Wave is too long to be endured patiently and he's still able to lure or bribe the children to some less frantic fun.

In another season or two, curiosity will overwhelm them, though, and they will insist on standing in the hot sun for however long it takes to ride upside down and scream.

Dad prays they'll be old enough to ride without him then, so he can wait in the shade, sipping his lemonade and aging gracefully into the history of the place.

March, 1979

Machines That Work

T
HE
OTHER
DAY
, I celebrated one of the major mechanical achievements of my life. It wouldn't be exaggerating to call it a milestone, since it involved not only nuts and bolts and screws and washers but electricity as well. I think of electricity as a mysterious, dangerous monster, as malevolently intentioned toward me as toward James Thurber's mother, who thought it would leak out of empty sockets and outlets and kill her in her rocking chair. Any mechanical job requiring the twisting together of copper wires demands bravery of me, as well as manual skill, for I never really believe I've flipped the circuit-breaker right or that it will really cut off the juice.

What I did was assemble and install a ceiling fan over my dining room table. Not one of those fast, hornetlike modern fans, but a quiet, sedate fan with big wooden paddles, the kind that made soda foun tains and grocery stores and hotel lobbies such inviting places before air-conditioning changed the am biance of our summers.

After a quarter-century of oblivion, those fans have made a comeback, first as quaint antiques in restored old houses or as graceful decorations in otherwise ordinary modern rooms. Now, though, more and more people are buying them for practical reasons. It has been learned that gentle movement of air about a room—the kind of movement those old-fashioned fans provide—decreases the need for air-conditioning. With a ceiling fan, you can set your thermostat at 82 degrees and enjoy the same comfort as if it were set at 74 degrees without the fan. Since the paddles of the ceiling fan are set horizontally, gravity doesn't slow their momentum, which means the motor doesn't have to work as hard as on modern, vertical fans, so the ceiling fan doesn't use much electric power. About the same as a lightbulb, in fact. And that can mean a big saving on summertime electric bills. That's what the brochure that the fan-store man gave me says, anyway.

I was so thrilled when I pulled the switch chain and the fan actually worked that my lady and I opened a bottle of wine and drank toasts to my mechanical genius and the gently turning paddles that stirred the air so sweetly. It was a pleasure to raise my glass to a machine that worked.

As we worked our way toward the bottom of the bottle, admiring the turning paddles so intently that we almost hypnotized ourselves, we talked quietly of machines that work—“work” in the sense of performing a useful function inexpensively and quietly without at the same time causing harm, either to people or the environment. We also agreed that a true machine-that-works ought to be fun to watch or use, and that it should be simple enough to be maintained and repaired by any reasonably intelligent adult.

The ceiling fan, we concluded, met all those criteria, and we drank another toast to it and tried to think of other machines still in common use that make the world a better place without hurting it at the same time. We came up with only two, and in the several days since my mechanical triumph I've been unable to add to our tiny list.

One is the bicycle. The basic purpose of the bicycle is the same as all the other modes of transportation that man over the millenia has invented: to move him from one place to another faster than he can walk. Most modern vehicles are perversions of that purpose. They move man from one place to another much faster than he has any business going, or at great cost, or they move him amid clouds of noise and poisonous fumes, or they move him in status symbols or sex symbols, or they kill him while they're moving him, or they do all of those injuries.

But the bicycle remains pure. It moves man faster than he can walk, but in such a way that its rider can still look at the scenery, exchange pleasantries with those he meets, enjoy the sunshine and fresh air, and improve his body while he is traveling. The bicycle depletes no precious natural resource; it pollutes neither air nor water; it costs little; it requires no expressways or highways or parking garages. Changes in its design and mechanics over the years have been genuine improvements, not done for the sake of fashion or planned obsolescence. Properly cared for, it will last for generations, and it's still a joy to behold and use.

The only machine that can match the bicycle and the ceiling fan for usefulness-without-penalty, I think, is the windmill. I'm not talking about the kind of windmill you see in postcards from Holland or Cape Cod, the kind that Don Quixote fought. Those machines were gristmills, most of them, and would qualify for our list if they were still used for that purpose, but they're only tourist attractions now.

I'm talking about the kind of windmill you see along country roads throughout the Midwest and South west. That mill harnesses the region's most plentiful resource—wind—to obtain the region's most needed commodity—water. It does its job without depleting its energy source or dirtying the sky. It can be left untended for months or even years, requiring only a little oil or a new sucker rod from time to time. Its workings are so simple that a child can understand their principle, and a teenager, working with an experienced windmill man, can master their problems in a day.

A windmill adds dignity to an otherwise drab land scape. In flat country, its tower provides a height from which to gaze into the distance. Its work is beautiful to watch, and its sounds—the whir of the wind through the wheel, the “thunk-thunk” of the rod, and the splash of cool water into the tank—renew the soul. The windmill works in perfect harmony with nature, never taking more from the earth than she can yield healthily. It's no accident that the water problems of windmill regions have increased in proportion to the replacement of that machine with electric and gasoline-powered pumps. Nature eventually will command the correction of that error, I think, and the windmill will return to its rightful places just as the ceiling fan and the bicycle have.