The Song of Suburbia: Scenes from Suburban Life

By David Bouchier

Award-winning humorist and radio personality David Bouchier has been called "The H.L. Mencken of the subdivisions." He applies his satirical wit, wisdom, and a touch of philosophy to the everyday dramas of suburban life. In this second collection of essays, originally broadcast on National Public Radio stations WSHU and WSUF in Long Island and Connecticut, he explores and explains such quintessentially suburban themes as: the the trauma of an empty driveway; romance in the catering hall; a visit from the exterminator; the metaphysics of golf; and the lament of the suburban commuter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 25, 2007
• ISBN: 9781462095032

David Bouchier

David Bouchier is the award-winning essayist for National Public Radio Station WSHU, and a popular workshop leader at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. He is the author of five books including The Cats and the Water Bottles and The Accidental Immigrant, and has contributed a regular humor column to the Sunday New York Times. David lives in Stony Brook, Long Island with his wife and two cats.

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All Rights Reserved © 2002, 2007 by David Bouchier

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and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Originally published by Mid Atlantic Productions

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-43757-3

ISBN-10: 0-595-43757-5

ISBN: 978-1-4620-9503-2 (eBook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction The Song of Suburbia

PART ONE Spring

Suburban Life

The Sounds of Springtime

How Are You Doing?

Home Alone

Too Many Vegetables

Save Our Darkness

Emotional Intelligence

Copy Service

Eternal Revenue

Seeing is Believing

It’s Not Cricket

True Believers

Essential Maintenance

Thanks for the Amnesia

The Creation of Dina Bo

Mission Impossible

Nap Time

Road Rage

Take Care

Service with α Smile

Wild America

Down on the Farm

From Hardware to Software

Little Big Truck

Sense of Direction

Domestic Pornography

Fish Under Troubled Water

The New Suburban Athlete

The Price is Right

The Parts are Greater than the Whole

Little Brother

Heavier than Air

The Gift of Guilt

All American

Military Intelligence

Talk is Cheap

Vital Signs

The Finishing Line

Romance in the Catering Hall

PART TWO Summer

Fire and Ice

Almost as Good as a Rest

Vacation without Tears

New Age in the Hamptons

Secrets of the Fork People

Up in the Air

Grand Motel

No Place Like Home

Almost Back to Nature

Par for the Course

The Last of the Summer Wine

Truth in Advertising

Running on Empty

Lost World

Exterminator II

Automatic Pilot

Primitive Economics

Home Away from Home

Born on the Third of July

Because It’s There

The Sleaze Factor

Jukebox Jury

All You Can Eat

Give Me an F

The Happening

Who am I?

Water on the Brain

Free to be Me

What the Eye Doesn’t See

Hanging Out

Tunnel of Love

Memories are Made of That?

Are We Having Fon Yet?

PART THREE Autum

Hard Labor Day

The Tourist Tide

Summer Memories

The Camera Never Lies

Watch that First Step!

Forbidden Fruit

Distance Learning

More Work for Mother

No Excuses

Tabula Rasa

Ignorance is Bliss

Out of Space

Traveling Light

The Last Garage Sale

Pause for Reflection

Victim for α Day

What Goes Around

Nothing to Lose but Your Grains

Morning Sickness

Pumpkin Madness Strikes Again

In Praise of Witches

Situation Vacant

Playing Safe

Movies through the Mail

Wild by Nature

Conventional Wisdom

Shopping Cart Bandit

Going by the Book

Under Lock and Key

If It’s Broke, Don’t Fix It

Happy Days

Lords of Creation

Hard Questions

Bad Heron Day

Do Not Try This at Home

Remote Control

My Four Dads

Hospitality for Dummies

Something to be Thankful For

PART FOUR Winter

Escape from Florida

Light my Fire

The Gift Relationship

The Ghost in the Machine

Home Improvement

I See the Lights

Life and Soul of the Party

Here’s to All of Us

Thomas Hobbes and the Spirit of Christmas

More than Perfect

Christmas Carol II

Refrigerator of Mysteries

Nostrodamus Makes it All Clear

Intermediate Technology

Thank You for Not Breathing

IWelfth Night

Leap Year—Big Deal

Glorious Breakfast

New Box

Dinner for Two

An Alternative Valentine

A Lie for All Seasons

A Choice of Heroes

Historical Amnesia

The Plague

Easy Money

On Top of the World

High Anxiety

The Kindest Cut

Faking It

SPAM

Vanity Fair

Gracious Living

The Pandora Principle

We’re All Connected

Persuasion

Au Revoir, Dr. Freud

That’s Not Funny

The Museum of My Life

Lament of the Long Island Commuter

Who Was George Kleinsinger?

