Wake Up to Summer - 22 June 2001

"Summer is a-cummin in, lood sing cookoo" is the way my tutor, Eustace Mandeville Wurtenbaker Tillyard, taught me to pronounce that simple pronouncement of Geoffrey Chaucer about the arrival of 21 June and the cuckoo, though where we live in summer there are no cuckoos, except, as my wife says, the two of us.

Our wake-up call is the weird moan of the morning dove.

Odd how people who have the luck to live in the city in the winter and the country in the summer so easily forget, over eight months or so, how different the simplest elements of life - the sights and sounds - can be.

I remember just at the start of the Second World War how the incomparable essayist of the New Yorker magazine, EB White, left his New York City apartment for good to live on a farm in Maine for the rest of his life.

He wrote a piece the day after he'd moved into the farm expecting, what with everything he'd been told, to have a deep untroubled country sleep after the roaring traffics boom of the city.

Well he woke up startled in the middle of the night to hear the oddest, the most all-encompassing sound, a great whooshing of water on the ceiling above him.

In the moment of waking he thought: "This is madness. The whole city is taking a shower."

And then he recognised where he was. It was raining. He'd never heard rain on a roof before.

So now instead of our being wakened by police sirens and the whine of ambulances hurling through Central Park we receive the melancholy greeting of the morning dove.

But also with the day coming on, the more cheerful chirrup of the chickadee. The prouder note, as it ought to be, of the cardinal. And, of course, our resident show-off the mocking bird, who spends the first half of the day repeating the other birds' arias and, he assumes, doing them better.

However, if you say is it true about the mocking bird I have to admit it's nothing but the truth. The first time I tested the blighter's boast I walked out on to our terrace, which fronts on the vast blue Peconic Bay, and I trilled eight bars of Handel - considering where I was born the Messiah of course, the only towering masterpiece I know note for note.

At once the cocky bird lived up to his name with a really recognisable alternation of the proper notes, from which you learned, in amazement, that unto us a child had been born. Honor Bright, as we used to say - though I told this to an American opera buff and he said: "Come on, gimme a break."

Well I've done it many times and I swear the mocking bird is truly named.

Another thing it takes a day or two to appreciate is the switching of your political interests from the national to the local. This is inevitable: In town you may take an intellectual interest in California's energy crisis but if there's a crashing thunderstorm and your power goes out you have a much more pressing concern to find some candles.

And when that sort of crisis extends for long, as it can during the coming hurricane season, you soon concentrate on buying non-perishable foods after you've had to dump the warming contents of the fridge and lifting - in my case finding somebody to lift - pails of seawater from the bay for the wretched toilets.

All politics, said a famous old Bostonian, for long speaker of the House, all politics is local - something, as a young reporter, it took me a long time to realise.

I never could understand why, for instance, an old congressman from a remote mountain village in Texas, kept being elected again and again and again. He was so old by 1932, so old he still hated the railroads, which had, when he was young, ruined the riverboat traffic, finished off the Pony Express and the stagecoach service, superannuated the horse.

So even though he was loyal to his crusading chief - Franklin Roosevelt - he could never catch on to such high falutin' stuff as social security and welfare. Organised labour was as alien to him as spacemen.

He came from barren goat country and he spent all his time trying to get through Congress bills for his people about claim jumpers and mortgages and getting the armed services committee to grant more subsidies to breed more goats, so as to have more mohair which makes more army uniforms.

The chronic problem of being a congressman is that he has only a two-year term - senators have six years - just two years to do something for your folks if you want to go back. It's a wonder any of them cares a jot for national, let alone international, affairs.

So congressmen have to spend all their days wheedling their fellows into voting for something they're not in the least interested in. And old Cactus Jack Garner was a great wheedler.

He had no use for orators. Politics was conducted best in small offices, poker games, in little chats with worried men, and with wheedling.

"A snort of bourbon," he once confided, "is a better persuader than the 12 apostles."

