Guys and Dollies

Over the holidays, we had to move my grandfather. For the last two years he's been living in a retirement home near my family in Columbia, SC, and he wanted to move to a smaller apartment in the same home. To help with the move, I enlisted the aid of my friend Tyson. I've know Tyson since we were 3, and he is one of the most solid individuals in the world. Whatever it is, he gets it done. Together with my dad, we formed the Creative and Dangerous Moving Company.

Because the new apartments was smaller, we had to be selective with my grandfather's possesions, including his hundreds of books. My Grandfather is extremely well educated. He has five degrees, and a lot of them are from Harvard. He's quite the eastern religion scholar, and his bookshelves, which we had to go through, were filled with books on Buddhism and Taoism, all writted by people named "Tzu" (Wen Tzu, Lao Tzu, Huang Tzu, etc). His new apartment didn't have room for all of them, so I could take any books I liked.

I hit jackpot early, finding the book What is a Man? 3,000 Years of Wisdom on the Art of Manly Virtue. Now here was a book that spoke to me. Essays by dozens of famous writers and intellectualls from all over history on what it means to be a man. Aristotle on friendship, Chaucer on bravery, Tolstoy on obligation. And it's not all just thinkers. We also have James Dean on youth, Kurt Cobain on sacrifice, and the original Rough Rider himself, Theodore Roosevelt, on...tenderness?

On the second day of moving my mom was going through more books, and she called to me, "Kenny, I think I found a book you'll like!" I headed over. "Here you go," she said, and handed me a book entitled Secret Sexual Positions.
"Oh boy!" I said. This is awkward, I thought. It's my mother giving me a book of sexual positions she found on her father's shelf. It's three generations of awkwardness.
"And this one too," she added, handing me The Clitoral Truth. Clearly my grandfather had not read the essay in What is a Man? by Lord Chesterfield entitled "Do Not be a Rake." But then word on the street is that, just five years ago, when he was still living on his own, he had three girlfriends. Granted they were his own age, so it's not quite Hugh Hefner, but I think it's still fairly rakish. I guess he must have read Baldesar Castiglione's essay "Older Men Make Better Lovers."