I dredged up that grad school memory yesterday, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. When I began to wonder what else the Internet had to say about the subject, I found myself reading a Fortune magazine article from 2005. This was the magazine that sent Agee and Evans to Alabama, and then declined to publish their report.

In 2005, Fortune went back to Alabama. This time the article made it into print, with the title The Most Famous Story We Never Told. Three generations removed from the summer of 1936, the families Agee and Evans immortalized have worked their way out of poverty. Younger generations are well on their way to escaping the anger the families felt about the book. The older generation is not.

Charles Burroughs, with whose family Agee and Evans lived, was a small boy at the time. Past 70 in 2005, he had neither forgotten nor forgiven “We never even got one of the damn books,” he said, “They should have had enough respect to come back afterwards. I know I would have. At least send a copy of the book.”

Maybe it’s a class thing. We aren’t supposed to have a class system in America, but we do. Everyone knows it. Hemingway and Fitzgerald argued about whether the rich really are different from you and me, but most of the non-rich agree that it is so.

Remember Leona Helmsley, the “Queen of Mean”? At Helmsley’s 1989 tax evasion trial, her maid testified that she once heard her boss say, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”

The remark, whether Helmsley actually ever said it or not, is a good barometer for measuring your own class identification. When you hear those words, how do you feel down in the pit of your stomach? If your first thought is something along the lines of “That was a reckless thing to say. No wonder she went to jail!” your people probably don’t come from the same place my people do. If the words stir up anger and the feeling of powerlessness, then you can probably understand why Charles Burroughs is still angry.

The way my home office is set up, the wall across from me is pretty much covered with bookshelves. The books, I confess, are not in good order. Each shelf is a jumble of old textbooks, classic novels, “brain candy” novels, computer references, and so on. When I looked at the shelves this morning, however, my eye for some reason went directly to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the photo-essay classic by James Agee and Walker Evans about sharecroppers in Alabama.

My relationship with the book has always been uneasy, for reasons that have more to do with me than with the book. The copy on my shelf is a paperback edition that I bought in the ’70s for a graduate school seminar at the University of Tulsa. I wasn’t prepared for the effect the book would have on me and didn’t actually read all of it, although I did the best I could. There was something about it that attracted me and repelled me at the same time. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

In the seminar session for which the book had been assigned, I had nothing to say. I was always a talker in class, and my silence struck the professor as odd. During the half-time break, he approached me and asked why I wasn’t contributing to the discussion. By this time, however, I had a pretty good idea of what was wrong. It was intensely personal. I told the professor that the class probably wouldn’t benefit from anything I might say, but he wasn’t having any of it. He kept trying to draw me out, and by the end of the break I agreed to say what was on my mind.

Which was this:

James Agee and Walker Evans were a couple of rich boys who set out to display poverty to other Northerners of their kind in such a way that everyone could cluck their tongues sympathetically but no one would have to get their hands dirty.

In 1936, they traveled to Alabama, about a thousand miles from the environs of Harvard University, their alma mater, in order to find the noble poor. As if poverty were a Southern problem, sort of like slavery, a thing that land-owning Southerners did to less fortunate Southerners.

But other things also happened in 1936. My parents got married that year. They lived in rural Maine, about 100 miles north of Harvard. The town of Stow, Maine, was a dirt-poor place where people set each others’ broken bones and pulled each others’ rotten teeth because there was no alternative, a place pretty much in the backyard of Agee and Evans, the concerned poet and photographer who felt they had to travel a thousand miles to get a look at poverty.

My parents lived on $300 for the first full year they were married. They made their home in an unpainted two-room house without electricity, running water or indoor plumbing. Nobody with money gave a damn about them. For me, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was essentially a diorama of my parents’ harsh life as newlyweds, and it made me sad and uncomfortable.

By the time I was done talking, the seminar was effectively over. Perhaps the silence in the room was partly about what I had insinuated about Agee and Evans. But mostly, I think, it was about what I had revealed about myself. In those days at TU, my New England accent was the same thing as money. Money mattered a lot in Tulsa. Everyone in the class, professor included, probably assumed that I came from money and that I naturally identified with Agee and Evans. But I identified with the sharecroppers, and I still do.

There are no photos of my parents’ wedding, by the way. The picture here shows my father, my grandmother, and three of my father’s sisters as they looked in about 1930. The little girl second from the right in the picture is the only one still alive. She is now past 80. No one in the family lives in poverty any more, but that’s where we came from.

I think that if Agee and Evans had grown up the way my father did, they would have produced a very different book.

OK, Google, here I am. A brand spanking new URL all set for you. But you never call, you never write. My Lijit search over there on the right doesn’t work without you, Google. And my AdSense? That is you, Google! Dammit, don’t get me started. I mean, what am I supposed to do? Play Elaine to your Lancelot and waste away waiting for you? I’m not feeling it, Google. I’m just not feeling it. So why don’t you crawl your robot ass over here right now and index my damn blog?

And while we’re on the subject of crawling, I know you guys at Yahoo! are up to here in alligators trying to fend off the barbarian hoards of Redmond. But still. You are in the search business, aren’t you? So search me, already!

As for you, Ask, it just hasn’t been the same since you dumped Jeeves. And you, MSN, what’s up with the butterfly? Maybe you guys have already stopped by. No offense, but how would I know? So it’s up to you, Google.

I’m waiting, Google. Don’t make me come over there…

Men, I want you just thinking of one word all season. One word and one word only: Super Bowl.

—Bill Peterson, football coach giving pep talk

When I was a kid I must have been absent the day they explained why boys were supposed to be so enthusiastic about sports, particularly football. Particularly professional football. As a week of pre-Super Bowl media hype draws to a close, I’m left wondering what I’m missing.

I suppose I’m just a product of my upbringing. My father wasn’t a sports fan. The game was never on at our house. As far as I know, the old man and I never played catch, even once. In that sense, my childhood was downright un-American. People certainly thought so in Oklahoma, where I lived for five years back in the 70’s.

To this day, I don’t even know the rules to football. I don’t think I have ever sat through an entire football game a single time in my life. My friend Mark, now deceased, dammit, used to turn to me any time any sports team was mentioned and deadpan, “FYI, that’s the name of an athletic organization, Pete.” “Thanks,” I would answer.

If Mark were alive tonight, he’d be listening to the game (he was blind) but he wouldn’t be trying to force it on me.