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Show -275 see." "How can you be so calm?" Jacob said. "I'm not calm." "Don't you think it's horrible? What he did, I mean. Jesus, I can't even bring myself to say the words." My brother was a big man and he looked incongruous and comical folded up in the passenger seat of Adam's Volkswagen. His knees and elbows overflowed everywhere; his shoulders pushed against the door. "Yes," I said. An old woman sitting on her front steps waved as we rolled slowly by; at her feet a black dog soaked up the sun, long delicate veined ears trailing on the concrete walk. Many people sit out their lives in that sort of dog-contentment, untouched by those big transcendental questions that racked all of us Skinners, even Jacob. Carlo would have said especially Jacob. It's Adam who taught us not to be satisfied with things-as-they-are. By his example. Not that he didn't have reasons to be bitter. Hammering stones all his life, or trying to work greasy clay into Beauty, Form, Meaning. Jesus what a sad life it must have been, with in the end nobody but Alice, that dusty intelligent flower, for company. His work was laughed at by the university professors who pasted strips of fur on urinals and called that art. Conceivably it was-I'm no judge- |