What's better than a fresh, hot cup of coffee, first thing in the morning?

Finding your adult son sitting on the porch, reading a book!

You thought I was going to say something else, didn't you?  Get your mind out of the gutter; this isn't that sort of blog!

Zack has always been great company and I've missed him since he moved out.  Even though he still calls to tell me what he's reading or to make fun of something he just saw on tv.

But 21 year old men aren't known for getting up at the crack of dawn and biking over to their mom's house to sit on the porch and read.

When I first saw him, I was doubly surprised because I thought he was reading "The Search for Strings, Superstrings and the Theory of Everything" by John Gribbon, which I knew was on the porch and is the same size and has the same color dust jacket as the book in Zack's hands.

My reaction; I should stop being surprised by anything that kid does.  ZPiv; foul mouthed rapper by night, student of theoretical physics by day.

Then I looked again and saw that it was actually Louis L'Amour's "Education of a Wandering Man" that he was reading.

Yeah, that makes more sense.

I actually bought that book for Zack for Christmas a few years ago and then decided not to give it to him.  Zack was an indifferent student, at best.  At one point he wanted permission to drop out of school and join the army.  We said 'Graduate first and if you still want to join, we'll back you.'

So when I opened L'Amour's autobiography and read the opening;

It was May 14.  In a few days my class back in Jamestown, North Dakota would be graduating from high school, and I was in Singapore.

I decided not to give Zack the book till after he graduated.
this is the boy who's nick name as a toddler was "Houdini" because no crib, bedroom or locked house could contain him.  The idea of Zack skipping graduation and hopping a steamer for Singapore was NOT AN UNREASONABLE FEAR.

But now, he's got his diploma and is out on his own and since he can't afford cable or the internet, has discovered the joy of reading.

Most of my family needs to read like they need food and drink.  The only exceptions I know of are my brother Joe and my son Tyler, both of whom have an inordinate amount of energy and can't sit still long enough to read.  Neither of them like to eat as much as the rest of us do either.  Hmm.

When we were growing up, JP, who shared a room with Joe, told him the entire story of The Lord of the Rings because Joe couldn't be bothered to read it.

Then Joe joined the navy.  There's nothing for a pilot to do on a battle ship between flights, so Joe started to read, woke up his Hubbell appetite and has now read approximately half the printed material on Earth. (Joe is an excellent writer too.  HEY, JOE!  WHEN ARE YOU GONNA FINISH THE JACK HOLIDAY STORY???)

That's where Zack is right now.  (And it's why I still have hope for Tyler becoming a reader someday.)

Zack recently finished "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac.

He looked up from L'Amour's book and said "Don't bother reading 'On the Road'.  What's a memoir of a loser who bounced between New York, San Francisco and New Orleans getting high and wrote one book about it, compared to a 15 year old who hopped a steamer to Singapore and traveled the whole world because he didn't think his small town high school was adding to his education and then wrote a hundred books about it?"

Louis L'Amour is not only the Great American Storyteller; he's the Great American Story.

Louis L'Amour is everything I love about writing; he's a gifted story teller who knows how to grab you from the opening line and bring a different time and place to life but he also tells the truth.  His books are fictional stories but his characters, places and events are all true to the time in which they're set.  Authenticity in fiction can tell you more truth than historical facts.

Read all of Louis L'Amour and you'll have a better grasp on the opening of the American West than if you get a degree in American history.

And he never graduated from high school.

Ironically, while Zack was reading, I was watching a Youtube clip of Conan O'brien's commencement speech at Dartmouth, where he mentions the importance of a college degree:

You now have a crushing advantage over the eight percent out there who don't have a degree.  Drop out losers like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerburg.

Conan didn't mention Rush Limbaugh or Louis L'Amour, but he could have.

As the economy continues to crater at the same speed that tuition is skyrocketing, it looks like that famous scene in Good Will Hunting, where Matt Damon flashes his library card and calls a college education a waste of time and money is just getting more pointed by the day.

The best part of self education is that you don't have Professors censoring the ideas you can expose yourself to.  You can read Thomas Friedman and John Stossell and use your own experience to decide which one knows what he's talking about. (maybe they both do!  Shocking. Maybe neither of them has a clue?) You can read Louis L'Amour and Kerouac to get a feel for the American experience.  Adams or Jefferson?  How about both?  Coulter or Dowd?  Both! 

Or just watch another episode of the Bachelorette.

You can probably get a degree in that these days.

 

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