Howard Zinn

You know, its funny, the little picture of Howard Zinn on the back of my copy of A People's History of the United States kind of reminds me of this guy I see sitting by the lake near my house. He's there every day. He parks his car in the same spot, on a curve in the street where its close to the path that goes around the lake. He has his mesh folding chair, a cup of coffee, his cigarettes and a book. I imagine that his wife likes that he gets out of her way every day to do his alone thing, and that she has her alone thing. He's an old guy, and a smoker, and I picture him living in a cluttered old house that smells heavily of very old cigarette smoke. I've been seeing him for years and I've had these images of him for a long time.

When I bought A People's History, it ordered it slightly used from half.com. When it arrived, it had the same old cigarette smoke smell that I imagined guy by the lake's house to have. It still has it, and I often bury my nose in the pages to smell it. For some reason, since the picture of Zinn on the book jacket looks like guy by the lake, and since it smells the way I imagine his house to smell, I can't seem to get past this feeling that it came from his house, that it was his, or that he's Howard Zinn. I suppose that I'll always have this association between A People's History and the guy by the lake, even when I'm an old man and my wife looks forward to me taking my alone time.

The most important passage in the book comes in its final pages. Zinn declares: "As we pass from one century to another, one millennium to another, we would like to think that history itself is transformed as dramatically as the calendar. However, it rushes on, as it always did, with two forces racing toward the future, one splendidly uniformed, the other ragged but inspired."

I wonder if his wife let him have his alone time every day.