I went to a book group recently. This still feels unusual. I was well into my seventh decade before I went to one. I haven’t done much reflection on why I have not been a book group kind of guy. Certainly I read, perhaps too much, but for me books are a solitary activity. They are read alone, and a group discussion doesn’t seem to enhance the pleasure or the accomplishment of the reading. I do discuss books, but almost always one-on-one with the wife or the daughter or with a reader friend.. Then the intimacy of the conversation seems to enhance the solitary pleasure of a book, and the one-on-one with a knowledgeable reader can lead to the kind of discussion that is less likely in a group, especially groups that are as large as the book groups that are held in my summer community.

My reluctance may also stem from a feeling that a book group is a feminine activity, and it is true, that while I know men who are members of book groups, overwhelmingly I know women who go to these organized book discussions. If a subconscious perception of non-manliness is a reason for my non-attendance, it is ironic because I have never seen myself as a manly man, and I would like to think that I embrace my feminine side at least as well as most men. (There is something funny, something incestuous or hermaphroditic in the phrase “embrace my feminine side.”)

It would have been doubly ironic if I had avoided the recent book group because of my feeling that it was a feminine activity. The book under discussion was Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. The author chronicles his struggle to both embrace and rise above his roots and succeeds, landing him at Yale Law School which he never calls The Yale Law School as a friend and former Dean of that institution always did. He bemoans the hillbilly culture that labeled studying and learning as “feminine” and a male with good grades as a “pussy.”

Vance and his book have gotten quite a lot of play. Read this book, many have said, to better understand the rise of Trump. The book, however, makes no such claim. Vance does say that he is concerned that jobs have gone overseas and that the middle class is harder to attain for those without a college degree and then pronounces: “But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”

The author, of course, can tell us what the book is about, but the reader, even if admiring the book, does not have to agree. Hillbilly Elegy is not about what happens to individuals when their economy sours. It is not about a way of life with an increasing societal collapse. The book does not show behavior getting worse or better depending upon the availability of good jobs. Indeed, he writes about a couple making over $100,000 in small-town Ohio who were unable to manage their lives. He does not show that the social decay has increased; instead he documents perennial family and work instability, childish family “honor” that justifies violence, child abuse, ignorance, and alcohol and drug abuse that has existed for decades in a “hillbilly” culture.

In fact, however, this flawed culture goes back much further. Appalachia, of course, saw honor killings as early as the nineteenth century—think Hatfields and McCoys. (The Feud:The Hatfields and the McCoys by Dean King [2014] makes for interesting reading alongside Hillbilly Elegy.) A century ago, H.L. Mencken wrote, of course entertainingly, about the Appalachian culture that promoted ignorance over education. And if you care to look, you can find many other examples from our history describing basically the same culture that Vance now chronicles.

Vance’s personal story is interesting, but he says little about how to change this well-entrenched culture. Instead, he suggests that the best way to escape its powerful pull is to marry outside the culture. Or perhaps, as he did, go to The Yale Law School and marry outside the culture. In other words, not much hope is really offered for some big change.

And he ignores a bigger fact about America in general. We proclaim ourselves to be the land of opportunity where hard work and education mean you can move up the economic ladder. And for much of our history, mobility was much easier in the United States than in Europe or other developed nations. This is no longer true. We have close to the lowest upward mobility in the advanced industrial world. (Go look it up.) A child born to parents in the bottom fifth of the income scale has only a 30 percent chance of making into the top half of incomes, and this percentage is less than it is for France, Germany, Sweden, and Canada.  Increasingly, the income ranking of a child’s family determines the income ranking of that child as an adult.

Add to this another phenomenon. Whites forty-five to fifty-four with no more than a high school education, a cohort that contains more than hillbillies but surely has a sizeable number of them, are now dying at a higher rate than they did in 1999. At the end of the twentieth century, deaths in this group were 601 per 100,000 but in 2013 were 736 per 100,000, a shocking, disturbing, and largely unknown increase. Whites in this age group with no more than a high school education were four times more likely to die as those in the same age group with a college degree.

In other words, it is always been unlikely that the hillbilly kid could break out of his background, but now larger trends in this country make it is increasingly unlikely that someone in the bottom half will move up.

The sun came up this morning. President Trump said that it was his idea.

“According to Dick Devlin, there are two kinds of work: the kind where you shower before and the kind where you shower after.”  Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light.

A play idea for the Beckett or Sartre in you. Imagine that redwoods are sentient and can communicate. Setting: A redwood grove with three or four trees. What would be the conversations over the thousand years that the redwoods would be next to each other unable to be alone or find other company? And then what happens when one of the trees finally dies?

You are Jewish if your mother is Jewish, I am told. But what if your mother converts to Judaism after you were born?

The person I took to be a conservative was railing against the big government program of food stamps. Her clinching argument was that someone she knew should have been on food stamps but did not qualify.

Another time I felt old. A man was dragging a loudspeaker against the traffic and ranting into a hand held microphone. No doubt a street preacher, but the loudspeaker was pointed the other way, and I did not hear his message until he got alongside of me. He looked directly at me and then said, “That applies to you too, Pops.”

