I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson Page B

are certain times when the informality and familiarity of American life strains my patience—when a waiter tells me his name is Bob and that he’ll be my server this evening, I still have to resist an impulse to say, “I just want a cheese-burger, Bob. I’m not looking for a relationship”—but mostly I have come to like it. It’s because it’s symbolic of something more fundamental, I suppose.
    There is no tugging of forelocks here, you see, but a genuine universal assumption that no person is better than any other. I think that’s swell. My garbage collector calls me Bill. My doctor calls me Bill. My children’s school principal calls me Bill. They don’t tug for me. I don’t tug for them. I think that’s as it should be.
    In England, I used the same accountant for over a decade, and our relations were always cordial but businesslike. She never called me anything but Mr. Bryson and I never called her anything but Mrs. Creswick. When I moved to America, I phoned an accountant for an appointment. When I came to his office, his first words to me were, “Ah, Bill, I’m glad you could make it.” We were pals already. Now when I see him I ask him about his kids.
    It shows itself in other ways, too. Hanover, where we live, is a college town. The local university, Dartmouth, is a private school and quite exclusive, but you would never guess it. None of its grounds are off limits to us, unlike, say, Oxford or Cambridge in England where virtually all the college property is closed to outsiders even though those venerable institutions are actually public and owned by the nation. Just you try to go into the Bodleian Library and have a look around, or take a stroll through one of the college quads outside an extremely limited number of hours and see what happens.
    Dartmouth, by splendid contrast, could hardly be more accommodating to the community. One of my daughters skates on the college ice rink. My son’s high school track team practices in the winter on the college’s indoor track. The Hopkins Center, a performing arts center, shows movies and puts on live productions to which the general public is welcomed. Just last night I saw
North by Northwest
on a big screen with one of my teenagers, and afterward we had coffee and cheese-cake in the student cafeteria. At none of these things do you ever have to show an ID or secure special permission, and never are you made to feel as if you are trespassing or unwelcome.
    All this gives everyday encounters a sheen of openness and egalitarianism that I admire very much. It removes a lot of stuffiness from life. The one thing it won’t do, however, is get you your wife’s social security number when that number has been mislaid. We needed the number fairly urgently for some tax form. I explained this to the social security man when he came back on the line. He had, after all, just called me Bill, so I had reason to hope that we might get somewhere.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we are only permitted to divulge that information to the designated individual.”
    “The person named on the card, you mean?”
    “Correct.”
    “But she’s my wife,” I sputtered.
    “We are only permitted to divulge that information to the designated individual.”
    “Let me get this straight,” I said. “If I were my wife, you would give me the number over the phone?”
    “Correct.”
    “But what if it was somebody just pretending to be her?”
    A hesitant pause. “We would assume that the individual making the inquiry was the individual indicated as the designated individual.”
    “Just a minute please.” I thought for a minute. My wife was out, so I couldn’t call on her, but obviously I didn’t want to have to go through all this again later. I came back on the phone and said in my normal voice: “Hello, it’s Cynthia Bryson here. Please could I have my card number?”
    There was a nervous chuckle. “I know it’s you, Bill,” the voice said.
    “No, honestly. It’s