The Problem of Adult Violence

The Genuine Article

Our Winter Cruise

All in the Family

Also by David Bouchier

The Accidental Immigrant

Radical Citizenship

The Feminist Challenge

Idealism and Revolution

For Diane

Who had to live through

the whole thing twice

Introduction

The Song of

Suburbia

The suburbs are America’s greatest gift to the human race. Already they have changed the world. The suburbs of New York stretch north and south for seven hundred miles, from Massachusetts to Virginia, and sprawl deep into Connecticut and Pennsylvania. It’s only a matter of time before they meet up with the expanding suburbs of Chicago, Kansas City, and Phoenix, which in turn will melt into the agglomerations building eastwards from Los Angeles and Seattle, creating the first one hundred percent suburban nation.

The early immigrants were astonished at the emptiness of America. When I first came here as a tourist in 19661 was amazed by its fullness. Subdivisions of substantial houses, many of them with multiple garages and swimming pools, seemed to cover the entire landscape. These were nothing like the narrow, dark London suburbs of my childhood. American suburbs were expansive, generous, light, and open. They were exactly the kind of suburbs that you would expect cowboys to build once they quit the trail and settled down.

Another twenty years passed before I was able to enter this Promised Land myself. I moved here permanently from England in 1986 to teach and to write, and I was delighted to find myself living with my wife Diane and our cat Bertram in deepest suburban Long Island. This is quintessential American suburbia. William Levitt built the first large-scale housing developments here in 1947, and building has not stopped since.

People back home eagerly asked me about my new life in America. They assumed that a New York mailing address meant that I lived in the fibrillating heart of Manhattan itself, so they were puzzled and disappointed when I revealed that I lived on Long Island—and liked it. The emigrants and refugees of the world flock to New York City and Los Angeles and Miami, not to Hicksville or Smithtown. Most immigrants to Long Island arrived here accidentally, often because of a wrong turn on the way to Greenwich Village that carried them helplessly through the Midtown Tunnel—and they never found their way back.

As for me, I had met my destiny. We settled in, put our names on the mailbox, bought a lawn tractor, set up some deck furniture, and learned to commute. Within a matter of months I had become a trained and dedicated suburbanite, often seen pushing a three-wheeled trolley in the supermarket, washing the car in the driveway, or even riding the lawn tractor in ever-decreasing circles on a lawn that seemed (to me) as big as an entire prairie.

This is probably the closest thing to a secular Utopia that we will ever achieve. In suburbia we are insulated from both the hothouse of the city and the idiocy of rural life. In suburbia we can have privacy, that precious commodity destroyed by the intimacy of a village or a city We can choose exactly how many or how few people we want to interact with ever day. For many suburbanites, the answer seems to be none, and that’s fine.

In suburbia we can, if we wish (and most people do), avoid confrontation—not just with other people but with reality itself. The big world, seen through the reversed telescope of the TV screen, seems infinitely small and far away. The fundamental questions of philosophy and sociology do not force themselves on our attention. Nature has been tamed and trimmed, and culture happens down the road in the big city. We can play with nature in the suburbs by cultivating a garden, or taking a walk in the state park. We can play with culture via a classical radio station or an evening lecture at the library. But these things are optional. True suburban life can and does revolve around shopping, schools, commuting, lawn care, and health care.

Health care is important because while suburbia is certainly a state of mind, it is also a state of health. You can’t drive every day past all those doctors’ offices, hospitals, and medical parks without feeling slightly ill all the time. Indeed, the closest we get to metaphysics on Long Island is the quest for eternal (suburban) life through the grace of health care, and the closest we get to pure faith is our unbounded confidence that every magazine article and TV program on the subject of health and nutrition is the gospel truth, given directly by God.

