THE LAST WORD
Mayer, Milton
THE LAST WORD Out of touch Milton Mayer Our doctor made an emergency call at our house the other afternoon. You can't even get a tree surgeon to make a house call these days. But ours is none of...
...Strickland and she said, "He's out on a job...
...Actually, the emergency had to do with the doctor's son Mark...
...Its answer is, "History says yes...
...I don't know linkage from leakage, or fission from fusion, or (even now) Guyana from Guinea (or Ghana), or, for the matter of that, if it isn't odd of God to let Manichaean evil abound just to show that He has given us a soupcon, or dash, of His freedom...
...In one of its full-page ads, Mobil (first-quarter profit up 81 per cent) asks, "Can the oil companies be trusted to put additional revenues into the search for new energy supplies...
...I don't know exactly — what do I mean, exactly"1...
...of a fast leak, and I got Mrs...
...But ours is none of your patient-be-damned high priests...
...But that way I'd pick up some Encounter, Confrontation, and Foot (or Feet) Massage on the side and maybe finish the Cruise as a Groupie...
...But I don't know how to be a decent man, either, and I don't know what good it would do me, in terms of my indecency, to know Cold Type from Hot or a meltdown from a hoedown...
...off to his truck and got in it and picked up a phone and the horn stopped...
...But if a kind friend, one or more, will ante up, I'll agree to do the Holistic Cruise in the $2,200 class...
...I'd have to have the money to get from here to Genoa, too...
...what a computer is or how it goes or what good it is if, like me, it makes mistakes...
...Well, sir, Mark's emergency was met and Grandmother asked if she could use our telephone...
...I just don't understand all that...
...Well, sir (again), a horn began tooting in his empty pick up truck at the curb and Ray Miller said, "Excuse me, that's my phone," and he toddled Milton Mayer is the roving editor of The Progressive...
...If I had the money — fourteen days for $2,200 to $3,390 —• I'd take the Holistic Life Seminar Cruise departing June 16 from Genoa for "five of the world's oldest civilizations with eleven respected and renowned teachers in mythology, dreams, and such contemporary consciousness-raising techniques as biofeedback, voluntary control of internal bodily states, dance, yoga, and intensive journal keeping...
...and I do not know what makes any of these things go...
...Her beeper, like Mary's little bleater, is sure to go wherever Lola goes...
...Mark had to have his diaper changed, and our house was on his mother's route home...
...When she finished, I said, "How did you know the hospital was paging you...
...Next thing I knew, I was out back, making chin-music with Ray Miller, Contractor, who is building a house next door...
...Shut 'em down...
...steerage, I suppose, with six in a bed...
...Nothing...
...But I'm ashameder of being indecent...
...Wouldn't you like to live in California and save money on heating costs...
...I just don't know how the thirty leading oil companies can stay in business at that rate, much less get their first-quarter profit up...
...The Bank of America once credited my brother Howard with $100,000,000 instead of $100...
...For the latest five available years, the Chase Manhattan Bank study shows that for some thirty leading oil companies, capital and exploration outlays of $126 billion exceeded net income by $59 billion, or 88 per cent...
...She called the hospital and said, "You were paging me...
...Heck, I don't know what makes an electric light bulb light up...
...I don't know what they've got in Outer Space that we haven't got in Inner, except maybe trouble...
...His mother is our doctor, and her name is Lola Stein-baum...
...And I just don't understand that, either...
...Or what Cold Type is...
...Here it is 1979 or so, end of the atomic era ("Shut 'em down...
...My beeper," she said, and she showed me her beeper, hanging from her belt...
...Strickland, the Plumber, in a hurry, acct...
...And have a thing or two to put down at the end of each holistic day under the salutation, "Dear Intensive Journal...
...Every so often I pick up an electric light bulb and turn it around and around in my hand and say, "Waddaya know...
...I am one with the Great Engineer Herbert Clark Hoover — olov ha sholem — who was asked what he thought of Sputnik and said, "I belong to a generation that just doesn't understand all that...
...And the next thing, I had to talk to Mr...
...ours is the Old Family Physician type...
...Nothing, that is, about any of the things that are, or within the last 200 years were, In...
...I don't know what an astrolab is, or an astroturf, or what the Aquarian Age was or where it went...
...Lola" means Grandmother in Tagalog, and our Lola, a looker who looks like she's eleven but must be twice that, is hereinafter referred to as Grandmother...
...I don't even know how newspaper stories are written electronically...
...The house is smaller than ours and is going on the market at $239,500...
...No, he's going from one job to another right now...
...I know some people who know all of the things I don't know, and I can't see that they're so much more decent than I am...
...I'm ashamed of being ignorant, or being, so to say, Without It instead of With It...
...All that, and all this...
...I'll get him on his radio...
Vol. 43 • August 1979 • No. 8
