I read Alex Panasenko’s memoir, The Long Vacation, this weekend. A delightful romp through the moral simplicities of Europe in the mid 20th century. If you believe that, the Golden Gate Bridge is for sale. Really it’s an entertaining and horrifying and funny and shocking and profound and vulgar and appalling ride to hell and back repeatedly. Then comes the second chapter!
Spoiler-ish alert. The final paragraph is so devastatingly bleak and funny at once, that I couldn’t decide whether to laugh hysterically or give up on humanity altogether, so I did a bit of both. But overall, the book helped restore my own will that we treat each other well, and ourselves well, regardless of what negative bullshit anyone may ever tell us about ourselves or others.
The author was, years after the events portrayed in the book, my biology teacher at Berkeley High School. The jovial, engaging and brilliant teacher I knew as a teenager, came up from a childhood worlds different from mine. I’m glad he wrote this book, or I would never have known his story. A story which also happens to be relevant to current events in terrible and important ways.
War is crazy. Bigotry is crazy. These things are crazy and ridiculous, yet they persist in being such large pieces of the human experience. After I closed the book, I had an unexpected musing: “The worst things people ever did were done by people.” And quickly reminded myself that the opposite is also true.