Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.
People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.
He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they’re substantial, that they’re not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to.
It was on such a night as this that the unhappy things came about.
The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all’s that happened and by all that could and will happen next.
He smiled at me, and it was not the worried, nervous smile from before, but a smile that meant he was pleased. And I don’t remember him ever smiling at me that way again.
It’s odd, though, what makes you think about the truth. It’s so rarely involved in the events of your life. I quit thinking about the truth for a time then. Its finer points seems impossible to find among the facts.
It was if we all sensed we’d be gone someday soon in a sudden instant – often it happened in the middle of the night – and didn’t want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.
And what there is to learn from almost any human experience is that your own interests usually do not come first where other people are concerned – even the people who love you – and that is all right. It can be lived with.