Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself Read online

  I was sent to Georgia to complete my education as a military hero, and once there, I was given a rifle again. “This is your rifle,” our sergeant said. “Your rifle is your friend. Take care of it, and it will take care of you.” He actually said things like that. I learned how to clean it and take it apart blindfolded and was careful never, ever, to let it stand with the muzzle in the dirt. I was trying hard to be friends with it.

  One morning before dawn, we marched to the firing range. I was sleepy but kind of excited. We would be aiming at targets, not at anything living, and I did enjoy shooting. I settled happily onto the ground on my stomach, the sharp pebbles poking into my starched fatigues. I adjusted the rifle’s strap over my cocked elbow at the approved angle, and I sighted down the barrel.

  “Ready on the right! Ready on the left! Commence…firing!”

  I curled my finger over the trigger—squeezing, not pulling it—and, after correcting for windage, I began blowing holes in the paper targets.

  A hundred other young soldiers were going through the same motions, and as a result, there was so much noise that I almost didn’t hear the sergeant call for cease-fire. Then there was silence on the firing line—except that something over on my left was giving off a piercing, high-pitched sound. After a while, I realized the sound was coming from inside my left ear. I wiggled my finger in the ear, but the steady ringing tone didn’t go away.

  I heard it for the next three days, and when it finally did subside, I had to keep asking people what they had just said. I had become partially deaf in the left ear, and not so good on the right side, either. After a while, when it was clear that my hearing wasn’t coming back, I began to feel there was a real downside to gunpowder.

  As I got older, my thoughts were influenced even more by the afternoon with the rabbits. I began to mistrust the feeling of power that came from the need to win between me and people who were close to me.

  A friend asked me to lunch to give him advice. His marriage was about to break up because his wife thought he loved gambling more than her. Winning, even just the chance of winning, made him rush off to Vegas or Santa Anita. And when they argued about it at night in their bedroom, he had to win there, too. He looked truly confused.

  “What should I do?”

  “I don’t know. I’m starting to think there are times when the only way to win is by losing.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Surrender to her.”

  “I should just give in?”

  “No, surrender.”

  “That means giving in.”

  “No. Look. The song doesn’t say, ‘I give in, dear.’ It says, ‘I sur render, dear.’”

  I was talking as if I had the answer to his problem, but I was a lot of battles away from being able to surrender—to give myself freely to someone I loved. I’d had three chances in my life to learn how to do it: with my wife, my children, and my grandchildren. And each time I learned how to do it, I had to start all over from scratch with the next batch.

  Finally, on a day I spent with two of my grandchildren, I began to feel I was getting the hang of it once and for all. I should have known it would be a significant day for me because it involved another dead rabbit. What is it with rabbits? I wonder. Why do they come into my life every time I have a big change? I used to bite their chunky chocolate ears off at Easter time before I ate their hollow bodies. Is this why they keep following me?

  There’s a time, I think, as we get older when we need the company of youth. They let us be young again; they let us have a do-over on things we missed the first time. I craved the company of my grandchildren when they came along and would have been happy if I could have made myself indispensable to them. This wasn’t surrendering to them, of course, but wanting them to surrender to me. There was a talk we had one day, though, when things clicked. It was Saturday, May 27, 2006. I made a note of it because it was a perfect day.

  Livvie and Izzy, two of our granddaughters who were living down the street at the time, called in the morning and asked if they could visit. I had something else to do, but I decided to drop it for them. Livvie was nine and Izzy was eleven, and we cooked a breakfast together big enough for ten people. We made pancakes and waffles and oatmeal; then, when we were full and couldn’t eat any more, they said they wanted to make something, so we looked in my closet for shoes that we could make something out of. Livvie found a pair of tan walking shoes, and Izzy found garish tennis shoes with lots of red and blue glitz all over them. I found two old telephones in a closet, and we took them apart. Then we made holes in the shoes and ran wires into them and installed the phones under the leather tongues. We plugged the other end of the wires into phone jacks, and the girls made phone calls with the shoes held to their ears.