At the old guys’ lunch, Bob, who gets interrupted a lot because he takes so long to say anything, was interrupted followed by a quick apology. He said, “That’s ok. My wife has told me that I talk too slow and then I often don’t make sense.” Ray replied, “How did Sarah get it right on both counts?” We all laughed, including Bob.

On the Fourth of July I wear a hat that reminds people of the Cat in the Hat, except that it is red, white, and blue with stars and spangles. Its label says that it was made in China.

orth Korea launched an ICBM that some say could have reached Alaska. I wonder if Sarah Palin saw it.

My friend, a good tennis player, announced after her game that she was going to play golf in the afternoon and added, “I hope that I hit a rider today.” Of course, I asked, “A rider?” “That’s when I hit the ball far enough that it is worth getting in the cart to ride to it.”

Apples and oranges. Don’t confuse them. Especially if you have scurvy.

Yet again I am confused by some Christian people.  Apparently religious principles prevent having contraception in a healthcare plan, but lying on invoices and trafficking in what are probably stolen goods are just fine with God as long as the artifacts are for a Bible museum. Maybe that museum will show me where the Bible forbids IUDs.

His hair is distinctive, one could say impossible, but there it is. A microphone is only a few inches from his lips, but he still leans into it. He does not really yell into the mike, but the voice is certainly not conversational. His words can be adamant; they can be bullying. He denounces enemies, enemies that stand in the way of greatness. He talks about the alliances he has entered or created and how strong they are. He makes promises about how he will perform, performances that he guarantees will be great. There is nothing nuanced in what he says; there are no ambiguities. It is a world of black and white; of good and bad; of greatness or failure. There is not a single shade of gray.

He pauses often, seemingly waiting for his audience to catch up. The audience reacts visibly and audibly. Each denunciation, each bragging claim elicits a hoot and a holler. He encourages the audience to mock his opponents, and the crowd often responds with a sing-song chant. This is an interactive, audience-participation performance. The speaker supplies the initial energy, but he soaks back energy as the frenzied crowd reacts to him.

The audience doesn’t really care about the specifics of his promises. They know that many can’t be kept. Indeed, they won’t be surprised if contradictory promises are made in a week or a month or that the alliances announced today are changed tomorrow or that the enemy previously castigated in absolute terms is now a dear friend with whom he has been secretly colluding. The audience is there not for truth, but for an attitude, and he supplies and feeds that attitude.

This audience seems bound together by something more than what most audiences have. They know that others, “nice” people, “successful” people, “elite” people not only do not share their enthusiasm, those others, this group knows, think there is something wrong, ludicrous, maybe even shameful or dangerous and low class in what this audience feels. Here, however, together with this crowd and the performer who understands their visceral reactions, each can indulge the passions they all enjoy, and this brings them closer together.

Perhaps this is a Trump rally, but what I was trying to describe is pro wrestling. Since the rise of Trumpism, I have thought that those who are mystified by the appeal of Donald Trump might learn something by trying to understand the allure of professional wrestling.

The theatrics of professional wrestling remains strikingly similar to what they were in my childhood of Verne Gagne with his sleeper hold and his between bout pitches for a nutritional supplement. There were good guys (Wilbur Snyder, for example) and bad guys (definitely Dick the Bruiser) in a simulated reality of pain, danger, and unbelievable heroics. The business, however, has changed in some important ways.

What I watched growing up was largely regional. Different parts of the country had different wrestling companies. As a friend once said about a wrestler, “He was the world heavyweight champion of the greater Cleveland area.” The spectacle might have been similar everywhere, but the performers changed with the territory.

Vince McMahon of what is now the WWE (World, or maybe Worldwide, Wrestling Entertainment) changed that. His wrestling organization, started in the Northeast by his father, did not respect others’ territories. He drove many regional operations out of business or bought them out as they started to fail.  WWE now dominates the business, and wrestling fans today pretty much all see the same product. The rise of cable television, the Internet, and other media has given more choice for news and entertainment and has fragmented popular culture. We don’t share as much in common as we once did.

Professional wrestling, with its nationalization, has gone in the opposite direction. The odds are overwhelming that its fans all know, and probably have opinions about, Kevin Owens, The Undertaker, the New Day, and Triple H. Wrestling is one of the few popular forces that is producing an increasingly unified cultural base, but a base that is out of sight to the rest of America.

The wrestling business has also changed because, while it is not trumpeted, it is not now a secret that the contests are not real sporting events. While back in the day, some fans may have thought that the spectacle was a legitimate sport, today it is acknowledged that wrestling is “sports entertainment.” All but the most naïve of wrestling fans know that while the wrestlers can be athletic and do take risks, the violence is simulated and the outcomes follow predetermined story lines. Wrestling’s popularity has fluctuated through the years, but its popularity does not seem to have been harmed because those involved no longer steadfastly maintain that it is “real.” Instead, it has always been a form of reality TV; something that pretends to be real.

The allure of pro wrestling to the outsider is hard to fathom, but it must have something to do with the power of simulated reality, violence, the simplicity of good and evil, outrageous characters, and the continuing tensions of soap opera. As epic poems, sagas, novels and movies show, we want, maybe need, superheroes and supervillains. At least some of the time, we don’t want nuance, caveats, and tough choices. During the wrestling shows, we have those heroes and villains and only easy choices. Who and what is good or bad is crystal clear.

