Day 94, Saturday June 8, 2024: Louisville, Kentucky to Indianapolis, Indiana
- Mark Carl Rom
- Jun 18
- 8 min read
Carnegie libraries visited: Shelbyville, Kentucky; Brookville, Knightsville, Shelbyville, Indianapolis Spades Park Branch and East Washington Branch, Indiana.
Days sober: 352
A flock of white gardenias greeted me when I opened Goldfinger’s hatchback this morning. I’ve gotten skilled at parking in the most quiet and dark corners of a hotel’s parking lot; floral arrangements are a bonus. Leaving Louisville, I meandered through rolling hills, passing by manors with pristine lawns like golf courses without sandtraps. I’m always wondering about the lives of those in the homes I pass. Did that 10,000 square foot estate contain laughter and love, or lonely and sullen kids in the rooms so far from their parents that they only communicate by text? Do the owners relax on their designer patios, marveling at their good fortune, or do they doom scroll just like their wealthy and yet harried neighbors? When the parents were growing up, was their main goal to become rich, or was it the lucky accident of following their passions?
I don’t aspire to be rich, although I wouldn’t object if I won the lottery, and the addition we recently added to our home made it just large enough that it is unlikely to be torn down by the next person who buys it. Money never motivated me. My parents certainly didn’t push it. My mother would say something about the fact that God even provides for the sparrows, so I was going to be fine.
Charles Beard was born in Knightsville, Indiana, a town I passed through this morning. Professor Beard certainly believed that the lure of money was a key human motivation, and he made this point forcefully in his 1913 book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. He argued that, instead of being motivated by higher purposes, the framers were influenced most by their own economic interests. Over time, his interpretation became the dominant one, until it didn’t. By the 1960s, historian Peter Novick wrote that “it was generally accepted within the historical profession that... Beard's Progressive version of the...framing of the Constitution had been decisively refuted. American historians came to see...the framers of the Constitution, rather than having self-interested motives, were led by concern for political unity, national economic development, and diplomatic security.”
Novick notwithstanding, during the time I was studying in graduate school “rational choice theory” dominated the political science profession. This theory claimed that, if you wanted to study politics scientifically, you simply needed to follow incentives. Incentives drove all political activity, or all the activity that was worth studying. On the one hand: duh. Yeah, of course, incentives matter; people aren’t stupid, not always. Yet rational choice theory could not explain some of the simplest phenomena – such as why people vote – without doing backflips with a twist. For example, in terms of pure self-interest, voting, except in small local elections, is stupid. Voting takes time and effort, and the probability that a person’s individual vote would be decisive was approximately zero. If your vote doesn’t really matter, then it only becomes a matter of self interest if voting provides you greater esteem in the community or fills your heart with a patriotic spirit. Yet to call the desire to be respected and patriotic purely a matter of maximizing individual utility (a favored phrase) is to misunderstand the human heart. It holds that Mother Teresa did not just serve the poor; she served herself. The brave (another concept ignored by rational choice theorists) soldier who flings himself on the grenade tossed into the foxwhole? Oh, that’s a self-interested act, because the soon to be dismembered fighter only seeks glory. Liz Cheney, in calling out Donald Trump for egregious misconduct, did so not out of patriotism but to somehow advance her career or fame? FFS, rational choice.
Kentucky is more like Tennessee and Georgia than it is Indiana when it comes to Carnegie libraries. In 1900, when Carnegie started funding libraries in earnest, all four of these states had similar populations (between two million in Tennessee and 2.5 million in Indiana). Kentucky received 23 public libraries; Tennessee, 13; Georgia, 24. Indiana got 165 of them. In my two-day drive through Kentucky, I visited six of these libraries, including four in Louisville.
Whenever possible, unless the Interstates are simply too convenient, I take county roads and state highways. In doing so today I passed fields where the corn was as high as a chipmunk’s eye, or a raccoon’s, or a coyote’s, or a burro’s, just definitely not as high as an elephant’s. Depending on when it was planted and when the rains came, the row after row of corn varied in how tall and luscious it was. I took great pleasure, as any red blooded male would, in peeing by the side of the road. It’s such a relief, literally, to piss where the only sounds are birds chirping, trees rustling, and urine tinkling.
In Becca Rothfeld’s review of Jill Ciment’s new memoir Consent (her second memoir) for The Washington Post, Rothfeld writes that Ciment now uses the word “scene” rather than “memory” in recounting her life. As Ciment puts it, “scenes in a memoir are no more accurate than reenactments on Forensic Files…A memoir is closer to historical fiction than it is to biography.” That makes sense to me. As I listened to the recovery memoirs Drinking, Lit, and Smashed I kept asking myself “How do the authors, who were drinking, lit, and smashed, remember all the conversations they have had in years long since passed?” I’m not questioning the veracity of the authors, as these conversations all sound real, if edited for clarity and concision, like polished diamonds. I can’t remember conversations I had last week, although unlike those writers I don’t keep journals, as I assume they do.