  I drove them home because they wanted to get back to show off their new phones, but when we got there, we heard from Teo, their six-year-old brother, that their baby rabbit had died. They’d found him in the grass the day before, hungry and weak. His mother had been killed by a fox, and only her feet had remained. They had scooped up the baby, named him Vinegar, and kept him safe in a box. But he seemed to be in shock, not eating or even moving. Then, while we were making the phones, he died.

  Izzy and Livvie laid Vinegar’s body in a small cardboard box. They got a shovel and started digging a grave under a tree. Everyone was surprisingly good-humored about the burial. As they dug, I said it was too bad Vinegar didn’t have a sister, because then her name could be Olive Oil. They thought that was pretty funny. Then, to let them have a chance to reflect on their feelings for the animal, I spoke a few words in the way of a eulogy for Vinegar.

  “He was a good little rabbit. And we’re sorry he’s gone. He was with us for a while, and now he’s going back into the earth. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”

  Izzy looked at me, puzzled. “What’s that mean about ashes?”

  “They used to say that at funerals. It means that we sort of came from the earth, and now our bodies go back to the earth and become dust again.”

  Izzy thought about that for a while. “You know, Grandpa, it’s really sad that you know something like that.”

  We chalked inscriptions on the driveway, saying good-bye to Vinegar. Before I left for my house, I wrote a short note in chalk and ended it: “I love you, Vinegar. Love, Olive.” I was hoping that the balm of love might take away some of the sting of death.

  They called me an hour later from their shoe phones, and their voices sounded surprisingly clear, considering they were speaking through layers of shoelaces and bereavement. They wanted to bike over and make notepad holders for the phones. They thought we could construct them from sliced-up tennis balls. I said sure, but I was worried about their biking across the main road. I said I’d come pick them up.

  “No, we’re fine. We won’t get hurt.”

  The fantasy of biking to Grandma and Grandpa’s house was driving any possibility of harm from their minds. I had to decide how strict I’d be. I could press them on it and win, or I could let them have the pleasure of the wind in their face, their leg muscles pumping, as they made their own way.

  I backed off as much as I could. “Would you please think about walking your bikes across the road? Because that would make me feel much better.”

  They said okay, but in such an offhand way that I was sure they wouldn’t bother. I didn’t press them on it. I surrendered to their enthusiasm, which was all sweetness and bubbles.

  They came over, and we cut up tennis balls and put notepads in them, and we made plans for making phones out of teddy bears and whatever else we could find. We would sell them at yard sales or online—none of which we ever did, but our dreams were happy ones.

  At the end of the day, as I watched from the porch, they climbed on their bikes and started down the driveway toward home. After a few feet, they stopped and turned toward me.

  “Oh, by the way, Grandpa?”

  “Yes?”

  “We took your tips on crossing
the road.”

  I smiled as they turned and pumped their bikes out to the road.

  And that was the meaning of life that day.

  Chapter 12

  * * *

  Pass the Plate, Mr. Feynman

  I was four, maybe five. My mother had a small gold watch that she left on her vanity one morning. A vanity, in those days, was a table you sat at while you made up your face, reflected in three mirrors. Her table was covered with boxes of powders, lipsticks, eyelash curlers, and eyebrow pencils. Sometimes, curious to see what would happen, I would mix some of the powders together with toothpaste, hoping for a fizz or maybe even a small explosion. But what drew me to the table this day was the watch. I wondered how it worked. What was inside that made the hands go around? I took it from the table in my short fingers and pulled at it. I shook it and pulled at it again. Amazingly, the back came off, and there were the little round things going in circles, ticking and clicking. It was a wonderful sight. After I watched it for a while, I put the back of the watch in place again, but it wouldn’t stay. I couldn’t get it to clamp on. I knew I couldn’t leave it on the table in pieces like this, so I put it between my teeth and bit down on it. That held the watch together. I put it back on the table and went to my toy box.