It is not my point and beyond my abilities to analyze the allure of wrestling, and anyway, the appeal may largely be visceral and, thus, cannot be satisfactorily explained to those who don’t feel it. But what should be recognized is that the spectacle has had an enduring appeal. And if I am right, that Trump at a rally performs much like a pro wrestler talking to the audience, and that audience responds much as a wrestling crowd does, it may make sense for those who can’t grasp Tumpism to try to grasp pro wrestling.

When Trump was gaining traction in the political arena, this wrestling fan thought back to one of the WWE storylines. It featured Donald Trump. Oh, yes, Trump has been a part of pro wrestling for quite some time. As I recall, Vince McMahon backed one wrestler and Trump another, and either Trump or McMahon would have his head shaved depending upon which wrestler lost some big event. This billionaire-baiting went on for weeks or maybe even months, provided us with the recently reprised and altered video of Trump “taking down” Vince McMahon in a moment of made-up macho madness. But of course, no one could really believe that Trump was going to appear bald to further wrestling ratings. The mere thought of it, however, whipped up the crowd.  Politicos have studied Trump’s business record and pop culture critics have talked about The Apprentice, but pundits mystified about his appeal should also have been studying Trump on Monday Night Raw and then watching more of the wrestling shows.

Perhaps roots of Trump can be found in Huey Long and William Jennings Bryan, but we should also consider Gorgeous George. Gorgeous George was–perhaps next to Milton Berle–early television’s biggest star. Professional wrestling has always presented itself as what is now called reality TV, and GG was America’s first huge reality TV star. Gorgeous George (George Raymond Wagner), often shortened by TV announcers to Gorgeous or Georgie, was in wrestling parlance a “heel,” a bad guy. (Good guys are “babyfaces” or just “faces.”) But he broke stereotypes. In what was supposedly a testosterone-fueled world, his character displayed effeminacy. Flunkies would precede him up the arena’s aisles spraying perfume in his path. He entered the ring wearing elaborate robes no “man” would have been caught in—festooned with ostrich feathers, for example. No one but his valet was allowed to touch his robe, and the referee in a Chaplinesque routine would be repeatedly blocked from doing so. And he had that hair. It was some sort of yellow or straw color never seen in nature, and it was curled and primped in ways that only permanents and feminine implements could produce. His hair was secured with what otherwise would have been called bobby pins; his were called Georgie pins. Before a match, he would elaborately remove and toss them to the crowd. The hair was central to the character. The storylines often said that he would not fight someone unless the opponent contracted not to touch his hair. And late in his career, as other wrestlers were eclipsing him, he fought a match where the loser would have his locks sheared. Gorgeous lost the match and his hair.

There is a line from Gorgeous George to Trump. This path meanders with stops for Muhammed Ali and James Brown, both reportedly fans of Gorgeous. It goes through Ric Flair, William Regal, and other wrestlers. But although the line goes to him, Trump in some ways has flipped (piledriven?) the Gorgeous George persona on its head.  Gorgeous played the heel to fill the arenas with those who came to jeer him. Trump, too, acts the heel, but not to the faithful in front of him. Trump unites with the audience and together they act as the heel to all who are not Trump’s fans or are, like Vince McMahon, Trump’s real or imagined nemeses. It provided pleasure akin to that at a wrestling spectacle when he would say–and the crowd would join in denouncing–little Mario, that nasty woman, the lying press. The fantasy of pro wrestling, however, becomes dangerously real when Trump wants the audience to join him in jeering at and taking down legitimate news media. Wrestling stars in the ring have a made up and scripted role, but Trump seems not to realize the President of the United States is not a fictional character.

Gorgeous entered the arena to work and work up the audience. When the crowd frenziedly taunted him, he would shout back, “Shut up, you peasants.” The crowed would roar with delight. Trump’s has shifted the heel’s performance. His audience roars because Trump and his audience together seem to shout to all those that are not enthralled by him, “Shut up, you elites.”

If you are like me, your Fourth of July rituals have changed through the years. When I was a mere tyke, I went to a parade on the main street. Representatives from a VFW post; floats decorated by kids from the day camps around town; a marching band or two. Lame and boring, I thought even then. (How often does a marching band actually play in tune?) Then a family reunion picnic at Aunt Maude’s where the boredom increased. In the evening, fireworks on the lakefront—the only good part of the day.

As a young married, the spouse and I did not have any firm Fourth of July rituals. Sometimes we went to New York City’s fireworks–always magnificent. Sometimes, however, we were traveling on Independence Day, at least once in Italy where I watched Wimbledon on a TV in a store window.

