Besides being an old school robber baron Henry Huntington founded the sprawling Huntington Library , Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in Pasadena. It’s a gorgeous place to visit and stroll around while immersing oneself in various indoor and outdoor splendor. It felt like Disneyland for grown-up gardeners, artists and lovers of historic architecture. Somebody working there also has a pretty good sense of humor. While the main Huntington Library building is closed and under construction for the next 100 years the Art Museum is currently featuring a small but clever literary exhibit entitled “Damaged Goods”displaying not just a few rare volumes from the Huntington’s vast library collection but a dozen or so books written or printed by well known historical figures and other famous authors who were either known or suspected to have ADHD, Asperger’s or just may have been clumsy shlemiels who’s priceless manuscripts were ruined (“To err is human”) by their own distractibility or ham handed butterfingered mistakes including knocking bottles of ink, whiskey, red wine or whatever all over their cherished first edition masterpieces. The Ben Franklin handwritten autobiography is the best single example (see video) which is somewhat akin to me impulsively polishing and spray painting antique family heirlooms with gold spray paint to give them more of a “modern pirate look” and immediately reducing their Antique Roadshow appraised value to minus one cent. Honestly, Ben Franklin made me feel a tad bit better about my abundance of boo-boos in life.

But life is not just about being an inept shmendrik or even a bumbling fool at times.
It’s also about personal redemption and making up for past mistakes. In the very same autobiography Franklin wrote about helping a drunken passenger dry out a water soaked book after the man fell overboard during a boat trip to New York. God does work in strange ways….even for shlemiels.