Suburbia is a green anteroom to heaven and this benign state of limbo may be the goal to which all human life has tended: the evolutionary Ultima Thule—no surprises and unlimited shopping opportunities. Properly understood and lived in, suburbs make the business of getting from birth to death virtually painless.

In the suburbs all dreams and self-delusions can find a comfortable home. In the country such things are manifestly a waste of time. In the city they are briskly ridiculed and squashed. But the suburbs are the heartland of the great American illusion that anybody can do anything—the subdivisions of opportunity within the land of opportunity. Sinatra sang about New York: If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere. But if we can’t make it there, we can probably make it in Rocky Point, Long Island—and still take an occasional day trip into New York to show how sophisticated we are.

In tribute to Walt Whitman, an early booster of Long Island, I call this collection The Song of Suburbia. All the essays in this book are one hundred percent authentically suburban. They were inspired by suburbia, written in suburbia, and broadcast in suburbia as Monday morning commentaries on WSHU/WSUF public radio in Connecticut and Long Island.

The great sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote: Whatever my subject, it is myself that I portray. Whatever my subject in the following pages, it is the suburbs that I portray—and the mildly happy, slightly confused, generally well-meaning inhabitants of the suburbs—especially, myself.

David Bouchier Wading River Long Island January 2002

PART ONE

Spring

Suburban Life

The racks of our local newsstand, which is located in deepest Long Island suburbia, bend under the weight of glossy magazines with titles such as Town and Country, Country Life, Country Living, Country Woman, Country Home. The lifestyle that is suggested in these magazines is as alien as anything dreamed up by science fiction writers. They seem to take it for granted that ordinary Americans dwell in antique-filled, historic houses on hundred acre estates, in the depths of the country.

These magazines are full of pouting teenage models who look as if their idea of a country experience is a limousine ride across Central Park, and with picture postcard views of New England villages, empty mountain landscapes, covered bridges, barns and cows. The sports pages advise about the best polo grounds, how to find a good private ski instructor in Northern Vermont, and how to achieve the body beautiful. The social section tells who went to which ball or fundraising party, and how badly they behaved.

These country life magazines are a kind of nostalgic pornography for suburbanites. Nobody lives like this any more. We all moved to the cities decades ago, and then after a brief moment of consideration, most of us moved right out of the cities and into the suburbs. This is the first and so far the only nation in history where more people live in the suburbs than in cities and countryside combined. Eight out of ten Americans are in fact suburbanites. But where are the magazines celebrating the suburban way of life? Where are the stimulating articles about lawn care and commuting, and the vibrant full-color photographs of typical suburban scenery?

I propose to fill this enormous gap in the market with a national magazine called Suburban Life, subtitled Wherever You Go, Here You Are.

Suburban Life will be about ranches and contemporaries, corner lots pickup trucks, cesspools and traffic—in short, a real magazine about real life, that is illustrated with pictures of ordinary people in ordinary clothes. By studying them readers will learn about the latest styles in blue jeans and baseball caps, and what to wear to the supermarket or the mall.

Every issue of Suburban Life magazine will include an architecture section featuring the four basic suburban home designs, interviews with developers and the men who hammer on the sheetrock. Each month the magazine will deal with a hot suburban lifestyle issue. For example: should you clean out the garage and put the cars in, even if it means having the whole lawn covered in junk? Or should you keep the garage shut and leave the cars on the lawn?

The gardening section will cover the creative use of backhoes and railroad ties, installing your own outdoor colored lights, and the basics of CPR. Each month some aspect of gardening aesthetics will be examined, such as how to arrange decorative objects like abandoned refrigerators and plastic toys.

The social pages will give valuable advice about how to behave and dress at the multiplex, where to find the tackiest singles bars and the keg parties everyone wants to be seen at. The fitness section will recommend simple exercises any suburbanite can manage—park in the second row back from the supermarket entrance and feel the benefit of walking those few extra feet, pump your own gas, or, for the real fitness fanatic buy a car with manually operated windows.

Every glossy magazine must have its gossip page, and our reporters will take their cameras and tape recorders around the subdivisions, into PTA meetings, Rotary luncheons and garden clubs, to bring you the latest scandals and dramas of suburban life.

And, so that we don’t forget our roots, Suburban Life will feature the heroic odyssey of the suburban pioneers from Brooklyn and Queens, celebrate the life and achievements of William Levitt, and explain why colonial and victorian mean something different in the suburbs than they did in history class.

