Goodbye Blue Monday

"So it goes."
I was on the way up to our family's cabin and my father allowed me to stop at Ead's News and Smoke Shop to get something to read for the weekend. This was back when they were located at Walnut and Broadway. The comic books were right up front, most likely to keep kids from wandering too far back to where "those magazines and "other smoking supplies" were displayed.
I wasn't looking for a comic book that day. My very good friend and confidante, Bill Johnson, had told me about a book that I just had to read. "It's science fiction. And it's funny. And it's got dirty pictures." Really? "But your parents will let you read it because it's literature."
I bought my first copy of "Breakfast of Champions" with my own money. I started reading it on the way up the way up the winding road to the mountains, and I am thankful today that I do not get carsick while reading on twisty mountain roads. When we arrived at our cabin, I paused only long enough to help carry some things from the car and say hello to my mother, but then I was quickly back to the book. I finished it that night, by the flashlight. I started to read it again the next day. It wasn't the dirty pictures, they were only crude line drawings to illustrate bigger points. It was those bigger points: life, death, time, art, that kept me going back.
The next time I was at Ead's, I asked if they had any more Kurt Vonnegut books. The guy behind the counter pointed me in the direction of a rack holding dozens of titles. Not all of them were Vonnegut, but I quickly picked two new ones and read them just as quickly as the first. Over the course of the summer before my eighth grade year, I became acquainted with the swirling ironic world that was Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
So much of my world view has been shaped by the ideas and colors of that world. Probably the biggest reason for you to be reading this blog or anything that I have written is that book I read so many summers ago. It's not much of a badge of honor to say that "I've read everything he's written," but I have a hard time relating to other people who have not. This was a man who shaped my life, and I will miss him terribly, but I am grateful for all those wonderful and subversive notions, and even those pictures of "wide open beavers" inside. I will keep reading books by Kurt Vonnegut because they are treasures and touchstones in my life. If you have never had this particular joy, stop reading this now and go to your local news stand and pick up a copy of one - I suggest "Breakfast of Champions." It has dirty pictures.
Goodbye. Hello.