I'm a Stranger Here Myself (2 page)

One of the pleasures of living in a small, old-fashioned New England town is that it generally includes a small, old-fashioned post office. Ours is particularly agreeable. It’s in an attractive Federal-style brick building, confident but not flashy, that looks like a post office ought to. It even smells nice—a combination of gum adhesive and old central heating turned up a little too high.

The counter employees are always cheerful, helpful and efficient, and pleased to give you an extra piece of tape if it looks as if your envelope flap might peel open. Moreover, post offices here by and large deal only with postal matters. They don’t concern themselves with pension payments, car tax, TV licenses, lottery tickets, savings accounts, or any of the hundred and one other things that make a visit to any British post office such a popular, all-day event and provide a fulfilling and reliable diversion for chatty people who enjoy nothing so much as a good long hunt in their purses and handbags for exact change. Here there are never any long lines and you are in and out in minutes.

Best of all, once a year every American post office has a Customer Appreciation Day. Ours was yesterday. I had never heard of this engaging custom, but I was taken with it immediately. The employees had hung up banners, put out a long table with a nice checkered cloth, and laid on a generous spread of doughnuts, pastries, and hot coffee—all of it free.

After twenty years in Britain, this seemed a delightfully improbable notion, the idea of a faceless government bureaucracy thanking me and my fellow townspeople for our patronage, but I was impressed and grateful—and, I must say, it was good to be reminded that postal employees are not just mindless automatons who spend their days mangling letters and whimsically sending my royalty checks to a guy in Vermont named Bill Bubba but rather are dedicated, highly trained individuals who spend their days mangling letters and sending my royalty checks to a guy in Vermont named Bill Bubba.

Anyway, I was won over utterly. Now I would hate for you to think that my loyalty with respect to postal delivery systems can be cheaply bought with a chocolate twirl doughnut and a Styrofoam cup of coffee, but in fact it can. Much as I admire Britain’s Royal Mail, it has never once offered me a morning snack, so I have to tell you that as I strolled home from my errand, wiping crumbs from my face, my thoughts toward American life in general and the U.S. Postal Service in particular were pretty incomparably favorable.

But, as nearly always with government services, it couldn’t last. When I got home, the day’s mail was on the mat. There among the usual copious invitations to acquire new credit cards, save a rain forest, become a life member of the National Incontinence Foundation, add my name (for a small fee) to the
Who’s Who of People Named Bill in New England,
help the National Rifle Association with its Arm-a-Toddler campaign, and the scores of other unsought inducements, special offers, and solicitations that arrive each day at every American home—well, there among this mass was a forlorn and mangled letter that I had sent forty-one days earlier to a friend in California care of his place of employment and that was now being returned to me marked “Insufficient Address—Get Real and Try Again” or words to that effect.

At the sight of this I issued a small, despairing sigh, and not merely because I had just sold the U.S. Postal Service my soul for a doughnut. It happens that I had recently read an article on wordplay in the
Smithsonian
magazine in which the author asserted that some puckish soul had once sent a letter addressed, with playful ambiguity, to

HILL
JOHN
MASS

and it had gotten there after the postal authorities had worked out that it was to be read as “John Underhill, Andover, Mass.” (Get it?)

It’s a nice story, and I would truly like to believe it, but the fate of my letter to California seemed to suggest a need for caution with regard to the postal service and its sleuthing abilities. The problem with my letter was that I had addressed it to my friend merely “c/o Black Oak Books, Berkeley, California,” without a street name or number because I didn’t know either. I appreciate that that is not a complete address, but it is a lot more explicit than “Hill John Mass” and anyway Black Oak Books is a Berkeley institution. Anyone who knows the city—and I had assumed in my quaintly naive way that that would include Berkeley postal authorities—would know Black Oak Books. But evidently not. (Goodness knows, incidentally, what my letter had been
doing
in California for nearly six weeks, though it came back with a nice tan and an urge to get in touch with its inner feelings.)

Now just to give this plaintive tale a little heartwarming perspective, let me tell you that not long before I departed from England, the Royal Mail had brought me, within forty-eight hours of its posting in London, a letter addressed to “Bill Bryson, Writer, Yorkshire Dales,” which is a pretty impressive bit of sleuthing. (And never mind that the correspondent was a trifle off his head.)

So here I am, my affections torn between a postal service that never feeds me but can tackle a challenge and one that gives me free tape and prompt service but won’t help me out when I can’t remember a street name. The lesson to draw from this, of course, is that when you move from one country to another you have to accept that there are some things that are better and some things that are worse, and there is nothing you can do about it. That may not be the profoundest of insights to take away from a morning’s outing, but I did get a free doughnut as well, so on balance I guess I’m happy.

Now if you will excuse me I have to drive to Vermont and collect some mail from a Mr. Bubba.

(Some months after this piece was written, I received a letter from England addressed to “Mr. Bill Bryson, Author of ‘A Walk in the Woods,’ Lives Somewhere in New Hampshire, America.” It arrived without comment or emendation just five days after it was mailed. My congratulations to the U.S. Postal Service for an unassailable triumph.)

Do you know what I really miss about Britain now that I live in America? I miss coming in from the pub about midnight in a blurry frame of mind and watching
Open University
on TV.

Now Open University, I should perhaps explain, is a wonderful, wholly commendable institution the British set up some years ago to provide the chance of a college education to anyone who wants it. Coursework is done partly at home, partly on campuses, and partly through lectures broadcast on television, mostly at odd hours like very early on a Sunday morning or late at night when normal programming has finished.

