Friends, a week ago I put some notes on WFB in Impromptus. (That column is
here.) Want a few more notes? Just a few more?
You know that he loved peanut butter. Ate it every morning of his life. Took it everywhere he went (because sometimes you couldn’t get it). But did you also know he had a thing for coffee ice cream? Yes — a real jones for it. I introduced him to Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch — one of the best things on the planet.
(Yes, I know that they are communists or whatever. Just eat the ice cream.)
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Note 2: Years ago, I had a spot of trouble finding housing in Manhattan. And he said to me, “Do you know I’m a closet George-ite?” He meant the 19th-century American economist and social thinker Henry George (author of
Progress and Poverty).
Note 3: A friend of mine reminded me of this, and urged me to tell it. Okay: It was New Year’s Eve. No, it was the evening of New Year’s Day. We were at Stamford, and the household staff had the day off. We were on our own for dinner. Bill said he’d just discovered this marvelous new place in town: Kentucky Fried Chicken. He related this as though it were novel and exotic. He would go pick up the grub.
When he came back, he said he’d had trouble understanding the young lady behind the counter. She’d said, “Do you want
unnnh or
hnnnh?” (I wish you could have heard Bill say this.) He had her repeat it — still couldn’t understand her. Then he had the wit to say, “What’s the difference?” (She might have been asking about regular or extra crispy — I’m afraid I don’t know.)
That story is not so funny on the page, I see (at least as I have typed it). But, at the time, it was funny as hell, trust me.
And a P.S.: Pat did the dishes that night. She really did — and did so elegantly.
A conscientious reader forwarded to me an article last week, and had but one comment to make: “I am sickened.” That speaks for me, too. The
article was headlined, “Chertoff scolded for lack of staff’s diversity.”
Remember how 9/11 was supposed to change everything? From then on, we were supposed to concentrate on important things, and be one America. We were to leave behind the frivolous racialism that had preoccupied us in the past. We had bigger fish to fry.
No way. Six and a half years have gone by, with no further serious attack. So we can afford to revert, or so people think. We can afford to go around with clipboards checking the biological makeup of Homeland Security employees.
One passage from the article: “In what appeared to be a sort of diversity sting operation, Rep. Robert C. Scott, Virginia Democrat, led off his questions to Mr. Chertoff by demanding that the secretary’s staff stand up to be scrutinized.” Why didn’t he demand that they give blood samples?
You will be happy to know — or not — that, regardless of 9/11, America is still America. Not only did 9/11 not change everything; I’m not sure it changed anything at all.
