The Little Things

Back in my bartending days in Athens, I was working happy hour on a hot summer day. College towns are pretty empty in the summer. You can actually get to the bar when you want to, and you can eat your meals peacefully. And cross the street without fear of a freshman in a Tahoe mowing you down.

A man came in who was actually pleasant to talk to, sometimes a rarity for a pretty bartender working the early hours of the day. That's when the horny businessmen and the career drunks come out to play. We talked books and he said I had to read Mark Twain's autobiography. He was so insistent that he brought it to me the next day while I was working.

I still have it -- at some point we were supposed to meet up and I was to give it back, but that part of the memory has disappeared. All I remember is a sunny day and being pleasantly surprised by a stranger.

I finally read the book. I felt it had to be read in sunny Southern weather, as befitting its origins in my life and also Mark Twain's general personality.

And I loved it. It was so funny and just so full of a life. Not in the way a biography is -- Mark was born, he did these things in this order and then he died. It's full of anecdotes and skips around and swoops from dark wit to poignant moments from chapter to chapter. It genuinely did make me laugh and cry. I laughed the most at the beginning. I cried when his daughter died, and then when his wife did. You could feel how bereft he was to lose them, and his descriptions of them, especially of Suzy, made me feel like I knew them -- the perfect small details and snatches of conversation that make a good portrait.

I wish he had talked more about his other daughters. But there was no way to make a whole picture of himself, I think. Just the chance to offer up handfuls of what he had in his mind at the time.

The introduction is engrossing me now. I'd never thought much about the philosophy of autobiography -- how you start, how you end, what you choose to keep, what you choose to leave out. How you tell it.

I don't want to start with my earliest memory, because it's about a failure to get to the bathroom on time.

The book: http://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Mark-Twain-Perennial-Classics/dp/0060955422