American Idylls

By Mary Langton

In this uproarious new collection of essays, Mary Langton once again provides her unique take on American life. Tackling everything from holidays to health care, from the political scene to the bittersweetness of growing up, these essays are sure to tickle the funny bone and touch the heart.
Filled with the wit and insight that Langtons readers have come to expect, American Idylls is the work of a humorist at the top of her game.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491826805

Mary Langton

Mary Langton has been a teacher, a newspaper columnist, and a radio personality. Originally from Queens, she lives in Orange County, New York.

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Copyright 2002 by The Times Herald-Record

Copyright 2009, 2010, 2011 by Niche News

Copyright 2012 by The Senior Gazette

Author photograph by P.A.L.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/03/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2681-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2680-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013918649

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

WHEREFORE AND HENCE

I’ve Got Mail

The Discovery of Secret Things

Understanding Your Cat

To Friend or Not to Friend

Flight of Fancy

Watch Your Back

Tweet Nothings

Ask the Ethicist

Moving In with Mom and Dad

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Twitterer

Bewitched by Mad Men

Mambo Italiano

A Nest of Robins

AMERICAN IDYLLS

At Plimouth Plantation

A Chicken in Every Doctor’s Pot

Global Warming, Metaphorically Speaking

Smoke Free Zone

Hey, Big Spenders

Making Sense of the Census

What the Heckle?

Cash for Clunkers

Determined to be Free

THIS WON’T HURT A BIT

Facing the Death Panel

Out of the Woods

Weighty Matters

House Calls

Bali Ha’i Won’t Call Me

Clouds in My Coffee

Don’t Have a COW

The Skinny on Fat

Eye Can See Clearly Now

Bedpan Humor

GET ME REWRITE!

Catching Up With Jane Eyre

Unpopular Baby Names

Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires

Acing the SAT

Book Marks

Breakfast with the Joads

The Funny Papers

A Poet at the Point

Fiery Petticoats on the Prairie

LIFE TAKES A HOLIDAY

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Happy New Year from Julie and Cleo

Your Valentine’s Day Gift Guide

Snow Event

A Great Day for the Irish

When Elephants Fight

Honoring Mom, Dad, and Planet Earth

Halloween Safety Tips

Holiday Greetings from Our House to Yours

Tips from the Turkey Hotline

The Art of Holiday Giving

Letters to Santa

SPEAK, MEMORY

Looking for Lightning Bugs

When Storms Strike!

I’m Thumbody!

C’mon Get Happy

The Book on George Washington

Change Agent

A Voice to Teach With

The Christmas Tree

Acknowledgments

About the Author

For my mother

Also by Mary Langton

Essays

The Bright Processional

Sense and Nonsense

Fiction

Dividing Line: Stories

The essayist… is sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

—E. B. White

WHEREFORE AND HENCE

I’ve Got Mail

I check my e-mail once a day, but that is not enough for some people. They call me on the phone and say, Did you get my e-mail? Or, Have you checked your Inbox? I sent you something. Or, You haven’t responded to my e-mail. Are you mad at me?

I’m not mad at anyone. But I am mad at e-mail. It irks me. It demands my constant attention. It is like an infant whom everyone is always checking on. Is the baby hungry? Does he need changing? Is his inbox full?

People tell me that e-mail must be checked more than once a day. They say, What if you check your e-mail at two o’clock, but then you get another e-mail at four o’clock? Well, what of it? Let it sit there, and I will read it at two o’clock the next day. No e-mail is so important that it can’t wait until tomorrow. Anyone who wants to deliver an important message to me should pick up the phone.

The problem may be that I check my e-mail on my computer rather than on a handheld device. I fire up the computer, check the e-mail, and then shut the thing down. It’s time-consuming. I could leave the computer on all day, as many people do, but I’d rather not. It would be like leaving the television on all day. Once you get into that habit you are one short step away from owning eighteen cats and scolding the neighborhood children for using your backyard as a shortcut. The TV should be kept off until you are ready to use it, and the same goes for the computer.

Sometimes the same person sends me multiple e-mails in a single day. When I read them the next day, it is as if I am eavesdropping on a one-sided conversation. It goes something like this:

3 p.m: I’m thinking of getting my hair cut.

5 p.m: A shorter style would be easier to take care of.

7 p.m: Plus, long hair is murder on the shower drain.

9 p.m: So maybe I’ll go for it, and get some highlights, too.

The effect of such e-mails is unnerving. It is as if the sender is talking to herself. I have nothing against people talking to themselves, but it should be done in private. I don’t see why I have to be involved.

