Andy Rooney: 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit by Andy Rooney

Author:Andy Rooney
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Publishers, Literary Collections, Humor, Journalists, Form, Editors, General, Biography & Autobiography, Essays, American wit and humor
ISBN: 9781586487737
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2009-10-26T10:00:00+00:00

Life, Long and Short

I change my mind a lot about whether life is long or short. Looking back at how quickly a son or daughter grew up or at how many years I’ve been out of high school, life seems to be passing frighteningly fast. Then I look around me at the evidence of the day-to-day things I’ve done and life seems long. Just looking at the coffee cans I’ve saved makes life look like practically forever. We only use eight or ten tablespoons of coffee a day. Those cans sure represent a lot of days.

Used coffee cans are the kind of statistics on life that we don’t keep. Maybe if we kept them, it would help give a feeling of longevity. Maybe when each of us has his own computer at home, we’ll be able to save the kinds of statistics the announcers use during baseball games.

It’s always fun, for instance, to try to remember how many cars you’ve owned. Think back to your first car, and it makes life seem longer. If

Life, Long and Short 137

you’re fifty years old, you’ve probably owned so many cars you can’t even remember all of them in order. I’ve also wondered how many miles I’ve driven. That’s a statistic most people could probably make a fair guess at. If you’ve put roughly seventy-five thousand miles on twenty cars, you’ve driven a million and a half miles. You’ve probably spent something like twenty-five thousand dollars on gas.

It’s more difficult to estimate the number of miles you’ve walked. Is there any chance you’ve walked as far as you’ve driven in a car? I’m not sure. You don’t go out on a weekend and walk four hundred miles the way you’d drive a car. On the other hand, every time you cross a street or walk across the room, you’re adding to the steps you’ve taken. All those little walks every day must add up to a lot of miles, even if you aren’t a hiker.

And how much have you climbed? I must have lifted myself ten thousand miles straight up with all the stairs I’ve negotiated in my life. There are seventeen nine-inch steps in our front hallway and I often climb them twenty times a day, so I’ve lifted my two hundred pounds two hundred and fifty feet on the stairs in the house in one day alone. That doesn’t include the day I climbed the Washington Monument with the kids or the time my uncle took me up the Statue of Liberty.

And how many pairs of shoes have I worn out walking and climbing all that distance? I’m always looking for the perfect pair of shoes and I’ve never found them yet, so I buy more shoes than I wear. There must be six old pairs of sneaks of mine in closets around the house. All in all, I’ll bet I’ve had two hundred fifty pairs of shoes in my life. Easy, two hundred fifty.

How long would your hair be if you’d never cut it? Everyone has wondered about that at some time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.