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: Clever WoT

Happy Belated Birthday To Me

My 25th birthday was yesterday. Although it was a pretty exciting, crushing, roller-coaster day (more on that later), none of it had to do with my birthday. I'm not a cake guy, I'm not a party guy, so I just laid low with my wife and son and enjoyed having quiet, uninterrupted time with them.

Sarah knew I've been on a reading binge, and so she loaded me up with some intellectual ammo. Her selection, not surprisingly, confirms that she knows me far better than anyone else in the world.

Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta by Robert Palmer

Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu

Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton

Going to Meet the Man (stories) by James Baldwin

A book on music history, a book on internet regulation, a funny/heart-warming autobiography, and a collection of short stories. She really is far better than I deserve.

I read Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" pretty much right away and remembered why he's probably by favorite short story writer. So in honor of someone who wrote much better than I could ever hope to do, here's an excerpt:

"This car was full of white men. They was all drunk, and when they seen your father's brother they let out a great whoop and holler and they aimed the car straight at him. They was having fun, they just wanted to scare him, the way you do sometimes, you know. But they was drunk. And I guess the boy, being drunk, too, and scared, kind of lost his head. By the time he jumped it was too late. Your father says he heard his brother scream when the car rolled over him, and he heard the wood of that guitar when it give, and he heard them strings go flying, and he heard them white men shouting, and the car kept a-going and it ain't stopped till this day. And, time your father got down the hill, his brother weren't nothing but blood and pulp."

Tears were gleaming on my mother's face. There wasn't anything I could say.

"He never mentioned it," she said, "because I never let him mention it before you children. Your Daddy was like a crazy man that night and for many a night thereafter. He says he never in his life seen anything as dark as that road after the lights of that car had gone away. Weren't nothing, weren't nobody on that road, just your Daddy and his brother and that busted guitar. Oh, yes. Your Daddy never did really get right again. Till the day he died he weren't sure but that every white man he saw was the man that killed his brother."

She stopped and took out her handkerchief and dried her eyes and looked at me.

"I ain't telling you all this," she said, "to make you scared or bitter or to make you hate nobody. I'm telling you this because you got a brother. And the world ain't changed."

Full post as published by Clever WoT on August 02, 2007 (boomark / email).