  Sometime later, my mother came over to where I was playing and began talking to me in a tone of voice I recognized as fake casual. I knew something was up. She was a terrible actress, and if she was acting this casual, something bad must be about to happen.

  “Allie, I’m going to ask you something, and I want you to tell me the truth. Have you been playing with my watch?”

  “Your watch?”

  “If you tell me the truth, I won’t punish you.”

  Why would she punish me? This was not good. My lip started to twitch. I had that sinking feeling of doom where something bulges in the back of your throat and heads for your stomach with menace.

  “I think you were playing with my watch. I found tooth marks on it. Did you…now, tell me the truth…” She paused delicately. “Did you bite my watch?”

  Of course I didn’t bite her watch. I reassembled it. I applied pressure to it. I wasn’t stupid enough to eat a watch. None of this came out of my mouth, because I didn’t possess these words then. Instead, tears came to my eyes and I nodded. She forgave me, and we moved on. After that, I tended not to fix things with my teeth, but my curiosity didn’t diminish. It might even have grown stronger.

  Curiosity had the power to engage me completely. It sent me to a zone where time stopped and I floated through that infinite space between dots on the face of a watch. Curiosity could make me feel more alive.

  I lived with a father who sometimes was absent, off acting somewhere for long stretches, and with a mother who was there in every way except for her mind, which was diseased. While I sidestepped her paranoia and tried to outguess her schizophrenia, I was alone, and although there was a lot of laughter in the house when it was full of people, much of the time I had to invent my own entertainment. I didn’t mind it then, and I’m grateful now for the solitude that was the soil in which my curiosity could grow.

  The days I spent in the California mountains where we lived, isolated from other people, had a sun-washed emptiness about them, but excitement swelled in me when I went out exploring them. I worked my way through the mountain trails and through the yards of books on our living room shelves that held strange stories and odd characters. When I couldn’t understand what I saw or read, I experimented with my own explanations. Sometimes I just lay on my back, looking at the clouds, figuring out what shapes they were trying to become.

  Allowing this childish curiosity to continue on through my whole life has given me satisfaction and maybe even a sense of meaning. It stimulates a part of my brain that registers pleasure; and whether it has meaning or not, it feels as though it does. No matter how old I get, I have the feeling that if I can keep this curiosity flame lit, I’ll see the world in a way that never gets stale. Life will have a taste that delights. Maybe that isn’t actual meaning or purpose, but somehow it sets that worry aside. And I don’t want to lose it.

  I listen more intently now when I hear about older people who are learning things they’ll never use but which they learn for the sheer pleasure of taking in something new. A friend told me her mother, at ninety-six, was reading all of Lincoln’s speeches because she wanted to learn more about him as a writer. She was doing this not to write about Lincoln or make some other use of it, but rather for the pleasure of following her curiosity, wherever it led. Another friend told me about his mother, who, at close to one hundred, was still riding the bus around Los Angeles. He was concerned for her safety and asked why she did this. She said, “Because I meet so many interesting people.”

  Their curiosity gives them pleasure; it puts gas in their tank. But more than that, it leads them to places they never expected to see and enables them to accomplish things that surprise them and satisfy them.

  On Scientific American Frontiers, the science program I did for eleven years, I kept meeting people who studied things simply because they were interesting. I stood one day on the sandy shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago with two scientists who were fascinated with why the water squishes away from your footprint when you walk on the beach, or why coffee stains always form into rings on a countertop. From these simple questions, they were learning about how materials interact with one another. A universe was opening up to them by studying ordinary things that at first seemed trivial.

  Paying attention to the apparently trivial intrigued me. Doors were opening up to me that might have forever remained closed if I hadn’t paid attention to the small things that didn’t seem to matter. It was as though a key to the big city could be found in pieces of chewing gum stuck to the sidewalk. That was an idea as valuable as it was strange.