This is the best investment opportunity since Thomas Edison invented the toaster oven. A hundred and fifty million Americans are waiting for this magazine-an honest true-to-life magazine with no celebrities, no glamour, and no nonsense about culture or "lifestyle/’ Unless we have totally lost our grip on reality, Suburban Life magazine can scarcely fail.

The Sounds of Springtime

One of the several things that makes April the cruelest month is that suburban homeowners take it as their cue to bring out their wretched machines.

I say home owners, but what I really mean is men. Do you see many women wielding these machines? No, and here’s why. Men have problems. Tom and Ray, the car guys you hear on public radio, have identified a condition that they call Male Answer Syndrome. This is a hormonal imbalance that prevents men from ever saying I don’t know, and forces them to give an answer, even a wrong answer, to any question whatsoever. I believe that there is a similar and related disease, which I’ll call Male Engine Syndrome—the male’s inability to tackle even the simplest job without starting up some kind of very noisy engine.

The small, air cooled, two-cycle gas engine is extraordinarily efficient. It produces more racket and pollution for the buck than any other device—although for a really excruciating pitch, the highspeed electric motor runs a close second.

If it is true, as H.G. Wells wrote, that our machines have made us into gods, we are unnecessarily noisy gods, like some of the more rambunctious Roman deities. Any man, however modest his condition, can make his mark on the neighborhood with a chainsaw: like Jupiter or Vulcan, he can be heard.

As spring turns into summer, the suburban power tool symphony inexorably increases in volume. Mowers are joined by leaf blowers, weed whackers, tillers, and shredders. Reluctant husbands start on all the home repairs that they had avoided all winter. Out come the electric saws, the chain saws, the drills, the sanders, the paint sprayers, and the power washers. They may hate the work, but they love the noise it makes.

In part, of course, this is pure laziness; or to put it in a more positive light, it’s a man’s natural desire to avoid bodily wear and tear and premature aging. I have seen men bring out an electric circular saw to cut a piece of wood 2 by 1 that could be cut with a handsaw in ten seconds. Clearly, such men are serious about conserving their physical energy. They have power windows on their cars, automatic garage door openers, and electric toothbrushes. No exertion is too trivial to be avoided.

Husbands who have to go out to work, and so leave their patch of suburbia unnaturally silent, can call in a lawn service. They have even noisier machines—mowers big enough to groom the prairies, and super hurricane-power, three-hundred decibel trimmers. On a fine day, several lawn services will converge on our neighborhood and run all their machines together like a chorus from some mechanical hell.

When the local kids get home from a hard day at school, at about noon, they drag their industrial-strength amplifiers outdoors and play vile music at full volume until their parents, conscious of their social obligations, arrive home and yell at them full volume for ten minutes, before pulling the plug and putting on their own vile music at full volume.

If there are any moments of near silence, we can listen to the bulldozers tearing into the nearby woods to create yet another development of Woodland Estates. Somebody within a couple of blocks is invariably having oil delivered, a cesspool pumped, trees trimmed, a driveway resurfaced, or a roof replaced. The concert never stops.

If we walk down to the beach for a bit of peace and quiet, we see not footprints in the sand but tire tracks. This is a visible warning that teenagers with All-Terrain Vehicles are enjoying the beauties of nature in their own way, although we can usually hear them coming for half a mile. Looking out to sea, we can enjoy a roaring vista of powerboats and jet skis.

The National Institute of Health reports that ten million Americans now have hearing loss caused by too much noise. The Environmental Protection Agency has introduced progressive regulations for quieter and less polluting engines on garden machinery. But we won’t notice the improvement until the regulations come into full force in the year 2006, by which time we will scarcely be able to hear the difference.

Laws won’t help. Making noise is one of those inalienable American rights, like the pursuit of happiness. If the issue gets to the Supreme Court, they will certainly rule in favor of the noise makers, even if they have to yell the judgment at the tops of their voices.

But there may be a technological rather than a legislative solution. The portable CD player makes the most appalling noises available in a private, portable form, injected right into the victim’s eardrums, without disturbing anybody else.

