The History of Men's Wishes

Day 158 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project and the local men's history book club is reading Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West, by Mark Wyman, because they are history buffs, and this is great history! I've mentioned the book here before, because Wyman is a local historian and author, but I mention it again because one of the book club members came into Babbitt's yesterday, hoping for it. Hoping perhaps the boss, who is in the local men's history book club, might have ordered in bulk, at a discount, but no..... We don't really do that.

This fellow can't make this month's meeting, but he wants to read the book anyway. "Well, after the meeting, a few copies will probably come in," I suggested, knowing these guys are good about clearing their shelves, making room for more, sharing with the less affluent but just as avid readers.

"Then I've got to be reading the next book!" he said.

I've finished The Wishbones, by Tom Perrotta, and I loved it. In fact, in addition to making me laugh, it made me cry, unexpectedly. It is subtle and real. I love books like that, especially if they are also hilarious. It taught me a lot about men's wishes, and that tendency to hang back and be boys, man-boys, forever. How, inside a man-boy, even a man-boy with a desire to be a rock star, there can be a sensitive, goofy, aware, mistake-making real man.

You know, I am easily pleased. Sort of like the dead duchess in "My Last Duchess." Sigh.... I will read anything, and I am open to the unexpected. I have set books aside...to read later...but the only book I never got back to that a bunch of people told me was wonderful was The Lost Father, by Mona Simpson. I'm sorry, Mona. Maybe I should give it another try. But I don't want to.

Other than that, though, I am able to set aside judgement, for the most part, even if what I am reading isn't grabbing me. Oh, dear, Julie, I have set aside Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome. I know I will pick it up again, on vacation. I am taking it with me to water. Along with Barbara Pym, just in case.

Speaking of the duke who was speaking of his last duchess, while preparing to marry the next, in the mall today (where I had gone for Beer Nuts treats, including Insane Grain, to take to an upcoming poetry reading, coming up tomorrow, in fact, in a gallery in Arlington Heights, Illinois), and waiting for my daughter and her friend, who were looking for shorts and did not find any, I saw a man reading The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert A. Caro. More men's history. Not unexpectedly about power. And the wish for it.

I observed him, imagined him waiting for his wife to shop, as might a character in The Wishbones, got interrupted in my imaginary history of this stranger in a St. Louis Cardinals shirt by a call from my daughter in a dressing room, and suddenly noticed he was up and walking ahead of his pregnant wife, who had no shopping bags. Where had she come from? He was walking very fast, and ahead and away from her. That was sad, until I realized she had nothing to do with him. Her real husband appeared. And the power broker was power walking the mall.

And now, for some odd reason, I offer "Opal Innocence," a poem that seems unlikely to be published anywhere else but here, and seems both pertinent and off topic.

Opal Innocence

It keeps on blooming in the big green pot:
pink bonnet, fat white lip, yellow eye.

An ugly baby
if that’s what you pictured in the stroller

of line two. I can’t pretend
this is not a poem. We all know it is

unwise to hang on too long
to innocence. It’s a kind of arrested development

say fathers and psychologists
(also a favorite TV show, cancelled—

too smart, too quirky—
but we have it on DVD, because, yes!—

I grew up, my reproductive organs functioned,
and I have a family that watches TV….

Remember the ugly baby
episode on Seinfeld, the show about nothing?

Now, be kind. Consider the poem’s parenthetical emptiness
and what it might possibly mean.)

Stumbling Blocks

Day 111 of the “What are you reading, and why?” project. Little did I know, when I left for church yesterday, that I was headed for an amazing reflection (we don’t have sermons) by historian Mark Wyman, entitled “How Should We Remember Horrible Events?” which, indeed, reminded us that the Holocaust was very, very real.

It was the perfect thing for the Sunday before Memorial Day, when we remember our fallen soldiers, and thus also the horrors of war, and our ongoing human conflicts.

Mark spoke movingly of how to remember any of our troubling actions of the past, how to honor victims, how to listen to the apologies and accept the restorative actions of descendants of perpetrators. He spoke of avoiding cliché memorials and gestures that lose their meaning. He asked us to consider new and meaningful memorials and gestures.

Examples: Classes in Duluth, Minnesota that teach young people about a horrible lynching in the past, so those 3 innocent men, circus workers, who died June 15, 1920, are not forgotten, and neither is our human capacity for folly and for evil. An empty library in Berlin, to commemorate the books burned by the Nazis, underground, seen through a glass pane in the street.

And the stumbling blocks, or stolpersteine, on streets in Germany, where artist Gunter Demnig has placed plaques on raised stones to remind us who lived where, who was taken, who died, and when, and what small privileges were taken away from Gypsies and Jews in the 1940s. No pets, no buying of pastries or cakes. It starts small, ends in Holocaust.

As I understand it, the stolpersteine make us confront the stumbling blocks of the past, the things we’d rather forget, but can’t, shouldn’t. In a way, we stumble, so we do not fall, again.

In the comments afterward, Becca spoke of a film, The White Ribbon, that has made her think about such things, and a book, a memoir by Christa Wolf called Patterns of Childhood, formerly A Model Childhood, mentioned here earlier because Susan was reading it. (We have Model Childhood at Babbitt’s, along with some of Wolf’s books in German.) There are all kinds of ways to remember.

Mark is the author himself of several books on American history. The most recent is Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West. And check out Wyman’s author page at Amazon for the rest!

Mark’s wife, Eva Goldschmidt Wyman, is the editor of Los Poetas y la General (The Poets and the General): Chile’s Voices of Dissent Under August Pinochet, 1973-1989, a bilingual edition, poems in Spanish and facing page translations in English. She is also the author of Huyendo del Infierno Nazi: La Immigracion Judio-Alemana Hacia Chile en los Anos Treinte, in Spanish, about Germans who went to live in Chile during and after World War II. Her work is available at Babbitt’s, Dan Wyman Books in Brooklyn, and various places online, including Google books.

Let us remember our fallen, those who died in military service for our country, today, Memorial Day. Let us remember the harm we can do when we are not doing good. Let us remember to do what good we can. Let us remember it is not always easy to know what to do.

Thank you for remembering.