rudely dismissive, short e : thuh . The most searing expression of contempt in my sixth-grade class was “farmer,” and every time I opened my mouth, I revealed myself as a farmer, which I had up to that year thought a noble profession. “How could we eat without farmers?” my teachers in North Carolina had asked, though North Carolina’s most famous and lucrative agricultural product was tobacco and the only field trips we took, other than to the Coca-Cola bottler, were to tobacco auctions and curing barns.
At Del Rosa Elementary when baseball teams were selected, the captains usually walked off with their players and left me standing alone on the playground, unselected. I was astoundingly uncoordinated, perhaps as the result of being born prematurely—that’s what my mother thought. I was useless at sports. I retreated to thegreen bench beside our classroom and to my books with despair and relief.
One morning, over the top of my book, I saw a teacher walking across the asphalt toward the green bench. Sensing the purpose in her stride, I pretended to concentrate on my book while glancing at the ground, looking for her feet to come into view. Boys were not allowed not to play games. I’d been breaking the rules and now I’d been caught.
“Get your nose out of that book and go play with the other kids,” she said. It was meant as gruff kindness, but what did she expect me to do?
I wandered down to the swing sets, because no one was there, sat on a swing and swung back and forth desultorily. She was watching me. I swung, cried a little, and sniffled until recess was over, then lined up with the rest of the kids and filed back into the classroom. The next day I took my book back to my spot. The teacher who had rousted me the day before glanced in my direction once or twice, but I could see she’d given up.
Like most adults, including my parents, she was probably reluctant to stop a boy from reading, a reverence I counted on to get out of things I didn’t want to do. I let them think reading was work, learning, ambition—though it was always pleasure and only incidentally edifying. As soon as I could read, I retreated into books for the comfort of worlds that were comprehensible. I might not understand everything in the book I was reading, but I could understand the arc of the story. This was not true in life, which had no arc I could see. Books told me why people did what they did. In life, my parents’ and my teachers’ thoughts were a mystery, and most of what they did, kind or callous, a surprise. Books gave me an illusion of order, and step by slow step they taught me how to interpret what I saw: to see that the coach’s crispness didn’t mean he disliked me but considered me irrelevant; that the tightness of the lunchlady’s lips meant she didn’t like smacking food onto plastic trays for a living; that Mrs. Porter’s constant anger, though often triggered by a student whispering in class, really came from somewhere else; that Mr. Alvin’s long stories about serving in Korea meant he was bored to stupefaction after twenty years of teaching fractions and he really didn’t much care anymore if we learned them or not. Books helped me understand that Mrs. Thompkins, who thought I was mean, was an easily frazzled woman and that only some of her rage against me was caused by what I’d done.
Soon after we moved to California, I discovered books in the library by the great comedians of my parents’ generation: Fred Allen, Sam Levenson, Steve Allen, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, and Jack Paar. I was astounded that men my father’s age could tell jokes one after the other, mock themselves, and treat their dignity as something to cast away and then pull back like a yo-yo. They turned their sense of self into a toy and played with it. These comedians didn’t see their self-respect as a bulwark against the world. They used humor to clear some ground in the world for them to stand on, a trick I wanted to
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