What we need are some really nasty CDs that would satisfy men’s craving for high-decibel meaningless noise. There’s a big potential market here: Chainsaw Symphony; Trimmer Sonata; Dan Drives Twenty Thousand Roofing Nails while Playing his Boom Box full volume, and so on.

If the boys must have their noise, let them have it on headphones, and leave the rest of us to enjoy the natural music of a suburban summer: the birds, the dogs, the insects, the swish of sprinklers, and the gentle sounds of a million gardeners—working the old fashioned way, with their hands.

How Are You Doing?

It is the fate of immigrants everywhere to live in a state of perpetual puzzlement. The world always seems a little out of focus. That’s fine because it keeps us on our toes, and makes life more interesting. After all, that’s why we travel: to explore strange new worlds and civilizations, to experience the sense of surprise and wonder that we never get back home.

I think I have learned a lot about American culture in the years I’ve been here. It’s perfectly clear to me that basketball is a vertical kind of game, baseball is horizontal, and football is bureaucratic—although the exact rules of these games still elude me. I have consumed a Double Whopper cheeseburger with large fries and survived—although only just. And I do drive on the right hand side of the road most of the time, although in my heart I know it’s wrong.

But language is a problem for me, as it is for most immigrants. My vocabulary is quite good, although I still stumble over the spelling of technical terms such as Kwik-Lube and U-Pik. But, as any student of languages will confirm, it’s the colloquialisms that are hard to grasp—those casual remarks thrown out in everyday conversation but never taught in language class. In French, for example, non-native speakers are naturally baffled by phrases like etre marron which means to be a sucker, but which literally means to be a chestnut. Who would guess it?

One such phrase in American English has been baffling me for years. It’s the ubiquitous friendly greeting: How are you doing? usually delivered as a single word, Howryadoin? This is a devastatingly difficult question, like What is the meaning of life? I’ve been told that the appropriate answer is something like fine or great. But that won’t do. I’m not often doing fine, let alone great, and I don’t want to lie to people every day of my life.

On the other hand, a full and complete answer doesn’t seem appropriate, especially when (as often happens) the question is asked during a casual encounter, for example by a fellow walker in our local state park. Howryadoin? he says as he strides by, and I come to a complete halt. How am I doing today? This is going to take some thought. Before I have my response properly organized, my potential interlocutor has already vanished into the woods.

There must be a happy medium, an appropriate and accurate answer somewhere between Fine or Terrible and a full-scale autobiography. One solution I thought of was to have a little pamphlet printed up that gives a succinct account of how I am doing. These could be handed out at the appropriate moments. It’s all in there, I could say. Perhaps I should have two pamphlets, one for good days and one for bad days.

But when I started drafting my pamphlet, it very quickly got out of hand. I divided it into sections: psychological well-being; physical health; appetite and the menu for tonight’s dinner; intellectual and literary activities and frustrations; work and deadlines to be kept; personal relationships; relationships with cats; how I feel about the weather; pending household jobs; bank balance and lottery tickets in hand; vacation plans; and so on. The list just got longer and longer. You can see the problem. I can’t explain how I am doing without getting into all these aspects in some detail, and nobody wants to hear it. I half suspect that they don’t really want to know, that their question is rhetorical.

So I suppose I will just have to accept the convention, and answer the huge, overwhelming, metaphysical question: Howryadoin? with the totally inadequate: I’m doing quite well. Thank you for asking.

My struggle with the mysteries of the American language continues. In future essays I hope to address the linguistic puzzles presented by such phrases as: Take care, Have a nice day, and most mysterious of all, How’s it going? where the subject of the sentence, it, is never specified.

Home Alone

My car was losing oil at the rate of about a quart per mile. At every stop it left a dark pool, and, in the end, there was nothing to be done but have it towed to the repair shop. It’s really serious, they said, no chance of getting the parts for a couple of days. And they gave me a ride home in the tow truck.

An unexpected day at home with all my regular tasks and errands cancelled! It seemed like a treat at first. I walked around the house, petted the cats, switched on the radio, and gazed out at the deserted street, wondering how I would ever get that great oil stain off the driveway. Suddenly, I was struck by an acute attack of Empty Driveway Syndrome or E.D.S. I should have been prepared. This uniquely suburban disease afflicts anyone who finds himself stuck at home without a car. The symptoms are a feeling of inner emptiness and depression followed by panic and cold sweats, the temptation to watch daytime TV, and the urgent desire to go absolutely anywhere, in any kind of vehicle, for any reason.

