My mother subscribed to Time and National Geography, not for herself–mind you–but for us, the boys, me and my two and then three younger brothers. They also bought the World Book Encyclopedia. Neither of my parents had been graduated from college, though both had gone a year or less. My father wasn’t graduated from high school till he was 21.
But my mother wanted us to be educated, maybe to fulfill her own unfulfilled dreams and maybe because she was an immigrant. She had the immigrant mentality when it came to education–Get One, Goddamn it, as the most practicable way to move up. Actually, she was not just an immigrant but an illegal alien from Canada. She looked just like any other American but she didn’t have the documentation to prove she had been born in the U.SA. So she never voted in her whole damn life or got a driver’s license because she was afraid that if she did these things the government might detect her illegal presence. She never did jury duty either.
In the closet next to my bed, in the room I shared with my brother, the shelves were stacked high with National Geographic and Time magazines. I read Time each week when I hit high school, and took it pretty seriously as my "eye-on-the-world" since I didn’t have any other, not knowing it then for the bourgeois organ than it was and still is. Also it seemed like every week, they would use some strange word that I didn’t know. I would look those up to expand my vocabulary.
My parents got Reader’s Digest. After my father read it, he would go around saying, “Did you know there are X number of fish in the Greenland Sound?” And did you know this? And did you know that? Like trying to be funny or maybe just irritating. But by the next morning he would have forgotten what he knew.
My mother read Reader’s Digest and the paper everyday from back to front, excepting Sports and with special attention to the Society Page as a way of updating her intimate relationship with the high and mighty of San Diego Society. She had grown up in San Diego, when it was like a small town, and she knew every high and mighty person there was. Like, “Oh yes, I knew so and so’s son when he was living in blank.”
And my father got Popular Mechanics mostly I think for the “centerfold” of some blond babe posed provocatively by some farm machine or manhandling a power saw.
