I met Dan MacCloud while at work as a waitress: serving the wealthy rabbit pate and veil at a French restaurant near Baltimore. Dan was a soft spoken, well mannered individual that we called the "Flank Steak Man" because that's all he ordered. Dan was unique among our elite customers because, unlike the suit and tie men who drove up in Jaguars because their wives never cooked, Dan had a large windowless brown construction van (I'm convinced just so he could say, "Hey I'm Dan The Man in the Tan Van"). He also had a grizzly beard like an Alaskan prospector, and a long, string thin rat tail.
Luck would have it that I had no ride lined up to get home (nearly an hour away from work) so Dan volunteered to drive me home. On the way home he asked what books I was reading. I judged him too soon (I admit) because I spouted out some authors I was quite sure he had no clue existed. Wrong! It turned out that Dan came from a rare background, having a father that worked as a NASA scientist and a mother who was the dean of the literature department at the University of Maryland. Dan was gifted with a first rate education, even attending the private school that Chelsy Clinton would later graduate from.
As a side note most of the east coast private schools are based on the Quaker religion (who knew?) and Dan later converted to the religion himself, minus the belief in Jesus. One of Dan's sayings was that he, "Saw light in everyone". He was one of those hippie types that did Owsley acid, found a different path then working a convention job (he worked under the table to avoid having his taxes go to fund war) and he lived on a Yacht that he built himself. He was probably a little crazy too.
Because I could learn a lot from this fellow, I asked him to recommend his favorite books to me. The following came from a manically scribbled list that was torn out of a notebook (I have put asterisks next to the ones I have read):
-The Polish Lieutenant
-Mosquito Coast
-Catch 22
-My Side of the Mountain
-Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
-A Suitable Boy
-Sarah Canary
-In the Skin of a Lion
-Life of Pi*
-The Dog That Wouldn't Be
-Master and Commander
-Even Cowgirls get the Blues
-Huckleberry Fin
-One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
-Wild Swans
-July People
-The Shipping News
-A Walk in the Woods
-Madam Bovary
-Canary Row
-East of Edan
-All The Pretty Horses
-The Brothers Karamazov
-The Idiot
-The Red and the Black
-War and Peace
-Dead Souls
-Ship of Fools
The Iliad
-The Odyssey
-The Bible By Everyone
Also:
Anything by:
Ursala Leguin
John Steinbeck
F.Scott Fitzgerald
Amy Chan
Micheal Ondajel
&
Emil Zola
Luck would have it that I had no ride lined up to get home (nearly an hour away from work) so Dan volunteered to drive me home. On the way home he asked what books I was reading. I judged him too soon (I admit) because I spouted out some authors I was quite sure he had no clue existed. Wrong! It turned out that Dan came from a rare background, having a father that worked as a NASA scientist and a mother who was the dean of the literature department at the University of Maryland. Dan was gifted with a first rate education, even attending the private school that Chelsy Clinton would later graduate from.
As a side note most of the east coast private schools are based on the Quaker religion (who knew?) and Dan later converted to the religion himself, minus the belief in Jesus. One of Dan's sayings was that he, "Saw light in everyone". He was one of those hippie types that did Owsley acid, found a different path then working a convention job (he worked under the table to avoid having his taxes go to fund war) and he lived on a Yacht that he built himself. He was probably a little crazy too.
Because I could learn a lot from this fellow, I asked him to recommend his favorite books to me. The following came from a manically scribbled list that was torn out of a notebook (I have put asterisks next to the ones I have read):
-The Polish Lieutenant
-Mosquito Coast
-Catch 22
-My Side of the Mountain
-Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
-A Suitable Boy
-Sarah Canary
-In the Skin of a Lion
-Life of Pi*
-The Dog That Wouldn't Be
-Master and Commander
-Even Cowgirls get the Blues
-Huckleberry Fin
-One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
-Wild Swans
-July People
-The Shipping News
-A Walk in the Woods
-Madam Bovary
-Canary Row
-East of Edan
-All The Pretty Horses
-The Brothers Karamazov
-The Idiot
-The Red and the Black
-War and Peace
-Dead Souls
-Ship of Fools
The Iliad
-The Odyssey
-The Bible By Everyone
Also:
Anything by:
Ursala Leguin
John Steinbeck
F.Scott Fitzgerald
Amy Chan
Micheal Ondajel
&
Emil Zola
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