Memoirous

These days with a numbskull obtuse racist president in the White House it’s hard to find a silver lining. Maybe this will help, or not. But the US has made a lot of mistakes—and somehow we’ve kept going. So I’ll let that sink in as good news. Our Supreme Court has made lousy decisions, Congress has passed some unjust laws that impinge on the rights of certain demographics, the citizens of these United States have collectively made unwise choices. It’s one reason to be afraid of but also believe in democracy. Or maybe it’s about having faith. Faith that the universe will somehow right itself. That people will at some point in history go, My bad! And turn the ship around. You might think I’m alluding to Dreamers and the end of DACA, to that stupid wall. But, no, I’m referring to the Dread Scott Decision. Sorry, Dred Scott. Also known as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Summarily: this meant that a runaway slave who had resettled in the North, perhaps for as long as 30 years, ...

  On weekends I have more time to read. Good thing because I began a doorstopper of a biography about Henry David Thoreau by Laura Dassow Walls. It might be more Thoreau than I bargained for. There has always been something compelling about Walden and “On Civil Disobedience” that reminds me of my 20s. It was a good time to drop out or become a rebel. I’ve come back to Walden again and again and each time I feel anxious—there’s got to be more to this story. But, there isn’t. He lived by himself for a few years “off the grid” and then that was it. I guess I wanted it to be about something other than simplicity. Anyway, the opening chapters of the biography explains that Thoreau’s parents, though modestly middleclass, made their money from—wait!: pencils. I know, random. In today’s economy I cannot imagine someone making a fortune from the humble pencil. But that’s the beauty of it! It isn’t humble—the manufacturing of pencils revolutionized the worker, the intel...