THIS MORNING, out for a walk in wintry weather, I discovered a young student from the Northwestern School of Music struggling on the icy sidewalk while carrying a double bass. “Excuse me,” said I, as our paths crossed, “but have you ever considered taking up the harmonica?” He took it, as the Victorians say, in good part. My model here was Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the actor and older half-brother of Max Beerbohm, who once came upon a mover bent almost double because of the grandfather clock he was toting on his back. “My good sir,” Beerbohm Tree is supposed to have said, “wouldn’t it be much more convenient to own a wristwatch?” A phrase is needed to cover this sort of thing, preferably one in English. It would be a companion to the French phrase esprit d’escalier, which refers to one’s regret about coming up with witty remarks or rejoinders only when it is too late to deliver them. What I have in mind is the gratuitous remark, in response to nothing but the scene in which one finds oneself. I seem to have become something of a specialist at these remarks. Later the same day, finding myself in a large yet crowded Chicago butcher shop called Paulina Market, my package under my arm, I said to an older couple as I was leaving, “I’m getting out of here. Too many vegetarians for my taste.” I’m far from sure that they got the joke. And why should they? More likely one turned to the other, asking, “Who was that maniac?” At the supermarket, the bagger, a tall, thin kid with dreadlocks, wants to know what kind of bag I want. Instead of answering either plastic or paper, I say: “Suede.” A pause; a moment of tension. Then he smiles. “Ain’t heard that one yet,” he says, grinning. “Not too bad.” In the restaurant, salad dishes set before us, the waiter comes round with a particularly large pepper mill. “Pepper?” he asks each of the six of us in turn, twisting the pepper on four of our salads. When he gets to me, I say, “No thanks. I don’t carry pepper-mill insurance. I had a cousin who was killed by a waiter wielding a pepper mill only slightly smaller than this one.” A look of disbelief is followed by a small shock–ten watts, let us say–of recognition, as the waiter realizes he is dealing with a genial but authentic screw-off. While my material is, I hope, original, I don’t seem to mind reusing it. I’ve hauled out the pepper-mill bit no fewer than two or three hundred times. I don’t seem to mind recycling, either. A number of years ago I bought two two-volume sets of the letters of Justice Holmes–the “Holmes-Laski Letters” and the “Holmes-Pollock Letters.” The bookseller, a rather dour New Englander named Richard Barnes, asked if I would like him to wrap them for me. “That’s all right, Mr. Barnes,” I said, “I’ll read them here.” I thought I noted the slightest hint of a wisp of a smile play at the left corner of his mouth, though I could have been mistaken. Two weeks ago, I bought two dozen night-crawler worms for my turtles at a fishing equipment and bait store. The man who brought them to me asked if I wanted them in a bag. “No thanks,” I said, “I’ll eat them here.” I wonder if the effect of these various bits isn’t to put the people on whom I use them in an esprit d’escalier frame of mind? Did it only later occur to the boy with the double bass to say, “No, but would you mind terribly if I smashed it over your head?” The bagger might have asked if I’d like to try one of his plastic bags over my face. The waiter might have noted that I made the same joke seven months ago, after which, near as he can recall, he spat in my entr e, the linguine and seafood dish. The fellow at the bait store might have asked if, with my worms, I preferred regular or Poupon mustard. Mr. Barnes needed only to have kept a stiff lower lip to have brought me down with a thump. Are these remarks merely a form of showing off: Yo, look at me–clever little mother hubbard, am I not? Yet my motive, I swear, isn’t to put anyone down. I fancy myself like the old lamplighter, only working a double shift, making the day a little brighter for the people on whom I try them. The bagger, in my kindly reckoning, goes home that night to tell about this nutty dude at work who asked for a suede bag (you had to be there, I’m afraid he’ll have to add). “I please myself,” says Frank Cowperwood, in Theodore Dreiser’s trilogy, “The Titan.” Wish I could say the same, but, alas, I am not always able to arrange it. So instead I try, as best I can, to amuse myself, and fairly often succeed. The trick, as I see it, is to continue to do so for as long as possible without getting punched out. –Joseph Epstein
