Anything Can Happen Read Free

said he'd take the fire. Not his wife, not his children, not his pets, books, letters, or insurance policy. The fire. That is a good example of being too clever by half.

    On Women and Men
    One never hears a woman say: "I wasted my life." From which one may conclude that (a) women do not waste their lives;
(b)
they are too considerate to say so;
(c)
men are ridiculous.

    On Censorship
    I have no way of knowing this, of course, but I would bet that every civilization that destroyed itself began to do so when someone in power demanded to know what the people were reading.

    On Assisted Living
    I could use some.

A Song for Jessica
    If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands, because you're way ahead of the game, and there's something to be said for the perseverance of the itsy-bitsy spider and the weasel who went pop. Of course, from time to time the bough is liable to break, Humpty-Dumpty will fall, London Bridge will fall, all will fall down. But the wheels on the bus do go round round round, and when you row row row your boat merrily merrily merrily merrily, life
is
but a dream.

New Year's at Luchow's
    Luchow's was a famous old German restaurant in downtown New York, situated just about where Irving Place and Fourteenth Street make a T . It was a bustling spot all year long, but especially at Christmastime when the proprietors propped up a huge Christmas tree for all to admire, and a hefty group called the Oom Pah Band tooted "O Tannenbaum" as the customers sang along. Diamond Jim Brady proposed to Lillian Russell in Luchow's, offering her a suitcase filled with one million dollars if she'd consent. (She didn't.) That's the sort of place Luchow's was until it closed some years ago.
    My parents used to take my brother, Peter, and me to Luchow's every so often, even though my father suspected the restaurant of having been a Nazi hangout during the war. There we went, nonetheless, to stuff our faces and gape at celebrities. I saw Jackie Gleason there once, looking like the comics' Little King, and leading a retinue including Jack Lescoulie, of mellow memory, among the crowded tables. That was not on New Year's Day. My family never went anywhere on New Year's Day, though for two years running Peter and I, while never going anywhere, still managed to spend the day at Luchow's.
    You see, when my brother was in high school, he acquired his own telephone, the number of which was but one digit removed from Luchow's. At first he was annoyed by this coincidence, as calls for Luchow's and calls for my brother came in at a ratio of twenty to one. So, eventually tiring of the phrase "Wrong number," he began to accept a few reservations. This was a cruel prank, to be sure, but partly justified in his, and later in my own mind, for our being on the receiving rather than the phoning end of the calls.
    Returning from graduate school one Christmas vacation, I was delighted to discover my brother's new enterprise and immediately joined his restaurant business with all the high spirits of the season. Embellishing his practice of taking reservations straight, I would ask—whenever someone called requesting a table for eight, for example—if the caller also wanted chairs. In no instance, and there were dozens, did the people calling for reservations treat my question as odd. As long as they thought they had Luchow's on the phone, everything was jake.
    During spring vacation we adorned our business further by adding a touch of professionalism. Because of frequent requests for the Luchow's headwaiter, we learned that the man's name was Julius, which Peter, for reasons of his own, insisted on converting to Hoolio and adopting it whenever a call came in. I would answer the phone and transfer the call to Hoolio, who would do most of the talking in a Spanish-German accent so difficult to penetrate that requests for tables—and chairs—often took ten minutes.
    We then began to push things a bit, in part to test the limits of human