For decades now, I have been in a little summer community that has its own Fourth of July pageantry. A tiny parade followed by a program that almost never varies—a few songs; children reciting the names of the signers of the Declaration of Independence; a couple dressed as George and Martha; a short speech by a community member; the releasing of thirteen doves; and cookies and watermelon afterwards. We then marvel at how Americana-ish we are. (I have some problems with the early morning routine. A rider on horseback goes through the community before a civilized wakeup time intoning, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” While this might be appropriate for Patriots’ Day, it is wrong for the Fourth. I don’t know where Paul Revere was on July 4, 1776, but he was not signing the Declaration, and he was not looking for lanterns to see whether if it was by land or sea. I have read my Longfellow.)

For a long time before the present rituals, however, I had my personal Fourth of July routine. The New York Times printed the entire Declaration on the first section’s back page, and I would read it. Even after dozens of readings, I would note the archaisms, but still admire the rhythm and the phrasing of the Declaration’s first section—“a decent respect to [not for] the opinions of mankind. . .”; “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established. . . “let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

If we even think of the Declaration today, we usually only contemplate these opening paragraphs, but I was also fascinated by the list of the elegantly-written grievances about the King and tried to remember, not always successfully, what specifics had occasioned the complaints. Some of my frustration at my lack of historical knowledge was relieved when, after many perusals of the Declaration, I read American Scripture: Making of the Declaration of Independence by Pauline Maier, who wrote “Today most Americans, including professional historians, would be hard put to identify exactly what prompted many of the accusations Jefferson hurled against the King, which is not surprising since even some well-informed persons of the eighteenth century were perplexed.” (Even so, I find it ironic today that the indictments included the assertions that the Crown had impeded immigration to our shores and prevented free trade. The list includes some . . . shall we say . . . overstatements of fact. My own research mirrors Maier’s: “Even the most assiduous efforts have, however, identified no colonists of the revolutionaries’ generation who were actually transported ‘beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses.’”)

Even so, each reading led me to the conclusion that Jefferson was a genius. (The wife says that after finishing Ron Chernow’s Hamilton, she can no longer hold Jefferson in the highest regard.) This, too, has been tempered as I have learned that the Declaration was preceded by ninety or so state and local Declarations whose phrasings often were echoed in the Fourth of July Declaration and that Jefferson’s draft was frequently improved by the editing done by Congress. But still, Jefferson produced the draft that in its final form still lives. Or at least it lives, if we, not just a few academics, continue to read and appreciate it. Yes, decorate the coaster wagons and golf carts with crepe paper, play John Philips Sousa, listen to platitudes about our freedom, watch the jets fly over, have a family softball game, eat ice cream and watermelon, but at least once in awhile also read the document that is the cause for all the celebration.

“Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods.” William Kennedy, Ironweed.

“In the beginning, human beings created God who was the First Cause of all things and Ruler of heaven and earth.” Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

“Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye, these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can ye no do it; the words filling yer head, then the other words; there’s something wrong; there’s something far far wrong; ye’re no a good man, ye’re just no a good man.” James Kelman, How Late it Was, How Late.

“I hadn’t been a shad fisherman all my days, only seven years, on the May evening when this story begins—in a johnboat, flat and square, anchored in heavy current by the bridge in Lambertville on the wall of the eddy below the fourth pier.” John McPhee, The Founding Fish.

“ ‘The Mass in English, Lolita in Latin, that’s the recipe for peace in our time,’ Father Guardian said—the Superior had a bee in his bonnet about liturgy.” Bruce Marshall, Father Hilary’s Holiday.

“From the west-facing window of the room in which Meriwether Lewis was born on August 18, 1774, one could look out at Rockfish Gap, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, an opening to the West that invited exploration.” Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West.

“They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.” Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach.

“Five Points, the lower Manhattan neighborhood name for the five-corner intersection of Anthony, Orange, and Cross Streets, was originally verdant and bucolic, like everything else in America.” Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19^th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum.

“We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.” James Agee, A Death in the Family.

“It was a few days after the tenth of August, 1949, when I first saw the Mann Gulch fire and started to become, even in part consciously, a small part of its story.” Norman MacLean, Young Men and Fire.

“I am an artist first, a censor second.” Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno.

“We search for certainty and call what we find destiny.” Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan, Chances Are . . . Adventures in Probability.

“At the age of fifteen, my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general, the police chief of a tenuous national government of China.” Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China.

Bad Girl by Viña Delmar was a bestseller in 1928. My copy is from its fifteenth printing that year. (Sales were probably not hurt when the novel was banned in Boston.) In the novel, Dot is a working-class, New York City woman who does the unthinkable and has premarital sex. She gets pregnant and marries her lover. She fears childbirth, about which she knows little, and the book has a frank discussion of her attempts to terminate the pregnancy.

Even though it is against the law, she gets a concoction from a pharmacist. Although she takes it “religiously,” it fails to work. Dot then turns to a more upper-class friend, Maude, who urges Dot not to have the baby and tells her that only an operation, not any medicine, will work. Dot asks whether the operation hurts, and Maude says it does “the first time, because most girls are crazy enough to try it without ether.” With the anesthetic, however, “you don’t feel a damn thing.” The friend gives Dot an address and tells her not to pay more than fifty dollars, an enormous sum to Dot. Maude states that the hospitals are open to the woman giving birth, but not to the one who doesn’t want a baby. “High prices, fresh doctors. It’s a man’s world, Dot. To the woman who knows her place they will give their charity, but the woman who wants to keep her body from pain and her mind from worry is an object of contempt.” Dot, not having fifty dollars, goes for a preliminary visit to the doctor, who determines she is pregnant, molests her, charges her five dollars, settles for the only two dollars she has, and tells her to make an appointment soon because she is in the second month.

