Read

In my last post, I discussed the value of learning to play a musical instrument.

This time I discuss the value of reading.

In a nutshell, I suggest reading anything and everything that interests you, from the backs of cereal boxes to the classics.

I won't go so far as to say you can skip school and get a complete education by reading (especially if you stop with the backs of cereal boxes). But you can come awfully close.

And I haven't even mentioned cultural literacy yet.

There's more to cultural literacy -- the ability to converse fluently in the idioms, allusions, and knowledge that creates and constitutes a culture -- than reading. But reading makes up the major part of it.

Cultural literacy covers everything from being familiar with "To thine own self be true" (Shakespeare's Hamlet) to recognizing the origins of "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" (the Bhagavad Gita, as quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer on the test of the first atomic bomb). And we might as well throw in "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." (Hint: Rhett said it to Scarlett.)

Knowing these things marks you as well-bred in sophisticated society. Given that you probably want to be -- and to be considered -- worldly and well-educated, you have to read, read, and then read some more.

I've been prowling around the Internet checking out what others have to say about books that lead to culturally literacy. I don't claim to have come up with the definitive list. But I'll name some of the books with which I'm familiar. Pick a few that you haven't read and give them a shot.

I'm not listing them in any particular order, and you might not enjoy reading all of them. That's okay. It's a quirky list, but it's all mine.

Feel free to add your own suggestions in a comment on this post.

Here's my list:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The Case of the Caretaker's Cat by Earl Stanley Gardner
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Holy Bible: King James Version, multiple authors
To Serve Them All My Days by R.L. Delderfield
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling (published in America as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)
The Odyssey by Homer
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Stand by Stephen King
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville

Enjoy!

Life's little lessons

What is it with us old people and this desire we have to pass on life lessons to the young?

I'm in my seventieth year. I don't have to stretch the definition of "old" to qualify as a member of the class. Wisdom? I'm not claiming a bit of it. I can promise you that wisdom in no way piles up as the years accumulate. Experience? That does pile up -- the good and the bad.

I say this as preamble to the first in a series of occasional posts that are aimed at the young ones in the family. My experience has taught me that certain roads taken in my youth turned out to have a profound impact on my life.

For the most part, this will probably be an exercise in futility.

Why? Because, dear reader, it's futile to try to influence another's life. Just as trying to teach a pig to sing wastes your time and annoys the hell out of the pig.

Nevertheless ...

Music will bring you joy in unexpected ways.

I began to learn that lesson in, I believe, 2nd grade. I was introduced to the tonette.

Tonettes are cheap, plastic wind instruments. The fingering is simple, and they are easy to play. They were incorporated into American classrooms in the late 1930s as a pre-band or -orchestra instrument. I think the first song we learned to play in the late 1940s was "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." At first, we must have created a disagreeable and discordant sound.

But we learned to play the thing, some of us better than others. A year later we learned the rudiments of playing an autoharp. By 5th grade, I was taking violin lessons from the visiting music teacher at Helen Dickinson Elementary. Still later, at East End Junior High in Richmond, I took up the bass fiddle and played in the school's orchestra.

I stopped playing music in high school. There was no orchestra at Henrico's Hermitage High School. (Instead, there was a marching band. Bass fiddles just don't work well in a marching band.)

So what part did the tonette, the autoharp, the violin and the bass fiddle play in my life?

They taught me about rhythm -- from the rhythm of rock and roll music to the rhythm of Bach and Beethoven and on to the unusual rhythms of Dave Brubeck's music.

They taught me to hear and appreciate the rhythm of the falling rain, the rhythm of a horse's hoofbeats and the rhythm of slow dancing when the lights are low.

I learned to hear the rhythm of verbal expression, the cadence of writers from Shakespeare to Harper Lee, the simple, throbbing beauty of a perfect sentence.

Even today, I feel life's rhythms deep in my bones.

The rhythm of music learned early and embedded acutely in one's brain will emerge at some point, often in a way utterly unrelated to music.

I, for example, became a writer.

Exercising and socializing

Today the topics ranged from Studebakers to Vietnamese restaurants. As always, I learned something.

