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Show -244 telephone. Why don't you and Jacob come by the office tomorrow morning?" "I'm going to be gone all day," I said. "Can it wait a bit?" He was up to no good-I could feel it in the subtle vibrations of the phone against my ear. I remembered this morning. Morning, alone, before anyone else is up, is the best time to think back on your life and try to make sense out of it. It's a time of particular clarity; the stomach is empty and the brain is full. Though sometimes, lacking the ballast of a solid meal, with nobody around to tell me to settle down, I get too sad, too happy, too depressed or, occasionally, too pleased with myself. In my way I'm as moody as my father, though not so given to gloom and self-mourning as the old man was. I peak higher than he did, and bottom out above his worst levels also. I had made myself a cup of coffee and carried it out to the garden. The sky was already that shade of blue which appears sometimes right along the edge of the blackest summer thunderheads. I couldn't find any clouds, but Adam's house is situated in a natural bowl, with tall trees on three sides and the ridge where the railroad runs on the fourth; for all I knew I might have been seeing the only clear spot over Oregon. Somebody looking down from thirty thousand feet would have seen a circular opening, an eye in the clouds, and smack in the middle of that round eye, me, Buck Skinner, |
