I want to start a somewhat different sort of conversation here: What made you into a book reader?

[Sweeney]

40. It is a shame for a man to act like a child

I never got a chance to do that really, to be selfish, and live for myself until after I got our of that family situation. I think my wife never had a chance to be a child, but she is on her own now, and at fifty, I hope she finds the time. That is just the way it is, and it is not necessarily bad to have responsibilities, or for others to have expectations of us. Like I tell my grandchildren: Don't forget to be children. Play is the work of childhood, and we will all soon enough forget how it was, until children or grand children will remind us to stick our face in a flower to see how it feels AND smells.

I don't know if I will ever escape that feeling that I might have been a contender if I hadn't been so hamstrung. Now, it is as my life has always been: doing the best I can with what I got. I don't want to act like it was all terrible. Where I grew up the people were tough, and way too cruel, and everywhere we went, we went with brother in tow. But life was a great adventure, always a plan, pack a lunch and stay all day. If my life was rather earth bound, we did sometimes get my brother into the trees which was no mean feat for my little brother, and our friend. We were all half kid, half engineer. If you ever see the movie: Stand by Me, and imagine it with a kid in a steel cart, and all the gear hung in some fashion and us pushing, you would about have it. Years after the fact I ran into people I never even knew who never forgot the sight of us in our travels. And we had the run of the place. No one ever messed with us. They knew we would fight. Where I grew up, that is what you had to know about everyone, and what everyone was certain of everyone. We found the limits of our world which was the new world, one of the first outposts of New France. Reading gave me a sense of the world beyond our limits. Our world was our navel. My world was the soul.