I enjoy my daily fitness class at the Richmond Jewish Community Center. It's preserving my mobility, strengthening my coordination, improving my balance and making me feel good.

But I enjoy the social aspect that follows just as much.

After our 30 minutes of aerobics, 15 minutes of handweights and 15 minutes of stretching, many of us gather in comfortable chairs adjacent to the café to relax and talk.

About half of us are Jewish, and half are Christian. I've learned a lot about Jewish customs and practices -- especially with the recent Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot holidays -- and I've explained a lot about Christian holidays and observances. But those are merely occasional topics of conversation.

More often we talk about restaurants (because we're usually hungry after an hour of exercise), movies (because of which I've seen a few good films I never would have otherwise noticed), good television programs (we're all devoted to "Masterpiece Theater" on Sunday nights), foreign travel (two people from the class are in Istanbul this week) and even politics (Eric Cantor might be Jewish, but he won't find many fans in our group).

It's an eclectic gathering. There's a woman who spent her career teaching Spanish at the University of Richmond and another who spent her career at Columbia University in New York, a man who ran a successful business in Richmond for four decades, a woman who immigrated from England (today the conversation briefly turned to the Wimpy Burgers chain in the U.K.), and a man who grew up in an apartment above his father's candy store in northern New Jersey in the 1930s.

As far as I know, I'm the only Richmond native in the group. I'm the go-to guy on Richmond history and why things are they way they are here. (Lord knows I hope I'm getting it right.)

The class meets at 10:30 Monday through Friday. Most of us are in our 60s and 70s, with a few who are in their 30s and 40s and another few who are in their 80s. Many of us are retired.

Of those of us who socialize after class, I am usually the youngest (I just turned 69).

Which brings me to my point.

In many other social situations, I'm the oldest.

So it's good to be able to socialize with people whose memories go back as far -- and even farther -- than mine.

Among other advantages, it means we don't have to explain what a rumble seat was.

Memories of Botticelli

Animal, vegetable or mineral?

The game of 20 Questions brings back childhood memories. But it can also be a complex game, as I am learning right now.

My friend Walter surprised me by starting a game of 20 Questions via email last week. Email makes the game slower but easier in at least one respect: you don't have to remember the answers because you have an email trail.

The category for the game with Walter was mineral. The answer was "a speed bump." I ran out of questions before I could get it right.

He started another round a few days ago. Again, the category is mineral. I've asked nine questions so far, and I'm stumped. If I am interpreting his answers correctly, the thing is bigger than a breadbox, can be found in homes, is used by men and women and is man made. But here's my quandary: the thing is neither useful nor decorative.

What could it be? I have 11 questions left to find out.

In my college days and for a few years afterwards, we played a more layered version of 20 Questions called Botticelli. It was named for the early Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli. He's the artist in the self-portrait above. (His best-known work is The Birth of Venus, which I finally saw in the Uffizi museum in Florence five years ago.)

Botticelli, the game, begins when one player -- let's call him "the chooser" -- announces that he is a person whose last name (or only name) begins with a certain initial. If the person were Sandro Botticelli, for example, the initial would be B. The hard and fast rule is that the person whose identity the players seek must be at least as well-known as Sandro Botticelli. The person can be either fictional or real.

Botticelli includes "access questions" and "yes/no questions." Players must ask access questions about people with the announced initial until they stump the chooser. Using my B initial, I might ask the chooser "Did you commission the original plan for Richmond?" If the chooser cannot think of an answer (in this example, William Byrd II), I have stumped him. Thus I win the right to ask yes/no questions until I get a no. I might ask if the chooser's character is fictional, or if he is male, or whether he is an American.

Once I get a no answer, it's the next person's turn.

It's not necessary to stick with the facts known so far when asking an access question. In our B example, a player might ask "Are you the cartoon spokesperson for a fruit?" If the chooser says "Chiquita Banana" -- or even any other character who fits the question -- the next player gets to try an access question.

And so it goes until the yes/no questions add up to an identity, at which point the guesser whose turn it is would ask, "Are you Sandro Botticelli?" and the game is over.

