Without the A

Yesterday morning my workout was interrupted by the president of the United States. Really. It was a beautiful, sunny, 70 degree day so I was going to do one of my usual bike routes through the big park a mile from my condo. I set off and biked the mile downhill to the park, but when I got to the bottom of the hill I saw two police cars partially blocking the road adjacent to the park, and when I attempted to turn onto the bike path I saw another cop car fifty yards down the path blocking it entirely. One of the policemen was standing outside of his car and he said, "You're not allowed to go down that path, ma'am." I said, "Oh, okay, what's going on?" and the cop leaned toward me and whispered conspiratorially, "The president is about to pass by. He was supposed to be here already, but he's running late." I told the cop thanks for the info and turned around to start biking back up the hill, but then I couldn't resist stopping halfway up the hill to watch the corner and wait until the motorcade went by. It's not every day you see the presidential motorcade! (Although, actually, this is the second time this year that one of my bike excursions has been rerouted by the president's motorcade. Come on, Mr. President! Let a girl get her exercise!) I don't know if I'll ever get used to the fact that I live in a place where it's possible to cross paths with the president with no warning while I'm just going about my daily routine. After three years some of the novelty of living here has worn off, but much of the time it's still really exciting to me.

To change the subject entirely, I started reading A Farewell to Arms a couple of days ago. We have 200 some-odd books in this apartment that I've never read because they were Penn's collection before he moved in with me. (He had about 300 books when we moved in together and I'd read about 100 of them.) I've decided that I really need to start reading the books we already own before going out to buy more books, and I'm even trying to cut back on going to the public library so often in favor of reading things I can find in my own bedroom. During the early years of grad school I didn't have much time to read for pleasure because I had so much course reading to do all the time. Now I still don't have too much free time, but I have more time than I used to and I'm making a concentrated effort to devote my pleasure-reading time to actual books rather than solely to blogs, which was the habit I had gotten into (not that there aren't well-written blogs, but obviously novels generally provide a richer experience). So, anyway, I'm working my way through some of the books we own and since I somehow got through an entire 22-year education without reading any of Hemingway's major works I decided to give A Farewell to Arms a shot. Turns out I am a Hemingway fan despite the blatant misogyny (I'm learning that with Hemingway you either love him or you hate him, there doesn't seem to be much in between), but the main reason I even started this paragraph was to say this: I am appalled at how very little I know about World War I. I read the first couple of chapters of the book and was like, "Wait, the US was allied with the Italians in World War I?" and then I realized that the character was just an American fighting in the Italian army but I still wanted to know who was fighting whom and I realized that all I really know about World War I are little tidbits: 1914-1918, ended November 11th, Wilson was president, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the catylyst, U-boats, tear gas...some Googling jogged a few more memories and I suddenly recalled Coach Sanchez explaining the Triple Entente and ordering the guys in my junior year history class to act like adults for two minutes and stop giggling about the Brest-Litovsk treaty, but mostly I still know very, very little. And I think most of what I do know I learned from Legends of the Fall and The Little Princess.
So my glimmers of memory assure me that I did, in fact, study World War I at some point in high school. And my Googling assures me that it actually was a pretty damn complicated, multi-faceted war (as many wars are, I suppose), so maybe I can be somewhat excused for not knowing every detail, but I still can't believe how ignorant I am about this historical topic. I can't help but think that if I know this little about World War I that the average American must know just about nothing. Because as much as I like to think that I'm average, I guess I have to leave that title behind now that I'm a year or so away from (hopefully) having a PhD. Even though I don't feel like it most days I am, in fact, extremely educated. I'm about as educated as a person can be, in the formal sense of the word. And before my Google spree this morning I would have been incapable of definitively answering any questions about who fought whom during World War I. I had a vague idea (it's not like I would have been all, "Um, China?") but I didn't know the details. And I don't know if that's because the education system is failing all of us, or because there's just way too much to know about the world.