Weekend Reading

Earlier this month I read this short story by Garrison Keillor in the Atlantic Monthly. It's now online, and I encourage the read. One of my favorite snippets:

Dear Eric,

You need women for education, flawed or not. The maiden with little snow-white feet, the one with black black black hair, Barbary Allen, the gypsy girl, Kathleen Mavourneen, Jeannie, Fair Ellen—each woman prepares you for the next. You learn the basics from Lady A and you graduate to Lady B, who is grateful to her predecessor, as are C and D and E, and by F you are quite a fine fellow, mostly recovered from your sulky adolescence and rapacious narcissism and prepared to carry on a conversation, brighten your corner, do light housekeeping, and every so often perform amazing feats in or near the bed.

The danger is that you may turn to the woman you're with and say, "Remember that little bar in the West Sixties where we went after we saw A Chorus Line and there was that pianist with the bad toupee playing the white piano?" and she says, "That wasn't me. You were with someone else." But secretly she's grateful to that woman for teaching you whatever she taught you.

You've cheated yourself of an education, sir. Take off your glasses.