Dear Mr. Steinbeck: Great book (sorry you're dead)

Oh, great. I just finished reading a book by John Steinbeck and now I owe him another apology.

Pity that he’s dead. He was also dead the first time I owed him an apology. In fact, it was his dying that made me so regretful I hadn’t written to him.

We humans love our lists – the best movies we ever saw, the biggest fish we ever caught, the most beautiful actress we never caught (Sophia Loren) and the best novel we ever read (“East of Eden” by John Steinbeck.)

Actually, it’s virtually impossible to choose No. 1 in such matters. It’s like trying to decide whether your favorite food is fried chicken, pizza or chocolate chip cookies. I refuse to choose and I don’t have to.

But when it comes to books and you threaten to eat my cookies if I don’t tell you my favorite, then I would have to say Steinbeck’s “East of Eden.” (If you want to know why, read it. And get your hands off my cookies!)

I enjoyed “East of Eden” so much that I read it a second time. I read it aloud to Sharon not long after we met. We were just getting to know each other. To know me is to love Steinbeck. And vice versa.

Suffice it to say, some elderly Chinese-American characters in that book fortified me with the nourishing truth that a person is never too old to learn something new, including something difficult like another language.

I admired Steinbeck for that and for other nuggets. So I was miffed when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature and some twit at Time magazine wrote that he didn’t deserve it. The Time twit even got Steinbeck to admit it.

That was like Steinbeck. He was less conceited than most writers. He had the grace to be a little startled himself that he had won the Nobel Prize.

So I decided I would write to the novelist and tell him not to worry, that I knew in my heart he deserved a Nobel Prize.

And he did. If you read “East of Eden,” “Grapes of Wrath” and “Of Mice and Men” – you will find it hard to believe that three such diverse and original books were all written by the same guy.

Unfortunately, before I got around to writing a letter to Steinbeck, he died. To this day, I feel like a lazy bum about that.

Many of us have a bucket list – things we want to do before we croak. Finally hearing Willie Nelson sing in person last summer was near the top of my bucket list.

But we also have a bucket missed list – things we always wanted to do and never did, a sad collection of regrets, stumbles like my failure to write to Steinbeck.

The other day I ran across Steinbeck’s little travelogue book about a drive around America with his dog Charley. I had always rejected the book “Travels With Charley In Search of America,” assuming it was a little fluff he tossed off the top of his head late in life.

Not so. The book is better than that. He has a lot to say and he says it at a level as high in quality as what Willie Nelson does with a guitar.

I underestimated that book for 30 years – until I read it last month, and it proved me wrong. I guess you know what that means:

It means I owe him another letter.

But he’s dead. So I hope, wherever he and Charley are traveling these days, he will consider this remorseful column my sincere and embarrassed apology.

Bill Hall can be contacted at wilberth@cableone.net or at 1012 Prospect Ave., Lewiston, ID 83501.