How do I explain the mystery that was my father?
Most of what I learned of any value, I learned from him. He was a hard man to get to know; he didn’t talk a lot, but his face spoke volumes. As his only son, he had hoped I’d take over his carpentry business one day. Several attempts to indoctrinate me to carpentry, however, cured that delusion. Still, as a young man in college, summers gave us opportunities to get know one another again. On one occasion, he said to me, “It’s a good thing you have brains: if you had to make a living with your hands, you’d starve!” It was a hard, but mostly accurate truth.