The television lectures, which nearly all appear to have been filmed in the early 1970s, typically involve a geeky-looking academic with lively hair and a curiously misguided dress sense (even by the accommodating standards of that hallucinogenic age) standing before a blackboard, with perhaps a large plastic model of a molecule on a table in front of him, saying something totally incomprehensible like: “However, according to Mersault’s theorem, if we apply a small positive charge to the neutrino, the two free isotopes will be thrown into a reverse gradient orbit, while the captive positive becomes a negative positron, and vice versa, as we can see in this formula.” And then he scribbles one of those complex, meaningless blackboard formulas of the sort that used to feature regularly in
New Yorker
cartoons.

The reason that
Open University
lectures traditionally are so popular with postpub crowds is not because they are interesting, which patently they are not, but because for a long time they were the only thing on British TV after midnight.

If I were to come in about midnight now mostly what I would find on the TV would be Peter Graves standing in a trenchcoat talking about unsolved mysteries, the Weather Channel, the fourth hour of an
I Love Lucy
extravaganza, at least three channels showing old
M*         A*         S*         H
episodes, and a small selection of movies on the premium movie channels mainly involving nubile actresses disporting in the altogether. All of which is diverting enough in its way, I grant you, but it doesn’t begin to compare with the hypnotic fascination of
Open University
after six pints of beer. I am quite serious about this.

I’m not at all sure why, but I always found it strangely compelling to turn on the TV late at night and find a guy who looked as if he had bought all the clothes he would ever need during one shopping trip in 1973 (so that, presumably, he would be free to spend the rest of his waking hours around oscilloscopes) saying in an oddly characterless voice, “And so we can see, adding two fixed-end solutions gives us another fixed-end solution.”

Most of the time, I had no idea what these people were talking about—that was a big part of what made it so compelling somehow—but very occasionally the topic was something I could actually follow and enjoy. I’m thinking of an unexpectedly diverting lecture I chanced upon some years ago for people working toward a degree in marketing. The lecture compared the selling of proprietary healthcare products in Britain and the United States.

The gist of the program was that the same product had to be sold in entirely different ways in the two markets. An advertisement in Britain for a cold relief capsule, for instance, would promise no more than that it might make you feel a little better. You would still have a red nose and be in your pajamas, but you would be smiling again, if wanly. A commercial for the selfsame product in America, however, would guarantee total, instantaneous relief. A person on the American side of the Atlantic who took this miracle compound would not only throw off his pj’s and get back to work at once, he would feel better than he had for years and finish the day having the time of his life at a bowling alley.

The drift of all this was that the British don’t expect over-the-counter drugs to change their lives, whereas we Americans will settle for nothing less. The passing of the years has not, it appears, dulled the notion. You have only to watch any television channel for a few minutes, flip through a magazine, or stroll along the groaning shelves of any drugstore to realize that people in this counry expect to feel more or less perfect all the time. Even our household shampoo, I notice, promises to “change the way you feel.”

It is an odd thing about us. We expend huge efforts exhorting ourselves to “Say No to Drugs,” then go to the drugstore and buy them by the armloads. Almost $75 billion is spent each year in the United States on medicines of all types, and pharmaceutical products are marketed with a vehemence and forthrightness that can take a little getting used to.

In one commercial running on television at the moment, a pleasant-looking middle-aged lady turns to the camera and says in a candid tone: “When I get diarrhea I like a little comfort” (to which I always say: “Why wait for diarrhea?”).

In another, a man at a bowling alley (men are pretty generally at bowling alleys in these things) grimaces after a poor shot and mutters to his partner, “It’s these hemorrhoids again.” And here’s the thing. The buddy has some hemorrhoid cream in his pocket! Not in his gym bag, you understand, not in the glove compartment of his car, but in his shirt pocket, where he can whip it out at a moment’s notice and call the gang around. Extraordinary.

But the really amazing change that occurred while I was away is that now even prescription drugs are advertised. I have before me a popular magazine called
Health
that is chock full of ads with bold headlines saying things like “Why take two tablets when you can take one? Prempro is the only prescription tablet that combines Premarin and a progestin in one tablet.”

Another more intriguingly asks, “Have you ever treated a vaginal yeast infection in the middle of nowhere?” (Not knowingly!) A third goes straight to the economic heart of the matter and declares, “The doctor told me I’d probably be taking blood pressure pills for the rest of my life. The good news is how much I might save since he switched me to Adalat CC (nifedipine) from Procardia XL (nifedipine).”

The idea is that you read the advertisement, then badger your “healthcare professional” to prescribe it for you. It seems a curious concept to me, the idea of magazine readers deciding what medications are best for them, but then Americans appear to know a great deal about drugs. Nearly all the advertisements assume an impressively high level of biochemical familiarity. The vaginal yeast ad confidently assures the reader that Diflucan is “comparable to seven days of Monistat 7, Gyne-Lotrimin, or Mycelex-7,” while the ad for Prempro promises that it is “as effective as taking Premarin and a progestin separately.”

When you realize that these are meaningful statements for thousands and thousands of people, the idea of your bowling buddy carrying a tube of hemorrhoid unguent in his shirt pocket perhaps doesn’t seem quite so ridiculous.

I don’t know whether this national obsession with health is actually worth it. What I do know is that there is a much more agreeable way to achieve perfect inner harmony. Drink six pints of beer and watch
Open University
for ninety minutes before retiring. It has never failed me.