Dot and her husband Eddie cannot talk freely with each other about what they are feeling. Eddie thinks that a pregnancy termination would be murder, but he also thinks a man “would have a hell of a nerve” to tell a woman to have a baby. “What right had a man to say what she should do?”

Dot talks with other friends. Edna says a woman has the baby whether she wants it or not. “Abortion” is never uttered. Instead, in a different way from the way we use the term now, it is referred to as “birth control.” Thus, Dot “was not anxious to debate the pro and con of birth control” with Edna, and Edna to herself was trying to figure out, “Who was the birth-control advocate, Eddie or Dot?”

Edna urges Eddie to oppose the abortion, but he replies, “It’s her business.” Edna then indicates that “nine-tenths” of young married women are ignorant about childbirth and also abortion. She states that there are only a half-dozen New York City doctors who do abortions without serious complications such as blood poisoning. For a birth, Edna maintains, a woman can find a good doctor, but “the other way you’ve got a guy who couldn’t make a living the way other doctors do. . . , and in case you have religion, you’ve sinned against it.”

Finally, Dot decides. “After all, it was her body that was to be the battle-field. She had been wrong. It was her place to do what she pleased, not to stand by and wait for Eddie to pass judgment.” The thought of the horrid abortionist was repulsive, and she feels happy and peaceful as she announces that she will have the baby.

Kate Simon’s memoir Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood, like Bad Girl, also describes working-class, 1920s New York, although Simon is narrating from the viewpoint of a young girl. She and her family were  then living in a Bronx neighborhood largely inhabited by immigrant Jews and Italians, and she was struggling to understand the world she was encountering, including the visits of Dr. James. He was seldom seen by the kids because he came when school was in session. No explanation was given for the appearance of this tall, fair “American” in a neighborhood of short, dark “foreigners.” However, Simon noticed, the mothers he visited, who were fine in the morning, were in bed when school let out.

Years later Simon’s medical relatives told her that Dr. James had had a prestigious and lucrative medical practice and came from the prosperous New England family that produced the writers and intellectuals William and Henry. After his children were raised, Dr. James dedicated himself to poor immigrant women who had “no sex information, no birth-control clinics, nothing but knitting needles, hat pins, lengths of wire, the drinking of noxious mixtures while they sat in scalding baths to prevent the birth of yet another child. Some of these women died of infections, and often when these procedures did not work, the women went to term and then let the infant die of exposure or suffocation.“

To prevent such suicides and murders, Dr. James went from one immigrant neighborhood to another, performing abortions. Often charging nothing but never more than a dollar or two, James performed thousands of the procedures. All the adults knew what he did, and according to Simon, so did the police and the Board of Health who generally let him be. Periodically, however, when there was some change in officialdom, he was arrested. He wouldn’t post bail but contacted colleagues. Doctors then thronged the courthouse where “they pleaded, they argued, they shouted, they accused the police and the court of ignorance and inhumanity,” and each time Dr. James was released.

James was a skillful and careful practitioner and would not perform an abortion if it would be too dangerous. Simon had a much younger sister, and when Kate was an adult, her mother told Simon that the sister was unwanted. James, however, would not perform an abortion because Simon’s mother already had had too many and another would be hazardous. Shortly before she died, Simon’s mother told Kate that she had had thirteen abortions (as well as three children) and that other women in the neighborhood had had even more. Why do you think, the mother continued, that the Italian women urged to have large families by the Catholic Church had only two or three kids? “Certainly it wasn’t the abstinence of Italian husbands, no more controlled than Jewish husbands. It was the work of the blessed hands of that wonderful old goy.”

Bad Girl and Bronx Primitive indicate that abortion was prevalent in this country a hundred years ago, as were willful infant deaths. (We tend not to think about infanticide, but the concern in our colonial days over it were so great the special evidentiary and other rules were applied when a mother reported a stillbirth or that a baby died shortly after birth.) One of the reasons for the number of abortions was ignorance about sex. In Bad Girls, Dot’s husband has no idea why she is making monthly marks on their calendar.  In our colonial history, and beyond, men, at least, believed that a woman could only get pregnant if she had an orgasm and that a woman could only have an orgasm if the intercourse were consensual. Thus, a raped woman could not get pregnant. Surely this ignorance led to abortions. But abortions and infanticides also occurred because of lack or knowledge of birth control in our modern sense of that term so that the only meaningful “birth control” available then was abortion.

Perhaps illegal abortions decreased after the 1920s, but that is unknowable. I knew a couple women who had abortions before they were legal in this country. These were what most would see as ordinary women. Only because I was close to them did I find out about the illegal terminations of their pregnancies. I can assume that of the many older women I have known less well, some, maybe many, also had illegal abortions.

