Curiosity.

My tenth grade English teacher, the one in whose class Wallace called me out, often cited Nabokov:

“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.”

I like memoirs. Honest ones, fake ones, dishonest ones. The Hemingway I most re-read is "A Moveable Feast." Hemingway's kind of a jackass about people he presumably considered friends, like Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald. He's especially weird toward the latter, in an oft-noted scene in which Fitzgerald frets about his penis.

So at my first newspaper job, I learned that my editor was a Hemingway fan, and I mentioned how much I loved "A Moveable Feast" because, while it was obviously just as calculated as Hemingway's other voices, it was different and looser and just plain funny and horrible and disloyal.

My editor, Hank, remembered none of this. His "Feast" was a genteel romp through 1920's Paris, all clinking glasses and literary ambition. He didn't remember the scene in the urinal, which to me would be like remembering "The Scarlet Letter" as a book about an island with genetically recreated dinosaurs.

A week later, he wrote a column for the paper's leisure section about having recently re-read "A Moveable Feast." He said he now found it distasteful and childish and unworthy of Hemingway.

Fear.

In my twenties, I had a small circle of friends. We weren't adventurous. Most of our evenings were spent at one another's homes, watching television and drinking beers. We were inexperienced, safe, privileged kids fresh out of good schools.

Lea was different. She had grown up poor. She was sexually adventurous where the rest of us were not. She laughed too loud and did not take care of her hair or teeth. On nights when the rest of our group would stay home, she would go to roadhouses and sports bars. The others of us spoke patronizingly about her choices and brainstormed ways to get her to leave that life.

At the time, I felt I was protecting her by worrying about danger from men. But  I really was terrified she was having a good time; scared that at any moment that she was enjoying sex.

Sticker.