E.D.S. explains the passionate desire of all teenagers to own cars, even at the cost of actually working to pay for them. Being young and active they feel the paralysis of suburban life more than us older folks. Yet even the oldest are not immune, and E.D.S. also makes clear why senior citizens in the last stages of senility still creep unsteadily around in their cars. The alternative is too awful to contemplate.

Although there was nothing special I wanted to do, and nowhere special I needed to go, I felt like an addict in withdrawal. I couldn’t stop obsessing about what I might do, if only I had my wheels. I might get the mail from the post office, six miles away. And if I could get to the post office, I could also go to the supermarket and buy something for lunch. Or I might just drive around the streets, studying the infinite variations of suburban architecture—ranch, hi-ranch, lo-ranch, wide-ranch, flat-ranch, and so on. But without wheels, these simple pleasures were as far beyond my reach as a flight to the Bahamas.

Suddenly, I remembered the deli, only a mile and a half away. I could easily walk there. After the sensory deprivation of the empty house, the deli seemed like Aladdin’s cave. Forty-five minutes later I trudged home with a newspaper, a can of soup, some cat food, and a lottery ticket. Now the rest of the day stretched ahead, empty and flat, with nowhere else to go and nothing interesting to do.

I reminded myself that many of the greatest writers of the past did not possess an automobile, and must have been in this situation all the time. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dickens, Proust all had to manage without wheels. Perhaps this was the secret of their great literary productivity? Stuck at home all day, they just turned out one work of genius after another. To test this theory I began to write what I hoped would be an autobiographical work of literary genius. But it turned out to be just a boring essay about being stuck at home all day.

Before long the wanderlust had seized me again. The two bicycles in the basement both had flat tires and there was no pump. I thought about the ingenuity of Robinson Crusoe, marooned on his island and making everything he needed out of the materials at hand. Could I construct some kind of vehicle out of parts lying around in the garage and things purchased from the deli? The lawn mower! I could drive somewhere on the lawnmower. But the battery was dead.

At last I understood why so many suburbanites keep half a dozen cars in their driveways. It’s the terrible fear of being marooned in deepest nowhere. Multiple cars are the only sure defense against Empty Driveway Syndrome.

In the last extremity of E.D.S., the high fever stage, I actually considered riding on the bus that stops about a mile from our house. But the bus goes to The Mall, which would be tantamount to killing the patient to cure the illness.

I settled for another walk around the neighborhood. It was a spooky experience. In an hour of walking, I saw only one moving vehicle and no human beings. Various dogs came rushing towards me, not so much out of ferocity as because they were glad to see anyone in this wasteland. As I walked I amused myself by gathering up garbage cans which had been scattered across the landscape by the wind, and returning them to the houses with matching color schemes—green cans to the green house, blue to the blue house—no matter how far down the street it was.

Back home after my walk I began calling people Fd not spoken to in a while, and who had no special urge to speak to me. I read the travel pages, fantasizing long trips to the ends of the earth. At one point I was reduced to surfing the Net. They say you can go anywhere on the Internet, but that’s not true. Even as I tapped into databases in exotic faraway places, my body stayed marooned and immobile in the kitchen.

At about seven in the evening my wife arrived home in her car. I had never noticed before what a very desirable car this was. I grabbed the keys and, like a prisoner unexpectedly paroled, I shot out of the driveway, up to the supermarket, then south to the Expressway, just for a couple of exits. The symptoms of E.D.S. subsided. I was cured.

Too Many Vegetables

Spring should be a season of optimism and happy expectation. But, as always, there’s a catch. The big farm stands on the east end of Long Island are gearing up for business. Any day now they will throw open their barn doors to reveal a cornucopia of vegetables so fresh that they have the dirt and pesticides still on them. This sends my wife into a kind of vegetable frenzy. She comes home loaded with the things, and I am expected to eat them.

There’s nothing wrong with eating vegetables. They are even classified as food by some nutritionists. What upsets me is the all-too-common prejudice, often strongly expressed, that we must eat vegetables. This is the voice of the Puritan down the ages: You are not here to enjoy yourself. This may hurt, but it’s good for you.

