happiness: morning and evening, or, a warm gun?

this entry is dedicated to you're a good man, charlie brown, the most aggressively Mostly Harmless musical i've ever seen.

so, when ben & i were in north carolina, we came across an immense collection of cheap books in the basement of a PTA thrift store. perusing the fiction, i noticed a paperback called "the milagro beanfield wars." why have i heard of that, i wondered. well, someone must have told me to read it! it only cost a quarter and it was in good condition, er go it is mine.

flash forward to swarthmore. stressed out during the days, i look to the time before bedtime as vital, and in that vital time i often read. i began "the milagro beanfield wars." bells began to ring faintly near the back of my head. i scratched my hair and continued.

by the time i was about a third of the way in, the bells had become insistent, obnoxious, and unignorable. i did the only thing i could: i called my father.

me: dad, i'm reading this book called "the milagro beanfield wars" and --
my father: *laughs for ten minutes*
me: dad! what? what?
him: *still laughing*
me: daaaaaaaaaaddddddd!
him: you don't listen. i've been telling you about that book for 20 years.
me: aha! so you do know it!
him: know it! i'm IN it!
me: wow! are you charley [our last name], the bright-eyed east coast lawyer who moves to the little town in new mexico in the late 60s and helps out the poor oppressed hispanic farmers?
him: actually, i'm the second tier bad guy, rudy noise, the state engineer's lawyer. my part was cut out of the movie.
me: ...
him: sorry, darling. this is america. besides, john nichols was a gringo stalinist and i always thought his book needed to be edited. with a hatchet.

too bad. i think it's amusing. i'm going to keep reading since i haven't even met rudy noise yet. apparently (& i'd forgotten that this is one of my father's favorite stories) (or rather, i remembered the story but didn't know it was about THIS BOOK) he's describe as being slender, intelligent, and well-dressed. a judge with whom my father was lunching quipped, "you should sue! they told three lies about you in one sentence!"