I've taken to reading again.

After months; well maybe weeks, of doing the photography thing, selecting, matting, framing, re-matting, re-framing, making smaller, larger, creating card versions, searching the archives, not shooting anything mind you, I've enough backlog to last a lifetime, I'm taking a breakeven though there is more to do re: "marketing".

I've done little to no writing to speak of, motivated only by the latest kid-crisis, so I've picked up a book I never finished, a rare out-of-character thing for me to do, and re-invested myself in it.

I either finish a book or I give it up. The latter either because it just doesn't go anywhere I want to go or it's too painful to read (see "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee" or "The Devil's Highway"). The former is my usual pattern.

I put this one down some time ago because for neither reason. I was just burned out on history at the time. But I cracked it open today noting that I'd marked where I left off, and began reading again.

And was recaptured.

W.E. Woodward is simply one of the best writer historians you'll ever read. He's smart, ironic, insightful, philosophical, well read and informed, and as objective as any historian I've ever read.

The book I picked off my shelf is, "A New American History" published in 1936, just three years after Hitler and Roosevelt came to power. I've started from the beginning instead of where I left off months ago so I'm way back in time, back into the "roots" of England's rise to power in the mid 1600's. And it's good.

Damned good!

With all we have to do to sustain life here in the New Mexico back water (is that a redundancy?) it feels a little odd to go back and re-plow this ground, but Woodward is such a fine writer I can't resist it. I know I should probably read Tolstoy to groom my own writing, or maybe Twain to loosen up a bit, or somebody brand new so I can be surprised but life is short so the hell with it, I'll go with Woodward and learn something.

I've been avoiding the obvious topics, top among them the tar baby we're entangled with in Iraq because there are so many really good, well informed and intelligent people out there doing what must be done to cover all of that I have nothing to add. Besides I'm so tired of bitching about it, about oil, the health care system and factory farms and water and kids that I want to take a vacation to Scandinavia. And I don't even know anybody there.

Then there's our own "tar baby" our eighteen year old going on four who is drinking herself into oblivion almost every night. Many of us did that I know, but she is also driving and she is not a conscious drunk. I know this first hand as a result of a version of "the phone call" that came in at 6:30 a few mornings ago. I've heard the opener a few times over the years. I goes like this, "Mr. Prosapio, we have your daughter here" and it goes on from there. So far it hasn't been the "and she's been badly injured in an accident." Or worse.

This one was the "Please come down and get her" call. We live in the mountains; she was in town of course so it was forty minutes to the scene of the crime. She had been walking up and down the street in a residential neighborhood, yelling obscenities at the top of her lungs at five in the AM. Understandably perturbed, the neighbors called the cops and when they arrived on the scene they found our little darling passed out inside her locked car. They had to break the back window out to get to her to make sure she wasn't dead.

When I got there there she was half dressed, looking like a frowsy, cheap, burned out bar maid instead of that winsome kid I once knew, and she was surrounded by solicitous cops. She can be cute and charming on the obverse from her usual drunken, foul-mouthed temper tantrum I-want-it-my-way production and she was doing "cute-and-foolish" to entertain them. Actually that was a good move since none of the six acted on the bench warrant that is out for her arrest. Instead the kindest of them offered her advice on how to handle the warrant whenever she got around to it.

On the way to her apartment she spun out the story of the night before as only a drunk would, details repeated over and over again punctuated with obvious information like, "I'm really drunk dad." and "I really like drinking dad." Etc.

When we got there I asked for and got her car keys and dropped her off.

The "philosophical" issue of taking her car had stood in our way the last time we determined to do this, after all, she is considered to be a (young) adult and does own her car, but this has all been swept away by the obvious. Behind the wheel she is a danger to herself and others and the call we don't want to get is the one about how our daughter has just killed or maimed someone while driving passed out.

All of this adds a tinge of grey to our otherwise blue sky life right now. But better than black armbands.

So; back to Woodward to see how that revolution turned out. Sometimes old realities are better than the current ones.

Dick Prosapio ©2007, All Rights Reserved
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