This one is honor of Andy Rooney, the grumpy `ole writer who entertained us with thought- provoking editorials on Sixty Minutes for a long, long time. He is the consummate curmudgeon, the guy who says what’s on his mind, the old fart that I feel I might have something in common with. Just get over the fact that we’re not the same gender, he’s almost twice my age, and he’s really famous in comparison to little `ole me. Let’s focus on the fact that over the years, what he said often made sense to me.
Take the subject of shopping at the grocery store. I dislike grocery shopping at all grocery stores—just going up and down the aisles is frustrating when there are people in my way. And as Andy once bemoaned, the shrinking size of food containers and the rising cost of food adds to the frustration.
But I’m also really put off when I get home from the store and open up a box of PopTarts—for my ferrets, of course—and find the words, “I’m Sorry” inside. I don’t like losing a contest I never knew I had entered. But I’m also competitive, so I decided to see if I could win something, so opened a second box of PopTarts and was “Sorry” again. You might imagine how sorry I was when the third box of PopTarts showed the same thing. Luckily, we’re on our last ferret and she doesn’t seem to like PopTarts so I won’t have to be sorry much longer. I’m betting that kind of thing irked Andy, too.
I also get perturbed about the decline of the English language that text messaging has brought about. We don’t laugh out loud anymore; we LOL. We don’t say, “Oh my God;” we say “OMG.” We don’t even say hello anymore; we say “Hi” because it’s shorter. I don’t know if Andy commented about this. He may not even own a cell phone with text messaging. I don’t. And I don’t plan on getting one. Now that I’m reading my own writing, I don’t even like seeing the phrase “text messaging” in writing.
I also find it downright disturbing that the Oxford Junior Dictionary has dropped words like magpie, vine, beaver and canary to make room for mp3 player, voicemail, blog and chatroom. Only the blog one is important and only because I have a blog. But the overall message is frightening to me–that kids are more and more disconnected from the environment. That’s one of the reasons why I do blog postings. I always discover something I didn’t know or haven’t seen before. That’s what writer’s do. What Andy always did.
Here’s what I discovered this weekend: pied-billed grebes in the spring look like this:
But in the fall, pied-billed grebes look like this fella, which I shot in my backyard this weekend:
In fact, I can relate to animals more than people, and I wonder if that’s true for Andy, too. I like just about any animal because they never say anything bad and are always happy to see me. Well, except for Purrkins, the cat. She reacts the way I imagine Andy Rooney might if he were to see me—he probably would lift his head up from his writing, blink at me like a cat, and go back to his writing.
I’m also guessing that if Andy had to chose between a cruise with a couple thousand old people and spoiled kids OR a free trip into the wilderness, he’d pick the wilderness and hope like heck he wouldn’t see anybody. Including me. Because I’d go for the wilderness every time. Well, unless my dad wanted to go on another cruise. We had a real good time in 2003.
Andy will have lots of time now to get away from people and hang with animals, or do whatever he wants. But as I watched him walk away from the camera on Sunday and into retirement, I got a sense that he’d already lived a pretty good life so far. He always wanted to be a writer and was just that and a darn good one to boot. He became as common a household name as some of the products whose packaging shrunk over the years, and that’s what all writers strive for until the public intrudes in their lives.
I hope Andy continues writing as long as he can, because there’s a lot of other things wrong with the world that we need a grumpy ole guy to help us see. Not that any of us can do anything about all that’s wrong with the world, but we all feel better going, “Yes, he’s spot on again!” That’s why we like Andy Rooney. And that’s why I’ll miss him on Sixty Minutes.
Love this Amy! 🙂