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Show -123 mother?" "I love you." But he looked away quicklv. "Never mind," I said. "Tell me something else. Why did you want to be a sculptor?" "Life is lousy," he said. "What kind of an answer is that?" "If life was good I wouldn't care what I did, but because it's lousy I have to do something to make up for it." I thought about that for a minute. "The Indians," I said. "What about the Indians?" "You're always telling us how happy they were." "The Indians," my father said. "Well you see they never did learn to stand back the way we do, and look at themselves, What we have in mind when we say life, they couldn't have understood at all. That's our curse as civilized men: we can say life is this, or life is that, and we know what we mean." What he meant was a mystery to me that night, but it sank in deep; the proof is that I can still repeat it word for word now. "Is this the kind of thing fathers are supposed to tell their kids?" I said. He looked so helpless that I wanted to laugh, and I wanted to kill him. "I don't know," he said. |