Goodbye Blue Monday!

It was the summer after seventh grade. A friend of mine suggested a book to me. He suggested it because "it's kind of dirty, and it's pretty funny." I wondered if I would get up the guts to go out and buy a dirty book. As has been the case for my entire life, when I have a moral quandary, I have gone to my parents for advice. When I told them the title of the book, "Breakfast of Champions," they were suddenly relieved. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.? Why that's not a dirty book, that's literature.
Turns out they were all right. It was a funny book that was a little bit dirty and it was, in fact, literature. I purchased my copy at Eads' newsstand - a trade paperback with a vivid orange, blue and yellow cover. I started reading on the twenty-five minute car ride up Boulder Canyon and Magnolia Road on the way to our mountain cabin. I was immediately struck by the "juvenile illustrations" as the author himself describes them. They were stuck right in the middle of some of the most amusing and thought-provoking prose I had ever encountered. It is true that I was only twelve at the time, but I had read a good many novels, starting with Michael Chrichton's "The Andromeda Strain" when I was in the fourth grade. I had read a lot of science fiction, and this had all the ear-marks, but it also had the strangest point of view I had ever read. Was that the author appearing all of a sudden at the end of the story?
The affection that Vonnegut felt for his characters was touching. It was such a personal piece of writing, even with all the silly pictures of "wide open beavers," it was still moving to hear Kilgore Trout plead with his creator, "Make me young again!" I read passages aloud to my parents, who were amused and just a little chagrined at the reader - and later the writer - that they were creating.
Forty years later, I'm still reading the good parts of Kurt Vonnegut books aloud - to anyone who will listen.