You know what I miss? Receiving no other written communication than that which is placed in my mailbox by an employee of the U.S. Postal Service. That mail is delivered once a day, and after I remove it from the box I know there won’t be any more until the next day. Once the letter-carrier delivers the mail, he does not return again and again the same day to drop off more mail. One and done: that’s how I like my mail. And the best part is that no one calls me up and chides me for not going to the mailbox often enough.

Have you noticed, too, that e-mail has the tinge of violence about it? We don’t just send e-mail, we shoot it. Shoot me an e-mail, people say. I would like nothing better than to shoot me an e-mail, after which I would have it stuffed and mounted on the wall of my study (if I had a study). Visitors could look at it and say, Wow! That’s some e-mail you shot. I would reply, Yep. I could shoot you an e-mail if you’ve got a place to hang it.

Perhaps the biggest problem with e-mail is that you are expected to answer it promptly. In the old days people wrote real letters, and they were content to wait weeks for a reply. During those weeks anticipation mounted in a delicious way. It was almost as exciting to wait for a letter as it was to receive one.

But those days are gone. When we receive e-mail we are expected to hit Reply, type a response, and then hit Send. If we do not do this within ten minutes of getting that e-mail, we can expect a telephone call: Are you mad at me?

No, I’m not mad at you. But I would like to shoot your e-mail.

The Discovery of Secret Things

A recent government study shows that texting while driving is dangerous.

We at the Department of Proving the Obvious would like to thank you, the taxpayer, for your generous contribution. Without your tax dollars we could not conduct our valuable research.

Our recent experiment involving the sending and receiving of text messages while operating a motor vehicle has yielded data that is most informative. In fact, our results in this area are so compelling that we are confident Congress will soon pass a law that will prohibit texting while driving. Good thing, too, because without such a law to guide them, people would not realize that they should avoid this dangerous activity.

Like Isaac Newton, we understand that we, as researchers, stand on the shoulders of giants. Whether we are attempting to prove that water is wet or that sugar is sweet, we adhere strictly to the dictates of the scientific method.

One of our heroes is William Gilbert, who, in the year 1600, published a book entitled Concerning Magnetism, Magnetic Bodies, and the Great Magnet Earth. In this book—which we think is about magnets; we haven’t had time to read the whole thing—Gilbert laid out what we now know as the aforementioned scientific method.

He wrote, In the discovery of secret things, and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators.

In other words, we don’t guess. We prove.

In our study entitled Concerning Texting, Driving, and the Great Conundrum of Whether the Two Should be Simultaneously Engaged In, we took pains to create the conditions necessary to prove our hypothesis that people who drive a car while typing on a tiny screen are more likely to have a negative automotive experience than those who keep their eyes on the road and their hands on the steering wheel at all times.

When deciding how to conduct our experiment, we turned to Galileo. We recalled that Galileo hypothesized that a bullet fired from a gun does not travel in a straight line, but rather in a curved path. Not just any curved path, either. The bullet travels in a parabola. This is important to know because, if you are ever in a situation which requires you to literally dodge a bullet, your chance of success is greatly increased if you have an idea of how a bullet moves.

After formulating his hypothesis, Galileo did something really brilliant: he purchased a gun and some ammunition. Galileo had an assistant load and fire the gun. He watched the bullets fly and said, Eureka! That’s a parabola I see! What this experiment proved is that Galileo had freakishly good eyesight.

We did what Galileo did: we went shopping. This is where your tax dollars came in. Unlike Galileo, who was always strapped for cash, we had your money. And boy, did we spend it! We purchased several top-of-the-line cars, a bunch of BlackBerrys, and a texting plan. We let the interns choose the plan. Young people know a lot about that stuff. The only directive we gave them was, Get the best plan, not the cheapest one. Money is no object.

We then asked for a volunteer to get behind the wheel of one of the new cars and drive around while using a BlackBerry to text. Strangely, no one was willing to volunteer. They said, It seems kind of dangerous.

This is precisely the attitude that stalls scientific progress. Unwilling to accept such defeatism, the onsite supervisor encouraged an intern to volunteer by threatening to give the intern a negative performance review that would prevent him from graduating from college.

The intern crashed the car four times in two minutes. But what, really, did this prove? That texting while driving leads to accidents, or that the intern is a bad driver? In order for the experiment to be valid, we had to repeat it multiple times with different interns. We are pleased to report that every intern crashed. The cars were destroyed. So were the BlackBerrys; the interns kept dropping them on impact. (Don’t worry about the interns. They’re fine, and they’re all going to graduate on time.)

If there are people on the Great Magnet Earth who do not believe that texting while driving is dangerous, we suggest they consult our study.

Or our interns.

