Free Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin by Calvin Trillin Page A

they call it?” I said. “Judging from the condition of the clerk, it obviously isn’t enough to keep a human being alive.”
    It happens to be true that health food makes me sick. In fact, health food stores make me feel a bit queasy even if I don’t buy anything—partly, I think, because they always smell like capsules that have been in the medicine chest since the Nixon-Humphrey campaign.
    “The children said you made a scene in the store,” Alice said.
    “Not a scene, really,” I said. It is true that, as I poked around the aisles looking for the soy waste, I stopped to sniff the air, and suddenly heard myself shout, “Help! I’m trapped in a bottle of multivitamins!” That isn’t really a scene though. I think of it as more of an outburst.
    “I think you’re becoming a crank,” Alice said.
    “Isn’t there some public health law against people who are shopping for food being reminded constantly of the last days of Howard Hughes?”
    “A sausage-eating crank at that,” Alice said.
    “Let me ask you just one question,” I said. “If bumblebee leavings and stump paste are so good for you, why can’t any of those guys grow full beards?”
    1980

HIGH SOCIETY AND JUST PLAIN RICH PEOPLE

    “When my freshman-year roommate at Yale, Thatcher Baxter Hatcher, told me that after the war his family no longer dressed for dinner, I thought he meant that they showed up in their undershirts. I said, ‘My mom would have never allowed that, Thatcher Baxter Hatcher, and I’m talking here about Kansas City.’ ”
Errands
    I’ve been back from the summer cottage for a while now, but I still seem to spend most of my time doing the sort of things that the recent biography of William Paley says he never had to do.
    These biographies of the mighty stir conflicting emotions in the ordinary reader. For instance, Paley, the founder of CBS, is revealed as a liar, a braggart, a bully, a turncoat, a philanderer, and the sort of parent who in a just world would be tossed in the slammer for derelictionof duty—in other words, the sort of person we’re used to reading about lately in biographies of our country’s most prominent citizens. On the other hand, he never had to unpack his own car.
    This combination is what stirs the conflicting emotions. If you’re reading the book on the beach, you might think, “What a thoroughly loathsome human being.” But if you’re reading it in the license-renewal line at the Motor Vehicle Bureau—the line you’re afraid you might wait in for forty minutes only to be told that the form you’ve filled out with such care is of no use without the birth certificate you keep in the safety deposit box—you might think, a bit wistfully, “I guess Bill Paley would have had somebody to take care of this sort of thing for him.”
    You would be half right. As I understand it, he would have had two people take care of that sort of thing—one to stand in the line at the Motor Vehicle Bureau and one who was in charge of such matters as sending somebody down to the Motor Vehicle Bureau to stand in line. This, at least, is what I was advised by my wife, who was the person in our family actually reading the book. I wanted to get to it myself, but I was too busy unpacking the car.
    “When the Paleys flew from one of their houses to another, they didn’t even carry a suitcase,” she said. “There were people who went ahead of them to make sure that the closets were in order and the refrigerator was stocked and there were fresh flowers in the house.”
    Again, if I had been told that while I was lying quietly in the hammock, I might have taken it in as a marginally interesting fact about the habits of the rich. My response had to do with the fact that I was at that moment trying to balance a pile of underwear in one hand while violently pulling on a drawer that seemed to have an old Stroud’s Fried Chicken T-shirt (“We Choke Our Own Chickens”) stuck in it in a way that prevented it from