The mawn is lone. I mean, the lawn is mown (Sorry. It just came out like that). The clothes are in the washer. I am on schedule to be packed up and out of here tomorrow morning. I’ll be going down to Iowa for family stuff over the weekend, and I won’t be back till Monday night, so I probably won’t post again till Tuesday evening.

Be strong. I know you can endure that long.

Got my Davy Crockett book in the mail today. It’s the same one as this one, except that close examination reveals it to be the Australian edition. I kind of wondered about that when I noticed the seller was from there (or New Zealand. I forget). But as far as I can tell it’s essentially the same. A quick perusal doesn’t even reveal any Britishisms like “colour.”

It was somewhat startling to page through it for the first time in decades. I thought I remembered the book clearly, but although every page is immediately familiar, I’d completely forgotten most of them, as far as being able to summon them up from memory on my own was concerned.

I puzzle over memory a lot. I’m convinced (and experience confirms it) that most of what we call “memory” is a construct, a movie we’ve produced for ourselves. The first time we remember an event, we remember the thing itself. The next time, we remember the event plus our experience of remembering it. That little addition compounds over the years, so that eventually there isn’t much of the original memory left.

That doesn’t mean memory is worthless. But it’s unfocused and palimpsested. It’s not entirely to be relied on.

Which is good and bad, I think.

Another thing that came to mind as I examined the book was the prominence of guns in the thing. No publisher would get away with so much shooting in a kids’ book nowadays, I’m pretty sure. Like all Baby Boomers, I grew up surrounded by the images of heroes (Crockett, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, etc.) who carried and used guns.

Yet—amazingly—we confounded the grownups who worried about the effects of all this “violence on TV.” We grew up to be the most pacifist, anti-gun generation this country had ever seen.

This gives me hope.

Because if it’s a principle that kids will grow up to reject the heroic images they were raised with, we can look forward to the next generation being the pickup-drivingest, huntingest, jingoistest, moral absolutistest generation that ever waged a war of aggression.

Bird of The Thinklings asks a couple reading questions. “When you read a book, do you EVER skip any pages or whole sections? If you do skip pages/sections, and you get to the end of the book, do you count the book as “read”?”

Commenter Sara raises a good point in her response.

What if you plow through every word of a book (as I did with Moby Dick at age 16) but miss half the point of what’s going on. Have you read it? After I finished Moby, I told my delighted uncle about it–it’s his favorite book ever. (Seriously, his copy is held together with duct tape and has a hand drawn whale on the cover / top page.) Anyway, he gave me copies of some of his favorite literary theorists on the thing, who made a very convincing argument that Melville was doing something very specifically literary with those whale sex organ chapters, and others of that sort. I not only hadn’t caught it when I read the book–I didn’t even have the concept that such a thing could be going on. Reminds me of one of my favorite authors talking about picking up her father’s copy of Animal Farm when she was ten because she liked animal stories and there was a horse on the cover . . .