So when you go to live on a narrow point jutting into the bay at the end of Long Island you think less about whether Mr Putin will go it alone with his warheads and more about whether the rest of the country is going to follow our lead in a bill just passed by the county legislature.

Oh oh - county! County government, yes, independent of a state's government, though connected, of course, by a range of appeals courts.

All right, remember there are 50 states, they have great independent power, they're more like nations than anything else.

They each have their own constitution, their own courts going up to their own supreme court. They have their own banking laws, criminal code, divorce laws, they're all different about the age at which you can drive a car, drink alcohol, get married, so on and on.

And now inside each state are a flock of counties - California has over 60 - and they too have county government. The United States has in all 3,300 counties.

Now you can see why this country is a happy hunting ground for lawyers. New York state alone has as many lawyers as there are in England.

You can understand why so seldom you hear of an impoverished American lawyer, since to compound their joy they live in a country which regards all human situations as problems which can be solved at law.

Well now Long Island has two counties - the half of the island that connects it with New York City is called Nassau County, after Prince William of Orange, Duke of Nassau.

Our county, which runs to the tip of the island, into the Atlantic, is called Suffolk County, since that's where the first English settlers came from in the 1640s.

We have a very active county legislature and pride ourselves on thinking up splendid new laws not just before Nassau County but before the rest of the United States. One law has just been passed and one has been drafted by a lady with a deep hatred of cigarette smoking.

The first one Suffolk County recently passed: The first law in the United States making it a crime to use a cellphone while driving. No exceptions - doctors, bus drivers, taxi drivers, nobody - and it's a bill that has received national attention and will doubtless by copied far and wide.

The other bill has been drafted with missionary zeal by a lady who is much concerned for the health of anybody who enters a public building if there is near the doorway, or lurking by, the sinister figure of a smoker indulging what King James I called "this most noxious and filthy pastime."

There was a news feature about this remarkable bill the other evening - a sort of little documentary - showing, as they say when reproducing historical events, shown in simulation.

A young woman walking into a revolving door while a foot or two away was a man, evidently a hopeful actor, in a raincoat with the collar turned up and holding on to the smouldering stub of a cigarette, like one of those Chinese cabinet ministers who can smoke cigarettes till they vanish between their teeth.

This bystander blew a faint stream of smoke on cue, as the fresh, fine young woman passed through the revolving door. Cut to interview with the fine, fresh young woman by, apparently, a young woman doctor.

Fresh, wide-eyed young woman: "Do you mean that that little whiff of smoke contains carcinogens that could enter my lungs?"

Doctor: "Ooh yes, definitely."

Cut to middle-aged county lawmaker bravely signing her bill. Close-up of bill which declares and commands that all residents of Suffolk County to take heed that henceforth upon the passage of this bill by the county legislature all outdoor smokers must stay not closer to the entrance of any public building than 50ft on pain of ... etc., etc., etc.

That's quite a bill and quite a production promoting it I must say. So the campaign against what's called passive smoking proceeds apace.

Finally, I recall my own campaign against the passive paranoiacs. Back in my own wicked days, long ago, I was in a booth or banquette at our corner coffee shop and having the first and final cigarette.

A young, earnest, bearded man, with a young, earnest, non-bearded girlfriend, leaned over and said with a gleaming eye: "Would you not do that?"

I said with no gleam: "I'll stop this if you promise to put on a mask or a handkerchief over your nose before you go out and cross Madison Avenue here at 96 Street. Four lanes of truck traffic alone manufacture more carbon monoxide and carcinogens and other poisons than all the cigarettes you'll ever encounter."

He was startled. He stuttered: "Are you a doctor?"

I hated to let him down. I was a doctor of letters three times over and a doctor of laws entitled "to practice law in Scotland".

"Yes," I said sharply, dousing my cigarette with one sharp, swift blow.

"Oh," he said, "I'm sorry."

He took out a handkerchief.

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