Young boys do stupid things. I was no exception. Back then if you had asked, “What was I thinking?” I could only reply that I wasn’t. In retrospect, my justification was being a city kid in the winter, duly enrolled in the school of hard knocks.
Each instant — while jumping from the top of one moving train car to the next — inspires an intoxication of worldly detachment and a paradoxical dichotomy.
What surprises me most was not how its past intimidation had diminished (dying used to seem daunting), but how mundane the notion had become after contemplating it for so long.
Pain. It was never a stranger. When they were still together, Freda once said he not only had a high tolerance for it, he seemed to embrace it. Her comment was made after he crashed his motorcycle on a rural backroad and pushed the bike a mile home with a freshly broken arm to grab…
