Wondering why there’s not more wondering

From time to time, I try to pay respect to my former beloved literature professors like Nancy Story by reading classic literature.

I pull myself away from pop culture and its modern day frou-frou and step into the classics of serious, enduring writers like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams and Eudora Welty.

Occasionally, but only rarely, I will venture away from the brilliance of Southern writers and read a work by Hemingway or Fitzgerald. Both, by the way, were married to Southern women. Hemingway married a woman from Pigget, Arkansas, and Fitzgerald, of course, was married to the wildly spirited, eventually tragic Zelda from Alabama.

Recently, I read the highly-acclaimed Walker Percy novel, The Moviegoer. Percy, who grew up in Mississippi, lived in the New Orleans suburb of Covington for most of his adult life. In The Moviegoer, set in New Orleans, the main character, Binx Bolling, confesses to being a wonderer. Never a moment without wonder, he says. My favorite line – one I truly understand – is, “Not for five minutes will I be distracted from the wonder.”

That’s me.

I spend my life wondering. I always have. When I was 15, the summer I spent most of my time on the creek bank behind our house reading and writing, I wrote a whimsical poem of my attachment to wonder and how “sometimes I wonder about the silliest things like who loves who and why the sky so blue should be that certain hue.”

Like Walter Mitty, the bum-fuzzled protagonist in another American classic, I sometimes get lost in a daydream of wonder. Like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube, I turn pieces of a puzzle over and over, trying to make it all make sense.

For instance, why, do you suppose, “M” comes before “N” in the alphabet? The single-humped letter should precede the double-humped letter. That’s logical.

Why are pimentos on the vegetable aisle and not next to the pimento-stuffed green olives? Pimentos should stick together. Don’t you think?

Why have the light bulbs in my walk-in closet – lights that, as you might imagine, are used quite a lot – lasted for 10 years? Yet, the bulbs in my hallway – lights used in a similar manner to those in the closet – blow out every six to eight months.

In an antique store in Paducah, Kentucky, I found myself wondering about the framed 8x10 of the beautiful woman. How does a photo only 35 or 40 years old find its way out of a family’s possession and into a store to sell for a few dollars? I wondered about that a lot.

“Don’t you wonder why homeless people live in New York City and they don’t go to a warmer climate?” I asked a friend.

He shook his head. “No. Things like that happen never cross my mind.”

Some people, I suppose, aren’t the wondering kind.

I wonder why.