If the abortion rate dropped from Kate Simon’s youth, it is not because laws against abortion had more effect, or that sex drives changed, or that women came to follow church proscriptions more faithfully, but primarily because of the increase in the availability and knowledge of birth control that occurred in the twentieth century. Margaret Sanger’s movement was in its infancy when Simon’s mother had abortions and when Delmar wrote, and the spread of birth control was hard work that took years to have any widespread effect. Four decades after Simon and Delmar, in many circles there was still limited discussion of birth control. In a senior class when I was in high school, ten percent of the girls got pregnant, or at least ten percent were known to have gotten pregnant. Of course, the odds are high that others got pregnant without its becoming public knowledge and had abortions.

Sanger had to overcome not only the reticence to talk about sex that prevented education about birth control, practices kept contraception as much out of sight as possible. Condoms were hidden away in the drug store, and the pharmacist had to be asked for them, an embarrassing and deterring encounter for many. But Sanger and her followers also had to fight laws that actually prohibited birth control.

Many states at one time proscribed birth control, but by 1960, only a couple still had such laws, including Connecticut which made illegal “any drug, medicinal article, or instrument for the purpose of preventing contraception.” The law applied to the married and the unmarried, and we should remember such laws when we hear complaints about how our present government has gotten too big. What could be more big brotherish than to regulate what married couples can do in their bedroom (or on their kitchen table or their washing machine)? I wonder how many people who complain about the intrusiveness of government even know that government once prohibited the use of birth control.

The United States Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), found the Connecticut law to be unconstitutional as a violation of “marital privacy.” The decision was controversial because nothing in the Constitution explicitly protects privacy, and the seven justices who voted to invalidate the law relied on different constitutional provisions to find this privacy right. Even so, the right to access birth control was extended to non-married couples by the Supreme Court in 1972 in Eisenstadt v. Baird.

It was settled, then. All had access to birth control, and many, most, nearly all of us thought that was good. Pleasure and passion and love can increase because of birth control.  Stable, non-abusive families are more likely with birth control. Abortion decreases with birth control. But we now live in a new age that once again may make birth-control availability more difficult.

The present administration plans to change the health-care rules to make getting contraception more difficult. Under Obama, the Affordable Care Act made birth control a regular benefit of health insurance without any co-pay. In 2014, however, the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby case ruled that a “closely held corporation” could be exempt from the Health care contraception mandate on religious grounds. The proposal now is to extend that exemption to both for-profit and non-profit entities and to all companies including publicly held ones, not just closely held ones. In addition, the exemption would extend beyond religious beliefs to sincerely held “moral convictions.”

That corporations could have religious beliefs came as a surprise to me. I did not know that if you make it to heaven, you might see Shell Oil, Amazon, and Morgan Stanley ringing the Father. I certainly was not aware of Jesus preaching in any boardrooms. I wondered how the religious beliefs of a corporation are determined. Will the shareholders be polled? Would we count the votes by individuals or by the number of shares held? If by shares, as must be done for other corporate purposes, the rich person’s religious views will count for more than the less affluent shareholder’s. What if I have religious views or moral convictions for or against contraception but I am in the minority; aren’t my religious beliefs or moral convictions then violated?

And what are the non-religious moral convictions about birth control? I have enough difficulty understanding the religious beliefs about contraception. I don’t pretend that I can recall every word of the Bible, but I don’t remember any mention of IUDs, the pill, condoms, or even latex. Did anything even like our notions of contraception exist back in biblical times?

On top of this, a person who has spoken out against not only abortion but also against contraception has been appointed to the position in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Title X program which oversees family planning funding for poor Americans. Add to this the attacks on Planned Parenthood. Remember that federal money cannot be used for abortions so that a federal defunding of Planned Parenthood will have little effect on those procedures, but it will affect  the availability of contraception. (And, of course, the latest healthcare bill was put forward without a single woman on the drafting group.)

We are on a dangerous path. Many states and the federal government have put such onerous restrictions on abortion that, although a constitutional right, it is not in fact available for many women. That is a step back to Delmar and Simon’s time of knitting needles and goop to be prayerfully drunk. And now we will make obtaining birth control more difficult with the result being that many women, generally poor women, will not have contraception. I suppose the good news is that we will be giving a new generation of novelists and memoirists like Delmar and Simon something to write about.

I know many families with only one, two, or three kids. Perhaps it is because in this age many couples have finally learned what previous generations did not, to use the rhythm method successfully. Or perhaps it is because passion or tenderness or intimacy dies out with modern couples as it did not a hundred years ago. But I am guessing that the prime reason is that these couples use birth control. They have found that birth control makes their lives, their relationships, their families better. Birth control should be available to all in our society.

Something I heard in a rural Pennsylvania grocery store that I have never heard in New York City: “Where do you keep your Miracle Whip?”

The painter on the eaves painting a window was singing. The painter on a nearby ladder said, “What is that song?” An answer was given. “Is that from Beauty and the Beast?” “No, it’s from Aladdin.”

Driving is never easy in New York City. There is always the normal, heavy traffic and construction sites closing lanes or even streets, and now there are many street festivals and parades causing even more re-routings. And, with all of that, concentration on driving is even more difficult because of the women crossing the streets and on the sidewalks in their marvelous arrays of summer dress and undress demanding attention.

