One of my favorite writers had a new book published today, and a line in it hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks.
I have loved Doris Kearns Goodwin’s work since I read “No Ordinary Time,” her 1994 book about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during World War II. I read her books about Lyndon Johnson and other historical figures and I fell in love with her writing when I read her 1998 memoir “Wait Till Next Year” about growing up a Brooklyn Dodger fan on Long Island.
She was one of the best things about Ken Burns’ Baseball miniseries for PBS, and I think she ranks with David McCullough as our top popular historians of my lifetime.
At any rate, her new book is “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s,” primarily about the 46-year relationship with her late husband Dick Goodwin. It was early in the introduction, when she wrote about getting to know Goodwin, that the line came.
“I told him stories about my parents and my sisters, my love of history and the Brooklyn Dodgers, the joy I had always found in school.”
It was really only the last eight words of the line that clobbered me.
“… the joy I had always found in school.”
My first reaction to that was to laugh and ask what kind of person found joy in school. From about the age of 10, school was nothing more than a chore for me. Anything less than perfect grades was a disappointment to my parents, and from eighth grade all the way through high school, the best year-end grades I got in academic subjects were B’s.
It was many years later that I first learned the term “passive aggressive,” but I could have been the poster child for it in my dealings with my parents.
I hate to blame anyone other than myself for my academic failures, but I didn’t want or need to be pushed, and when they pushed, I pushed back.
There was really a great irony in it. I was the oldest of five children in my family, so all the mistakes my parents made learning to do it right came with me. And I learned how to be a good parent — the one really great thing I ever did in my life — by thinking back to my childhood and saying what I wasn’t going to do.
When I went back to school for the last time in my life at age 28, I told myself for one semester, I would do something I had never done in college — attend every class and do all the reading. I took four classes — American History, Introductory Sociology, Chemistry and German.
The last two classes were my real weaknesses, science and foreign language.
I did something I hadn’t done since elementary school.
I got A’s in all four classes.
And I actually found some joy.