I've several times written here about how complementary my
late wife Helen's
and my temperaments were. She was
ebullient, extroverted and social; I am reserved, introverted and, if not
exactly anti-social, at least not a mixer. We were also extremely different in our approach to the
rules of officialdom.
I grew up in New York City, where there were official rules
galore, emanating from an elaborate bureaucracy. I learned as I grew up that observance of them came under
the rubric "Don't fight City Hall"—one just lived with them. My mother for
much of my youth managed the then-famous Luxor Hotel and Baths in midtown
Manhattan, which had plenty of rules to follow. I remember her annoyance at the sometimes-incomprehensible
and pettifogging application of them by city inspectors. Her bile would rise further when those
same inspectors appeared at the holiday season to collect their
"gifts," disregard of
which would result in the discovery during the next year of yet more-minute
"infractions," many of questionable authenticity. She would choke on her anger, but then
she would shrug and accept the "rules" as they were.
Helen grew up in a town of a few hundred people in
Utah. There the rubric was a
pioneering "Don't tread on me!"
Her father,
not a good driver, would frequently get traffic tickets. He would appear in court and chastise
the judge: "I've known you since you were a boy. Don't be so high and mighty now that you're a
judge!" (The judge once in
response threw him in jail for contempt of court. The family story goes that one son, trying to visit him in jail, found him instead polishing brass handrails in the
courthouse. Going over to chat, all he got was a growled, sotto voce,
"Hush! I'm getting time off
for good behavior!")
Two examples in Helen's and my life together show how these
different backgrounds brought us into conflict.
When we married, we honeymooned in the Caribbean, hopping
for two weeks among a number of gorgeous islands. In those days, passports were not necessary in returning
from some neighboring tourist locations, but a proof of U.S. residency was
required. Helen had no passport,
but she had been to Mexico, and her driver's license had always done the
trick. I didn't think that would
work this time, so I pestered her to get a copy of her birth certificate, and
she eventually (and exasperatedly) asked her mother to go to Salt Lake City to
get one for her.
When we returned to the U.S. through Puerto Rico, we found
ourselves in a long, slow-moving line.
Immigration officials were carefully examining documentation and
shunting some people aside. I
nudged Helen to show how right I had been to insist that she have her birth
certificate with her. But when we
reached the head of the line, the agent's face lit up with a bright smile as he
said, "Helen Green! What are
you doing in Puerto Rico?"
They had gone to high school together in Utah! What are the odds against that?
The second example also concerns foreign travel. About two years after we were married,
we headed to France for a year-long sabbatical. I, still the rule follower, called the French consulate in
San Francisco to find out whether we would need visas for that length of stay. The answer was yes, so I got one. Helen, now having a passport, refused
to follow suit, saying that it would involve her with the French bureaucracy,
of which she wanted no part. She
was right again.
When we got to French immigration control at the Paris
airport, Helen breezed through a different line than I, declaring that she was
on a tourist visit. I, with a visa
in my passport, was interrogated at length about the purpose of my stay,
whether I would be earning money in France, and so on. When asked whether I had a radio with
me, I dutifully produced an early $5 Sony transistor device from my luggage,
for which I was later billed a 50-franc ($10) radio tax. I was told to report to a police
station within a week to get a carte d'identité (three hours of shuffling through lines, plus a visit to another
police station when we moved from our initial hotel to an apartment we
rented). When I went to pick up
the Peugeot I had ordered, one look at the visa in my passport led the salesman
to delay delivery of the car until I had my carte d'identité, and prompted him to get different, more expensive
license plates than had already been mounted on the car.
The landlady of the apartment we rented was on the same page
as Helen, although in a much more aggressive book. When I asked her what I should do about the radio-tax bill,
she looked at me in amazement and said, "Ignore it! Don't ruin it for the rest of
us." When I got my first
parking ticket and asked how to pay it, her answer was the same. She showed me three cubby holes in her
desk. One was filled with a thick
sheaf of blue parking tickets, the first notice; a second was filled with a
thinner sheaf of orange notices, warning that she would be subject to arrest if
the original fine, now increased, wasn't paid; a very small sheaf of red notices
said she was now subject to arrest.
"But," I asked, "how can you possibly ignore
the red notices too?" Her
face showed that she was astonished by my naīveté. "Look," she said, "the bureaucrats have done
their job by sending out three notices, and they don't always do even that
much. Now there is nothing left
for them to do, so that's the end of it."
Helen looked on bemusedly at the annoyances my visa caused
me, especially since she lived in France for the year without any repercussion
for lacking one. Even though I
admit that her attitude turned out to be better, or at least less aggravating, to
this day I haven't rid myself of the habit of rule-following that was ingrained
in my youth.