Games of Botticelli can last a long time, an hour or more.

I have such pleasant memories of playing Botticelli while driving with friends to Charlottesville or D.C. or while gathered around a table at a bar or while killing time between college classes.

I haven't played in at least 30 years.

I wonder why. I should do something about that.

Perhaps I'll host a Botticelli party.

Or play a game via email with Walter.

(If you want to know more about how to play the game of Botticelli, click here.)

Mining memories

Here goes part two of my series on memories.

A few days ago I wrote about joy and of my belief that it's more prevalent in memories than in real life -- simply because joy is so rare in real life.

Memories of another kind assaulted me during this past week. This time, the memories I'm talking about are things of great ... moment, like the Watergate scandal, Nixon's impeachment and resignation, Civil Rights, Women's rights, and Southern prejudice.

One of my colleagues from WTVR TV News from the 1970s emailed me the other day. She's working on a book, and she wanted to tap my memories.

I was a new news director in the early 1970s and was building a staff. The station's and my goals converged when it was time to hire a new reporter. We had no on-air black news people. We were also woefully short on women.

I decided to hire a black woman. Months later, I picked her to be the co-anchor, with a white man, of the 30-minute noon newscast, which drew something like 70 percent of the people watching TV. It was a ratings powerhouse, sandwiched between, if memory serves me, a top-rated game show and the mother of all soap operas.

I was proud of hiring her. She was direct, honest, objective, appealing on camera, intelligent, a quick thinker and a good writer. She also was not above calling me out when leftover traces of Southern prejudice or disrespect showed through in any aspect of the news operation.

She also carried a heavy burden. She was a pioneer, a trailblazer, in Richmond television.

When she told me recently of some of the overt prejudice she recalls, it shocked me. Did I never know? Or was I just not invested enough to remember? In a recent email, she quoted bits of advice I had given her at the time. Forty years later, I read what she says I said, and I suppose I advised her well enough. But I don't remember saying those things.

What I remember most is her perspective on a city that I thought I knew inside and out. She taught me about culture, attitudes, politics. I remember conversations about authors, politicians, music and heroes. She broadened my world. She moved on to anchoring in several major national markets before leaving the business a couple of decades later.

She was on the air on Channel 6 for stories that only she and I remember and for stories the whole nation remembers. She could do a good feature story that made your heart melt. And she could keep the noon newscast on the air with few resources other than her own wits while awaiting network coverage of Richard Nixon's farewell address to his White House staff. (He was late.) With a little help from me running copy up and down the stairs, she kept the newscast moving professionally. I'll take her word for it: I have no memory of her marathon ad-lib or of my running up and down the stairs.

I don't doubt that any of it happened. I just don't remember those incidents.

This business, yet to come, of getting together and exploring our no-doubt distinctly different memories of a brief, key period in our lives as journalists will prove to be interesting and probably challenging. Two people. Two perspectives. Two selective memories of events from nearly 40 years ago.

We'll be meeting up next month. I'm looking forward to it.

Joy happens more often in memory than in life

The Charles Bridge in Prague was built between 1357 and the early 1400s. Its original statues of noblemen and saints on the balustrade have now been replaced by replicas. (Photo by Walter Foery, 2002)

Memory is selective -- and I am constantly amazed nowadays at what I do remember about my life. And what I don't.

Several threads came together during the past week to emphasize the point.

It began when I watched a travel show on Prague, a city I visited in 2002, about a decade after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. It's a beautiful, stimulating and energetic city, striving in those days to hurl itself headlong into freedom and capitalism.

I remember many details of the city -- the Art Nouveau architecture of the Old City (against a backdrop of square, spare, concrete Soviet workers' housing high on the hills). A funicular ride to a luxuriant park with a panoramic view of the city. Shopping in the city's biggest department store with only pointing and hand-gestures as a way of communicating. And staying in a B&B away from the city center: It was a bus ride and a climb up a steep four-block hill to Ron's Rainbow Guest House.

Staying there was my friend Walter's idea, and I agreed. A rainbow flag flew above the door. There was even a rainbow on the toilet lid. The décor was clean and spare with an abundant use of rainbow colors. But I was exhausted every time I walked up that steep hill to Ron's Rainbow Guest House and then had to climb two more flights of stairs to my room.

