My Favorite Authors

Aha Moments

I am presently reading on the origins of modern American English called "Made in America" by Bill Bryson and I am learning all sorts of things I didn't know before. Much more of our language than I ever knew is derived from the native American words the colonists bastardized. We are lead to believe that white settlers came in and after Thanksgiving basically wreaked havoc on the natives killing or moving them off immediately, (after all, what else was there to do before NFL playoff season?), which is not at all true. First we befriended them, stole their culture and language and skill and technique, assimilated the ones who could be assimilated and then we wreaked havoc.

Among the many words common to the colonists upon arrival to the shores of the new world that did not make it into the lexicon of today are:
Fribble, bossloper, bantling, sooterkin and my personal favorite, slobberchops. These would seem to denote in respective order, a frivolous person, a hermit, an infant, a lover and a messy eater. All of the original words are poetic beyond measure and I for one am hereby lobbying for their immediate re-inclusion into the common vernacular! Especially slobberchops! "Slow down there, slobberchops, that's the good tarp your eating over!"

Mr. Bryson has now taught me more about this subject and so many more than any of my college professors and has done so while making me laugh hysterically. He has the ability to put things into perspective that helps you comprehend what you are actually reading so that a full appreciation may be gained. If he is reading this, (you never know, it could be a slow day or maybe he Googles himself each morning), I want to be like you. Or exactly you. Anyway, thanks for the good reads. You are at the top of my favorite authors list.

Mr. Egan, I Presume

Similarly, Peter Egan is very much near the top. I have been reading his Side Glances column in "Road and Track" magazine since being an impressionable boy of 14 way back in the year 1989. I still own my original Road and Track magazine, thoroughly well worn, missing pages and replete with thumb smears on others.

Mr. Egan is a married man with no children who after a stint away from his boyhood home in the wilds of California, moved back to a farm in Wisconsin. He has a large workshop wherein is now or has been the greatest collection of automobilia, ever. I won't bore you with the details, but Egan's life of traveling to exotic foreign lands to cover wonderful and often untouchable cars and then coming home to his own projects and restorations is pretty much my dream.

Egan's road trip articles get past the pro forma normalcy and get right to the emotion of the event. Among his best is his two-piece article retracing of Hank Williams last road trip- in a very similar black Cadillac- as he was slowly drinking himself into hell. Poignant, funny, achingly beautiful and appealing not only to the music lover, but also the inveterate road tripper within me.

This is a guy who in the same issue of a magazine tells the story of his most recent automotive resurrection and has a story of eating dinner in France sitting between the amazing Paul Frere and Juan Manuel Fangio, (perhaps the greatest racer of all time), and wondering just how he got there all the while marveling that Mssrs. Frere and Fangio were each carrying on multiple conversations fluently in multiple languages all at the same time. Priceless.

Egan, like Bryson is an inspiration to me. Two people who take very seriously the work of having fun and doing what they love. Surely their lives cannot be perfect but from the outside, they sure look enticing.

I thank these two men for all they have given me and I hope, even if just a little, I can emulate them in my own words.