My memories are highly selective. My sister Gretchen asked me “Do you remember the time we visited Curt at Philmont?” She recalled that his staff had been living on powdered eggs for their daily scramble [Note: Most food at Philmont’s backcountry camps was either canned or dried.] “Anyway, someone had delivered Curt a dozen fresh eggs and the cook scrambled them instead of frying, poaching, or soft boiling them! He cooked them exactly the same way as the dried eggs!” I had zero memory of this event, which happened nearly fifty years ago. For Gretchen, it was as if it had happened yesterday.
I’m a guy, so I remember events much better than conversations. Also around a half century ago I was planning tennis in Arkansas in August, and the courts were nearly melting. I had forgotten to bring any water with me, so I went into a nearby dorm which had a Coke machine, one of those that drops a cup down after you put your quarter in. I didn’t have a quarter, or didn’t want to spend one, so I got down on my knees and snaked my hand up into the machine’s slot so I could grab a cup, pull it out, and fill it with water from the restroom. A security guard busted me.
“What are you doing?”
“Um, I put a quarter into the machine, and it failed to drop a cup, so I was just trying to get what I paid for.”
“Did you check the coin return?”
“No.”
The guard slipped his sweaty paws into the coin return, withdrawing a quarter.
“Here you go.”
“Wow. Thanks.”
I pushed the quarter in and a cup was soon filled with 7 Up (on family vacations, I was the child who always chose the uncola as my lunch drink). So maybe I can remember some conversations, if I put my mind to it.
A men’s club (The Businessmen’s Association), women’s clubs (The Saturday Club and the Women’s Social Club), and one of unknown gender (The Brookville Historical Society) worked together to bring a Carnegie library to Brookville in 1910. In Knightstown, Mrs. Jennie Johnson, the city’s librarian, was the one who reached out to Carnegie to procure a grant. Miss Eliza Browning, Indianapolis’s librarian, made her request to Carnegie, adding that several local clubs had asked her to travel to New York to make the pitch in person. Bertram in turn asked her if she was making a personal appeal, or was this a formal request from the town’s mayor and council. Browning’s response: “This is an official application…” Indianapolis formally requested six branch libraries, and Carnegie funded five of them.
With the help of my Meeting Guide app, I found recovery meetings to attend both last night and tonight. The meeting in Louisville was in a backroom to which you entered through a cool recovery deli. A few people were eating in a lounge area up front, for a fee, or the impecunious could help themselves to a free pancake buffet. I thought I was in the wrong place until I noticed a few guys walking into the back room, which had couches against the wall and rows of folding chairs in the color of the “flesh” crayons of our youth. A couple of the shares were pretty incoherent, as they sometimes are. One guy told a very long story related to the concept of taking life as it comes with the punchline something like this. A farmer was too infirm to continue working the fields, so his only son had to do all the work.
One day his son broke his leg, and all the neighbors rushed over to say “Oh no, that’s horrible.”
The farmer replies “Maybe, maybe not. Who knows?”
“What do you mean, maybe, maybe not? Your only son broke his leg and won’t be able to work!”
The next day, the military swooped into the area to press all the able-bodied men into the service, as the country was at war.. The son, with his broken leg, was exempted. So the neighbors rushed back to say “That’s wonderful!”
The farmer replies “Maybe, maybe not. Who knows?”
When I pulled into the “Stepping Stones” meeting tonight at the Pleasant View Lutheran Church in Indianapolis, only three cars were in the lot, and I was glad to see them. They were having a “birthday” meeting tonight, as one of the eight attendees was celebrating 42 continuous years of sobriety. Forty two years; half of his life. Miraculous. With my 352 days, I was the baby of the group: all but one had been sober for more than a decade, and the “youngest” one had stopped drinking six years ago. I felt like a guest of a couple that had been married for a very long time. Each person who shared, and everyone did, addressed their comments directly to me because everyone else had already heard their stories over and over. I sat like the good school boy I have always been, listening attentively and giving nods of affirmation every few seconds. I hope I didn’t come across as obsequious, as I truly took their stories to heart. They were even more delighted to celebrate my eleven months as Ted’s 42 years. Afterward, Larry – who used my first name everytime he addressed me, like a guy practicing “ways to remember the names of persons you have just met,” asked me “How’s your spiritual condition? Do you believe in angels?” I replied that my higher power was working through the fellowship of those in recovery, and that seemed to satisfy him.
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