Understanding Your Cat

Why does my cat periodically run like a crazy person through the house, with no reason that I can see? And why mostly in the evening? Is she crazy? Do I need a behaviorist more than a veterinarian?

—actual letter to the Fetching Advice column in

The Times Herald-Record

Am I crazy? Interesting question, considering that it comes from the human who cleans my toilet and allows me to claw her sofa until the stuffing comes out.

The mere act of running is not sufficient reason to suspect a feline of insanity. In the wild, cats run with abandon. Have you never seen a nature documentary? When you watch a cheetah chase down a wildebeest, do you say, Is that big cat crazy? No. What you say is, Awesome! True, some of you say, Why don’t the people making the documentary turn off their cameras and help that poor wildebeest?

Alas, not everyone understands nature. Or filmmaking.

Yes, there are times when I run through the house. Sometimes I do it for exercise. There is a dog living here too, and he gets walked twice a day. I, of course, would never allow myself to be walked. It’s demeaning. I choose my own form of exercise, and what I choose, on occasion, is a nice sprint. I like to pretend I am on the Serengeti, chasing my prey.

As to why I do my running primarily in the evening, please keep in mind that I am a nocturnal creature. I am genetically programmed to like the night life. In fact, the main drawback to being domesticated is that I don’t get out at night. It can be frustrating when it’s the shank of the evening and my owner wants to park me on her lap and watch The Mentalist.

At the risk of sounding like an ingrate, sometimes I’m running from my owner. She can be somewhat high-maintenance. She seems to need a lot of reassurance from me. She strokes my back and says things like, Does baby love her mommy? My standard response to this ridiculous question is a big yawn. Oh, excuse me. Is that rude? Give me a break. I’m no baby, and my owner is not my mother.

(Actually, I don’t know who my mother is. Maybe that’s because the moment I was weaned I was placed into a cardboard box along with my siblings, taken to a strip mall, and put on display in front of ShopRite until a rather excitable woman—guess who?—decided I was just too cute to pass up.)

My owner always needs to know where I am. When she comes home in the evening, one of the first things she does is wonder aloud regarding my whereabouts. She says, Hmm. Now where is that cat of mine? Where does she think I am, Timbuktu? I’m a housecat. I’m in the house. Duh!

Of course, she always knows exactly where the dog is. How could she not? As soon as he hears her key in the lock, Rover or Duke or whatever his name is bounds to the front door to offer his slobbery greetings. How pathetic. No cat would behave in so obsequious a manner. As to why the dog does, the reason is simple but sad: no pride. (It’s no coincidence that a dog travels in a pack while a lion travels in a pride.)

When my owner wants to get my attention, she lowers her hand to knee level, rubs her thumb against her index finger, and says, Pish-wish-wish! Pish wish-wish! Now who’s neurotic? I respond to this embarrassing display the way any self-respecting member of my species would: I yawn, stretch, and lick my paw. Then I bolt in the opposite direction. I never come when she calls. I’m not a dog. Besides, would you respond to the name Marmalade? To those who say I have a bad attitude, I say, Fine. Catch your own mice.

Rather than referring me to a behaviorist, it might be better to learn a little history. Cats weren’t always accused of mental instability simply for taking a few laps around the living room. The ancient Egyptians worshipped cats. Considered them sacred. To the Egyptians, the cat was the living form of the fertility goddess Bastet. There were statues of cats all over the place. (As monikers go, Bastet beats Marmalade by a mile.)

Herodotus, the great historian of antiquity, informs us that If a cat dies in a private house [in ancient Egypt] by a natural death, all the inmates of the house shave their eyebrows.

The inmates of the house also mummified the cat’s remains. Deal with it.

In the good old days, a person could get in big trouble for even accidentally harming a cat. Here’s Herodotus again: When a man has killed one of the sacred animals, if he did it with malice pretence, he is punished with death; if unwittingly, he has to pay such a fine as the priests impose.

It’s something to think about.

No, I’m not crazy. And my needs are simple. I want to be left alone. So just fill the food bowl, change the litter box, and back away. Throw some catnip into the deal, and I’ll purr for you.

If I feel like it.

To Friend or Not to Friend

One friend in a lifetime, Henry Adams wrote, is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.

It’s a good bet Henry Adams would not have known what to make of Facebook.

I’m with Adams. I don’t know what to make of Facebook either. But 500 million people the world over apparently do know what to make of it. That’s how many belong to the social-networking site.

A number of people have been urging me to get on Facebook. Friends from my high school days keep asking me, When are you going to get on Facebook? Or, Why aren’t you on Facebook? Or, Why didn’t you invite me to your Sweet Sixteen party? (I didn’t have a Sweet Sixteen party. That is what I