Leonard and Hungry Paul

It had turned into a nice spring morning: bright and warm on the sunny side of the street, but in the shade there was a head cold waiting for anyone who thought it was an early summer and went out hatless.

But it was the nature of being a parent. The kids’ lives are their own. From day one you are handing it back to them bit by bit, until they move on.

Mother/daughter holidays are normal of course, and father/son trips are famously storied as a way to come of age. Mother/son holidays, though, have the connotation that one of them must be a burden on the other. But truth be told, they were well suited as travelling companions.

perquisite.

The deep peace that he now felt was in a minor key. It was not blissful, but melancholy. It was a profound acceptance of things as they were, devoid of superficial preferences. The weight of effort that it took to be happy was lifted from his bones.

But Hungry Paul seemed to be able to maintain his peace where another man might have declared war on themselves and those around him. What did he think about? The answer is, quite simply, nothing. Hungry Paul had been blessed with a mental stillness which had become his natural state over the years. His mind worked perfectly fine and he had all the

Watch him the next time you spill something. His whole attitude is that it has already happened, and he just moves on to cleaning it up. He’s all about what’s going on now.

Given that all good ideas have a natural buoyancy that forces them to the surface,

He thought about how, whenever he read something he wanted to share as a child, if only because he would burst with amazement if he didn’t, she used the same phrase, a phrase that Leonard hoped every parent used with their children every day: ‘Tell me.’ With her attention undivided, he would gush with every last detail, urging her to share his awe,