Melville Moment of the Day

There is a move afoot among a group of 10-year-old Massachusetts kids to make "Moby Dick, or, The Whale" by Herman Melville THE OFFICIAL BOOK OF MASSACHUSETTS. I voted for it, by GAWD!

There were, of course, a few nancy-boys and Clintonistas who insisted that this offical tome be "Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott; and while I also laud this book as very important to the psychology of Massachusetts women (big AND little) in my own home, and an important work, I STILL VOTES FOR MOBY DICK.

Louisa May did try to be balanced; remember, she also penned "Little Men", but they were all gay anyway. Also on the list:

• The House of Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne (Nope. It's already a tourist trap in Salem)
• On the Road, Jack Kerouac (a Lowell boy and a bit of a stoner)
• Make Way for Ducklings, Robert McKloskey (Also a Boston Tourist Trap, and an urban myth)

When I suggested that perhaps there was room for an official BOYS book and an official GIRLS book, the shit hit the fan, and I shut my mouth. But Moby Dick still gets my vote, because it is the most ripping Yankee tale told short of The Last of the Mohicans.

You can see I found the e-book version and started reading it again. I, like Melville, was a kid from the New York area that longed to see open water, meet serpent-like monsters of the deep and generally feck-off and run away to the sea.

One other reason it has such importance to me personally: one hot summer when I was a wee lad of 6 or 7 years, I ran with the neighborhood pack of kids, looking for something to do and causing mayhem for the older neighbors. One of these old guys lived next door and decided that "someone should try and occupy these little savages instead of abandoning them to the street." He said this while giving my hard pressed Mom the evil eye. His answer? He would READ to us every morning from 10AM to 12PM, directly after which we were to report to our homes for lunch and a verified hour of PEACE AND QUIET so he could nap. He promised that if we didn't observe this to the letter, he would not read to us AND he would get his gun out.

Seeing as we liked breathing (of COURSE we believed the old fart), and our parents of both native- and newly-immigrated stock saw this as "enriching", we were delivered to the old man's living room promptly one Monday morning, 10AM.

Now the man's name was Mr. Bogey. And yes he was scary as the name implies, being old and cranky but mostly because he talked so funny. That was because he was, " ... a native born MAIN-AH. From DOWN 'EAST." He had the misfortune of having been an attorney in NYC for his business career, and stuck for most of this initial portion of retirement in the Jersey suburbs, at least until his new manse somewhere around Tenant's Harbor was completed. But he was going to drive some 'Cul-chah' into the stoney brains of these neighborhood urchins, by GAWD.

And of course, he had me at "Call me Ishmael ...."