A Low Bid for Immortality

I Have Always Had A Furtive Desire to achieve immortality in two sentences, or even one. The kind of sentences I mean is, "To thine own self be true," or "Never complain, never explain," or "Take the cash and let the credit go."

I figured when I got old enough and smart enough, I would utter the sentence or sentences, some young lady in a Grecian tunic lying at my feet would copy it down, and then it would either be hand-illuminated on a large piece of vellum, chiseled into a block of granite, or, lately, copyrighted and embossed on millions of pieces of plastic to be hung on the walls of every cultured home.

Back in the Thirties (not mine, the century's) I thought I had it for a minute or two, and then Duke Ellington made a song out of it, "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing."On reflection, I am fairly certain I never thought of it until Duke made up the song. Then a little later on, in a gin mill in Chicago, a piano player said to me, "Don't get hostile with yourself." But he said it, not me. And Satchel Paige said, "Don't never look back. Something may be gaining on you," and a ball player whose name I don't know, commenting on life in general, said, "I figure everything is about seven to five against."

The other difficulty, besides Shakespeare and W. C. Fields and Omar Khayyam and Samuel Butler and the author of Ecclesiastes saying the good things first, is that I always figured as I grew older I would know more, but it doesn't seem to have worked out that way.

I knew so many things, absolutely, at one time or another. Early on, it was evident to me that no right-minded, more or less red-blooded, underweight American boy could ask for more in this vale of tears than a Barlow jackknife. This was all I knew or needed to know, until I discovered, in succession, that the secret of true and abiding happiness was a pair of hunting boots that laced up to the knee, shoe skates, the complete works of Sax Rohmer, Toby Wing, Bud Freeman's recording of The Eel, a model A with a rumble seat, the building of a rational society, the acquisition of large sums of money, true love, being interviewed by a newspaper reporter, getting money for talking instead of writing, having the adoration (in rehearsal) of a company of actors. Some of these I got, and some I didn't (ah there, Toby), but none of them proved to be the philosopher's stone, and these days I don't even know what would bring me nirvana if I could fetch it.

What has happened, and I am sure I could have read this somewhere had I known where to look, is that what I have acquired as I have grown older is the knowledge that I know less and less. This is, of course, real knowledge, but nobody ever told me that.

Well, now that I have almost reached the age where I almost accept, with considerable bad grace, the fact that young ladies who look delicious to me have taken to calling me sir, it seems to me I better deliver myself of that deathless sentence while I still believe I know anything.

The wisdom I have accumulated then, the only information I am absolutely certain of, amounts to two unrelated sentences. I do hereby irretrievably declare: 1. Never order shirred eggs. 2. Everything takes longer than you think it's going to.

These sentences would make two plaques. There is no causal connection between them. I am not saying, "Do not order shirred eggs because they take a long time to come."

The only thing the two aphorisms have in common is that I utter them and I know them both to be true.

I ordered shirred eggs the first time I saw them on a menu because I love eggs, and I envisioned shirred eggs as something like, I suppose, shirred curtains. I believe shirred curtains are like the ones in the houses of my boyhood, thin translucent white material, with little dots of opaque material, sort of corrugated from top to bottom, although corrugated is a hard word for what I really think of as ruffled, but then I do not really know what ruffled means, and though I think of the material as dotted Swiss, I equally do not know what dotted Swiss is. But you see, what I expected from a shirred egg was a kind of very light ruffled egg. The first shirred eggs were a terribly hot sort of shiny white leather.

The second time I ordered them, I suppose I thought that the first ones had not been correctly cooked. And then from time to time I ordered them because the word shirred, as always, unhinged my brain.

It has taken thirty-odd years. I know now that shirred eggs, correctly cooked, are terribly hot and like white leather. The chef hasn't goofed. That's what shirred eggs are. So do not order them.

Now, about everything taking longer than you think it's going to. It takes longer to write, "I will not put blotting paper in the inkwell," a hundred times on the blackboard than you think it's going to. It takes longer than you thought possible for anything in the world until you wait for an order of sneezing powder to come through the mail from the novelty supply house you trusted to ship it at once. To sell one hundred and fifty packets of bluing to get a magic lantern takes longer than a whole summer, which you had always previously thought was the longest time in the world. At one time it had seemed to me that nothing took longer than to graduate from short pants to knickerbockers, until I waited to get from knickerbockers to long pants. Is there anything longer than a high school graduation address? Yes, there is: a college commencement address.

Is there a time that exceeds the wait in the outer office for news about your first job? Not until you get fired and start looking for your second job. Short of eternity, you think no more time can pass than the time it takes for that girl to say "Yes, I will." And then you sweat out the eon that passes until she says "No, I'm not."

Well, there you have it. All of knowledge in two sentences.

And please don't tell me about a place you know where the shirred eggs are delicious. I haven't got the time to go through it all again.