There’s a restaurant that I regularly patronize because it has good food. But it is run by direct descendants of the Puritans. When you place your order, the waitperson says: I’ll send your order into the kitchen as soon as I see you go to the salad bar. Some cunning diners are prepared for this and pass their salad through the window to an accomplice. The rest us just have to hide the salad in our pockets or briefcases so we can get to the main course.

It’s hard to imagine such totalitarian tactics working with other consumer choices. Imagine being told that you have to drive a Yugo before you can buy a BMW, or that you must watch Touched by an Angel before tuning in to Masterpiece Theater. However, I have never seen anyone protest against the compulsory salad. We all troop over to the salad bar like sheep, who would probably enjoy it much more.

The theologians of the vegetable religion preach that an adult person, in full possession of his or her faculties, must eat five servings of green stuff per day. For those of us with modest appetites, this regime would use up our entire eating capacity, leaving no space at all for real food.

To be fair, vegetables have improved a lot since I was young. I can remember shelling peas, peeling potatoes, and trying to dismember a cauliflower without destroying it. Now the fruits of the earth can be found in the freezer section, neatly packed in square boxes with pretty pictures on the front. As a bonus, the good farmers often add a hefty dose of simulated cheese or Teryaki sauce, which does not occur in nature. Cauliflowers with snow peas do not occur in nature, nor do strange concoctions called New England, Bavarian, Californian, or Italian vegetables. Food science has transformed the vegetable experience.

Everyone has a least favorite vegetable. For ex-President George Bush it was broccoli; for me its eggplant, in all its devious forms. But there’s no escape from them. Vegetables used to be seasonal. Eggplants would appear and then mercifully vanish for months on end. Now, every green and purple thing is on the menu year round, imported from the ends of the earth to remind us yet again of the old Puritan lesson that we are not here to enjoy ourselves.

Of course some vegetables are more edible than others. The noble potato, for example, can be made into French fries, hash browns, or mashed. It can be baked and stuffed with bacon, diced and served with gruyere cheese, boiled, microwaved or barbecued to perfection. In my opinion, the potato is one of the four major food groups. The others are poultry, meat, and fish.

Even the inferior vegetables have some good qualities. They make a colorful display at the entrance to the supermarket. They don’t induce queasy feelings in the sensitive soul who may look at the all-red meat counter with misgivings. They fill dinner plates cheaply when you have unwanted guests (which guarantees that they won’t come back again).

But will vegetables make us healthy, as their boosters claim? The fact is we don’t know because the research is all one-sided. Scientists never look for the bad effects of vegetables. For all they know, carrots may cause depression and broad beans may make your teeth fall out. The only food they ever test is the food that tastes good. So common sense and observation must be our guide. If you have ever traveled to Belgium, for example, you must have noticed that people who live in Brussels are no healthier than the rest of us, in spite of their wretched sprouts. Cabbage is a favorite dish in Russia, a nation with the worst health record in the developed world.

We can always learn something from history. Nineteenth-century sailors lived on a diet almost completely devoid of fresh vegetables. Because of this they occasionally got a disease called scurvy. But this could be cured or prevented by drinking grog, a mixture of rum and lime juice, at the rate of about two pints a day. Perhaps in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, we are here to enjoy ourselves.

Save Our Darkness

Every spring, a whole hour of sleep is snatched away from us by the barbaric imposition of daylight savings time. Not only do we suffer this Congressional act of daylight robbery, but most of us waste half of Sunday trying to reset all our clocks and watches. Before digital technology came along this was easy: move the hands of the clock and it was done. Now we have to find the instructions for each timepiece, all printed in miniscule type and all different, and manipulate buttons the size of deer ticks according to an incomprehensible ritual: Press C to change flashing digits; press F on time signal to correct seconds, and so on.

In terms of lost time, this vanished hour is nothing compared to the ten full days stolen from the calendar by Pope Gregory in 1582. But it is annoying nevertheless, because it is so silly. We can’t save daylight, any more than we can save time. We might as well claim to make people live longer by starting newborn babies at ten years of age. It’s all very well, I suppose, to have an extra hour of darkness in the mornings. But then we get the extra hour of daylight at the end of each day, making it hard to concentrate on the TV and leading inevitably to barbecues,