  This may have been what led me to Feynman’s plate. At a tricky point in his life, the great physicist Richard Feynman became interested in a plate—an ordinary dinner plate—and, in a way, it changed his life. At a tricky point in my life, I became interested in Feynman, so the plate flew off the page from Feynman’s hands into mine.

  It was a time when I was ready for something new, but I didn’t exactly know what it was. M*A*S*H had come to an end, to a great extent because I had felt we should end it on a high point. I had pretty much decided I didn’t want to write and direct movies for a while, in this case because there was beginning to be a noticeable roominess in the theaters where my movies were being shown. I was free now to do what interested me, not because it was a career move, but simply because it interested me. I was following my curiosity, and I was looking for fun.

  I was asked to become the host of Scientific American Frontiers, and I jumped at it—but only if I could interview the scientists myself.

  I found this new life liberating. And it was probably why I reacted so strongly to Feynman’s plate.

  I came across the story of the plate in a collection of autobiographical stories called Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and I became infatuated with this man who possessed such a brilliant mind—some people said a mind second to Einstein’s—yet had such an extraordinary capacity to entertain and to present himself as just an ordinary guy. His total honesty and his unwillingness to fool himself or others made him a hero of mine.

  I wanted to imitate his way of thinking, and at one point I studied his trick of finding square roots in an instant. I was able to do it for a day or two, but because it’s not something I need to come up with very often, I soon forgot how to do it. Then I saw an experiment in one of his books I couldn’t resist. He told a story of how he had become interested in the idea that dogs had such an acute sense of smell that it made him wonder if people had that same sense, but perhaps not as well developed. He wondered if we could exploit a similar sense. So he asked a group of friends to stand by a bookcase, and when he left the room one of them was to take one book off the shelf and then put it back. He left, and when he
came back, he methodically smelled everyone’s hands. Then he put his nose to the bookcase and ran it along the shelves. Within a couple of minutes, he didn’t know why or how he had done it, but he identified the book that had been handled.

  I couldn’t compare brains with Feynman, but I could compare noses. I was on vacation with my grandchildren, and we went to a sitting room in our hotel where there was a little library for the guests. I told them that after I left the room, I wanted them to take a book from the shelf, open it up, look inside, and then put it back. Then I left. When I came back, they were smiling, knowing I couldn’t possibly pick the right book out of two hundred of them. I smelled their hands—then I applied my nose to the shelf, just as Feynman had. I scanned the shelves two or three times. But nothing seemed to be happening. I had a sensation in my nose—a vague rumor of an aroma—but I couldn’t quite smell it on the books. Finally, there was one book I thought I’d have a go with. It kept registering with me every time my nose passed it on the shelf. I pointed at the book.

  “Is it this one?”

  There was a long pause.

  “No. It’s the book right next to it.”

  I took that as a major victory and never repeated the experiment. Feynman may have been my hero, but I didn’t yet possess his heroic desire to prove myself wrong.

  I kept reading everything I could about him, and one day I came across a book that revealed his character so charmingly, I got excited about the idea of playing him on the stage. You may hope to be realistic as a person, but when you’re an actor, somewhere in the back of your head you’re thinking, I’m not as smart as Feynman or as wise as Feynman, but for two hours a night, I can be Feynman, and you jump on it.

  It was astonishingly difficult, though, to get Feynman boxed within the confines of a play. He was a man of so many parts, no matter how you told the story there was always an arm or a leg sticking out of the box. We went through more drafts than I’ve ever seen a play go through. We became discouraged many times, missing an opening date we’d scheduled at least once and twice almost canceling the play altogether. It was frustrating to know we had one of the world’s great characters, yet we couldn’t create an evening in which he could come alive on the stage. Peter Parnell wrote draft after draft. And they were all vastly different. He tried to come at Feynman from every conceivable angle. Some writers will turn in a second draft that differs from the first only in that some of the punctuation has been rethought. Peter would write an entirely new play with a whole new set of characters, covering entirely different parts of Feynman’s life. Then, after we read it aloud and discussed it for a day or two, he would throw it out and write a new Feynman play.