Yes, I remember that vividly.

And I distinctly remember two meals in Prague. One was outdoors at a restaurant overlooking the city. What I really recall is the view. It was a warm, sunny, relaxed afternoon in an almost idyllic spot. (Walter took the picture above while sitting at our table.)

The other was at an outdoor café at the end of the Charles Bridge (the far end in the image above). It was an intimate setting in an old and crowded part of the city. I have no memory of what we did before or after, or even of what I ate, but I recall sitting there with a good Pilsner while I people-watched. The sunlight was golden yellow. The casually well-dressed Czechs and tourists around me were just going about their lives, enjoying a brief break. I was content to sit, sip my beer and watch --marveling all the while that I was in ancient Prague, so far from home.

A third Prague meal was memorable, but for a far different reason. It was a drizzly night, and Walter and I set out for dinner with no destination in mind. We wandered the Old City. We read menus posted outside several places, and skipped them for various reasons -- too touristy, too elegant, too boisterous.

We stumbled upon a basement restaurant that seemed to appeal. The walls appeared to have been hand-carved out of the rock beneath the city, candles and fresh flowers sat on white tablecloths, the waiters wore ersatz tuxedoes, and -- best of all in those early days of freedom for the Czechs -- the menu was in both Czech and in fractured English.

But it wasn't the meal, which was perfectly fine as I recall, that was memorable. It was the finale. We wanted after-dinner drinks. I looked carefully at the English side of the menu and saw Drambuie listed. I ordered by pointing to it.

Perhaps I pointed to the wrong thing. Perhaps the waiter misunderstood, Perhaps the order got mixed up in the kitchen.

What I got was a chocolate sundae in a parfait glass.

There was no trace of Drambuie in it. But it was a fine chocolate sundae, elegantly served.

Walter, by the way, got the glass of port he had ordered.

Those are some of my Prague memories: Memories enable us to capture what brought us the most joy in our travels -- over and over again. The moments of delight come with traveling, experiencing the new, being surprised by choices, and realizing that customs, like adventures, are not good or bad, just different and sometimes exciting.

Perhaps I would do well to always keep in mind that simple joys can be memorable. That in itself is worth remembering.

More on memory next time.

A day to celebrate

Forty-five years ago, I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. It was probably one of the most dynamic periods of my life. I matured over the next four years. I became more self-confident. I learned to manage my life better. I grew up.

But I had to lie in order to put on a blue uniform and follow in the footsteps of my father and my brothers. My desire to make myself proud, to make my parents proud, and to do right as I saw right, meant that I had to deceive.

Today, I received a note from a straight friend, an airman who served with me in Germany. We chat often via e-mail these days.

"Don't Ask -- Don't Tell expired at midnight, and the world kept turning. Isn't it refreshing that there is one less obstacle to serving one's nation? ... God bless you, Don -- and thank you for your service to the nation.

"Will you blog about this event?"

I told him I probably wouldn't. But his touching e-mail -- which is emblematic of this gentle soul I met nearly a half-century ago -- has been on my mind all evening.

I answered him by saying that my orientation made little, if any, discernable difference for me when I was an airman. It just wasn't an issue. There were many of us who were gay at Bitburg and Spangdahlem air bases -- enlisted men and officers who wound up getting to know each other primarily at a small but quirky and amiable bar called Zum Bitchen in Trier, about 30 kilometers away.

(I never knew how the bar got its name, but it has something to do with the German word for "small," and it certainly was.)

In Germany, I was first a surgery medic, then a broadcaster on American Forces Television. There wasn't much prejudice in either specialty. The USAF wasn't conducting any witch hunts that I was aware of. The Vietnam War was at its peak, and I assume that warm bodies in uniform were more important to the establishment than what those warm bodies did in their private lives.

But this is not to say that others didn't have a tough time, a really tough time, because of who they were. It's taken a long time for prejudice to fade just a little, and it's not gone yet.

But we're getting there.

And for that, I am thankful.