The photo to the left is not one I was looking for, but it will do. I got out my box of old photographs because if I had a photo of Nick, I was going to post it with this blog. I didn’t find one of Nick, but of the three guys in this photo, Terry, Steve and Dave, Terry and Nick had grown up together in Salem, Illinois, and it was through Terry that I met Nick.

The guy in the middle in the photo (Steve) was from Marion, Illinois, and Dave was from Champaign, Illinois. I lived with Terry and Steve in a trailer in Carbondale, Illinois. Dave is the one who helped me get a job as a laborer on the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad; his dad had been the President of the ICG, and then had been a Vice President of Pepsico, the corporation that owned the railroad back then.

There are not many stories I can tell about those guys that don’t involve either alcohol, or fast women, or fistfighting, or all three. But there is one story about Nick that just involves books. Well, one book.

We all met at SIU, but none of us was making a mark as a scholar. Nick was the best athlete, but probably was even less interested in schoolwork than the rest of us. Nick’s girlfriend, Linda, was from Chicago, and she was stunningly pretty, with very long legs, and a small tight butt that she liked to keep wrapped in tight, small shorts. She was very sweet, and mostly seemed like the proverbial girl next door (if you lived next door to a combination of Ginger and Mary Ann). To me, in a way, the two of them seemed like a modern day Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher.

One day I was talking with Nick, and for some reason the topic of “classic” literature came up. Nick opined that he didn’t really think there was such a thing as “classic” literature. He figured that a bunch of so-called experts got together and decided what would, and what would not, be “classics”, and then everybody else just went along. I told Nick that I had just the book for him to read. The next time I saw him, I handed him a copy of “Tom Sawyer”. Nick knew of the book, but had never read it. The next time I saw him, he had finished it, and I could tell that he thought it was a great novel, and that he wondered how I knew he was going to like it. I knew he was going to like it because he WAS Tom Sawyer, and Linda WAS Becky Thatcher.

For some reason this week, I have been thinking about “Tom Sawyer” and about “One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that “Ivan Denisovich” snuck up on me in the same way that “Tom Sawyer” snuck up on Nick. I had always been leery of Russian literature, but one day I ended up with a copy of “Ivan Denisovich”, and a few hours later I knew that I had just read a classic.

I like to add vids to my blogs. Sometimes they connect to something I’ve written, and sometimes they don’t. The first one here is about “Ivan Denisovich -- The Movie”. Maybe the second one is about an intergalactic Becky Thatcher. The third one is just one I like.