“No one on earth—none that I had ever seen—is more polite than a person at a gun show: more eager to smile, more accommodating, less likely to step on your toe.” Paul Theroux, Deep South.

What did couples differ over before there were dishwashers to load?

The graduate students at the house for Thanksgiving dinner included some from India who were comparing notes. In your part of India, when do you celebrate this holiday? What language is predominant for the upper and lower classes? I asked some questions and learned that there are many, many official languages in India as well as many more that are not official and that Indian Hindus celebrate holy days at different times of the year in different parts of the country and in different ways. The students went on to explain more and more differences around the country. I finally asked, “What, then, unites India as a country?” The students simultaneously answered, “Cricket!”

Is it true, as I just read, that you have to play polo righthanded?

President Trump does not have laugh lines. Isn’t that sad?

Are you one of those people who think that they are eating adventurously when they have a spicy tuna roll?

“None of us is pure, and purity is a dreary pursuit best left to Puritans.” Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness.

We were driving from Phoenix to the Grand Canyon. The daughter, who had never really gambled, had a fascination with it. On some level, this was out of character since she is thrifty and little concerned with the status and trappings of money. We stopped at an Indian casino where she was just old enough for the slots and blackjack. I gave her some money. She quickly lost it. I was pleased. I am not a gambler and would not like it if the daughter were to become a regular gambler. The money’s quick disappearance I thought might end her gambling fascination, but as we were leaving, somebody near the exit got a payoff in a slot machine, and one of the coins fell on the floor.  The daughter picked it up to return it to the winner. He indicated that she could keep it. She put it in a machine. She won. And I thought, Damn!

A few weeks ago, Scooter Gennett, a major league baseball player, hit four home runs in one game. If you are like me, you asked, “Who?” A guy named after a Muppet is in the major leagues? But even if you don’t know who Gennett is, you are still impressed with the what. The total number of major league baseball games played is not something I know, but surely it is north of 200,000, and only seventeen times has a player homered four times in a game. Rare, very rare.

Only one of these four-homer games has stuck in my mind, and that is as much as for what happened in the game after the one with four home runs. The Milwaukee Braves were playing at the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1954. The New York Giants would win the World Series that year, but it was a three-way pennant race when the Braves and Dodgers played at the end of July. (Even though it was a weekend, Ebbets Field was about half filled. Many Brooklynites bitched about the Dodgers moving to Los Angeles for decades after it happened, often stating how well the Dodgers were supported in Brooklyn. If support was meant to mean actual attendance at games, the moaners may have overstated matters.)

In that game, Joe Adcock, the Braves’ first baseman, hit four home runs and a double, which meant he had eighteen total bases. (Four for each of the homers, and two for the double.) Eighteen set a record for total bases that stood for over a generation.

A memorable day, but Adcock continued on the next day—a double in his first at bat. But then it ended. He did not get any kind of hit in his next time up; instead he got hit. I believe it was a fast ball from Clem Labine, not thrown at the small of the back, but hitting Adcock in the head. Back in those days, baseball was the same game, but it was also different. Get some hits and expect to get thrown at. The opponent did not want the hot hitter to be too comfortable in the batter’s box.  Newspaper pictures the day after Adcock was hit showed him on a stretcher with concerned players from both teams huddled around.

In one sense, Adcock was lucky. Few ballplayers back then wore helmets. They might have said that the head protection was uncomfortable and could have affected their swing, but surely a main reason is that it was considered unmanly to have a helmet. (Football players did not then have face masks and surely part of the reason is that they were not manly. Hockey players did not wear helmets and the goalie went maskless for the same reason. As far as I know, however, all wore jock strops, and baseball catchers wore even more groin protection. There were unwanted images of unmanliness from a helmet or a face mask, and then there is protecting your manhood.) The Braves, however, defying convention, wore helmets, and Adcock had one on.

Years later I heard a Dodger who was on the field for that game—I think Pee Wee Reese—discuss the beaning. He said that the sound of the ball hitting Adcock was chilling. He went over to the prone Adcock and saw the helmet. It was cracked at the temple. The Dodger said that he decided to wear a helmet after that, as did his teammates.

Now, of course, it is routine for athletes in many sports to wear protective head gear, and the men don’t seem less manly to me.

There weren’t books in my house growing up. There was reading material, however. Two newspapers were delivered daily, and a third came once a week. There were magazines. I think the parents subscribed to Reader’s Digest. I read some of its articles, but mostly I went to the anecdotes and jokes. There were many other magazines that came from friends of my mother’s who passed them on to her when they were through with them—Life, Look, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal. And I exaggerate when I say no books were in the house. There was an encyclopedia and a few textbooks that seemed as if they came from my father’s high school days, but there were not the kind of books a second grader who discovered he liked reading wanted.

I soon found the public library. It may have been a mile from the house, but in those days, a mile was nothing. A two-story building with the adult section on the entrance floor and the youth books upstairs. I fell in love with two series: Freddy the Pig books and what I thought of as orange biographies. I don’t remember much about the Freddy tales, but the biographies were so labeled in my mind because they all had orange covers. Of appropriate length for a third grader, they were hero books with an emphasis on the childhoods of Thomas Edison or Andrew Jackson, but they also contained enough about the subject’s adulthoods for me to learn much about history. I believe that these books have stayed with me, forming much of my background knowledge about various personages and historical eras.

