So, one of the birthday goals is to read a biography of each US President. This goal came from writing a poem or two starring a few of our Presidents. Then someone asked me if I was going to write a poem about each US President. I thought that it sounded like a good challenge. The problem, however, was that I just didn’t know enough about them to write about them. And a project was born.
It turns out that there are a whole bunch of people doing a Presidential Reading Project of some sort.
So far, I have read about Presidents Lincoln, Polk, Clinton and Kennedy. I have started in on Presidents Adams (the father), Wilson and Madison.
Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, another book that I am reading right now wrote 40 Ways to Look at JFK, which I finished reading last night. Being of a generation that was not a direct witness to this personality and relies solely on the images that seem to be everywhere, my mind was blown by this bio. The presentation alone was interesting, reminding me that people all look different depending on how we look at them. I’ll say this, I came away from that book seeing Kennedy as very human, as opposed to a sterile icon. This is actually most of the point of this particular goal. You see, the original poems that started it all were about those moments that these men had, which we don’t think about much. We think of them in terms of their jobs, what they represented, but hardly as people like us, people who did things like blow their noses and occasionally burn toast.
I have about eight months to complete this project. It is ambitious, but I feel sure that I can do it. Actually, I hear President Madison calling right now.