Perhaps because I was shy, I read constantly, even while walking to and from school. It was not long before I felt I had exhausted the offerings of the children’s section of the local public library.  Luck befell me in the person of Miss Dahlberg, my sixth-grade teacher. She recognized my dilemma and went with me to the public library. I don’t remember at what age one qualified to take books out of the adult section, but it certainly was not the sixth grade. Miss Dahlberg talked with library directors, and then some higher-up  library directors. She knew how to hold her ground. (None of us kids would have been surprised. We all knew she had been a WAC during WWII and had even parachuted out of a plane!) What had been rigid rules for the library were no match for her, and I walked out with a library card that granted me adult privileges.  (Actually, inked on it was “Adult Priviledges.” Miss Dahlberg knew how to be gracious in victory. She noted the misspelling and told me that it would not matter, and we left the library.)

This golden card allowed me to enter a new stage in my reading. There was no one to tell me what were good books or what books they had enjoyed. I certainly did not then read book reviews. Instead, I would walk the stacks, read jacket copy, read a few paragraphs or pages and then used gut intuition to take out books. Thus, the reading at this stage was random. Only years later did I gain direction and would perhaps read one Hemingway or Fitzgerald after the other.  Well, there was one direction that came before that. I was soon at the age where there was an interest in male-female relationships, and I would spend many hours skimming books back in the shelves looking for some sort of sex scene, but I seldom checked such books out.

I remember little of what I read from these directionless days except, perhaps, for The Mouse that Roared, and its sequels, by Leonard Wibberley. The Cold War satire was a delight, a precursor in my mind to Dr. Strangelove, but like that movie, it also hit my emerging views that the powerful– whether the military, political, corporate, or social–were to be distrusted. If I had then talked about books with others, I would have insisted that all read it.

The other book I remember from that period was different in that I did not stumble across it—From Here to Eternity by James Jones. I am not sure how I became aware of the book; even if I had read about books, I would have been too young when the book was published, or even when the movie of it came out, for it to have registered with me. But somehow a half dozen years or so after its publication, I decided I wanted to read it, and I went looking for it on the shelves of the Mead Public Library. I did not find it, and then I learned that in that staid period the book was too explosive or controversial to be allowed on the shelves. A potential reader had to ask for it at the front desk. I did, and this caused consternation. No one apparently wanted to be the one responsible for corrupting this youth by giving him this book, but I insisted that the library had granted me “adult priviledges.” After much discussion behind closed doors, the book was produced, and I was allowed to check it out. Perhaps the library staff did not want to take on Miss Dahlberg again.

This was the first adult book that mesmerized me. The beach scene famous from the movie was not the real draw. The sprawling narrative was captivating, but it was the character of Robert E. Lee Prewitt that totally grabbed me—a Hamlet, a Tony Zale, a Miles Davis, a Kierkegaardian zen figure, a lover, a friend, an anti-authoritarian, a patriot. Of course I was not alone in these reactions, but I did feel that the character talked especially to me.

Life moved on, and I went off to college. Now a library was different. It was a research institution, not a place for browsing to find material to fill up my idle hours. I said good-bye to the kind of library that had helped form me. Now I did what had once been a radical act for me; I bought books and rather than checking them out of libraries.

That pattern remained for decades. It only got altered when I started spending summers in the Poconos and finally became a regular patron of the Barrett Friendly Library. It is smaller than my hometown one, but it has a similar feel. Of course, libraries have changed since my youth. Many still go to that library for its books, but now many also come to use the computers,  but even this latter group really come to the library for the reasons I did. I didn’t have books at home, and they do not have books and computers at their home.  Recently I read about a county out West that had slashed its already low taxes more and as a result was closing its public library. I felt a despair for the place and a grief for all the kids there who did not have access to books and computers.

Owning computers, I am one who goes to the library for the books, and the library has brought back some of my old browsing ways. I don’t wander the general fiction and nonfiction shelves as I would have in olden days. Instead, I browse the bookcases of “new releases,” an often generous ascription in this small library because a volume can remain “new” for over a year. At the beginning of summer, I concentrate on the nonfiction and biography sections. While on occasion I spot a title that I have heard about from elsewhere, most of the books are previously unknown to me. I just look for topics that I might find interesting, and since the collections are diverse, this has led to varied subjects. Last year from the library I read about class and poverty in America, a North Korean pilot who defected, the CIA, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the connection between corporate America and a form of Christianity, surfing, modern China, and a Jesuit traveling in the Holy Land.

I feel like this library has returned me full circle to reading habits I had when still in Wisconsin public schools, but more important, it has reminded me of how important the library was in my formation and how important it must still be for the many who are raised in homes without the resources that too many of us just take for granted. A long time ago I had vowed that if I ever published a book, I would make a donation to my childhood library, and both events eventually happened. Now the wife and I have given money to the Friendly Library, and of course, I urge you to support a local library—volunteer or donate money, or both.