Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [61]
Though my dad always kept his office door open, we all knew that he was most comfortable alone. He was a quiet, attentive listener; when talking to his co-workers, I was always struck by how much they seemed to adore him. My dad could listen to a person ramble on without ever feeling the need to interrupt. Nor, unless asked, would he ever offer advice. Instead, he would clarify your problem—rewording what you’d said in a way that crystallized your thoughts and allowed you to solve the problem on your own.
When talking to Micah—and later, when talking to me—his routine was always the same. He would ask what was going on regarding a specific situation, then would listen while you filled in the void. And the more Micah—or I—talked, the less he would say. Sometimes, these one-sided conversations lasted upward of an hour. We would usually leave his office thinking more clearly, and believing he was one of the smartest people we’d ever met.
In the end, my dad gave us three ironclad rules that we were bound to throughout our teenage years. They were:
A. Don’t drink and drive.
B. Don’t get a girl pregnant.
C. Be in by your curfew—midnight as a freshman, and increasing half an hour with every passing year in high school.
My dad, by the way, was very shrewd to offer us these particular rules when he did. We would soon be reaching the age where one or another might become an issue, but since we were following all three already, they seemed entirely reasonable at the time. Even more important, by our teenage years we’d been on our own for so long that anything more would have seemed draconian (too little, too late) and no doubt would have led to outright rebellion. These, however, seemed well thought out, and Micah agreed to abide by them.
Micah, it must be said, followed those rules, and only those rules. Everything else, it seemed, was up for grabs, and for the next couple of years he continued to press the outer limits. On more nights than I can count, I remember listening to my mom and dad fretting about him.
“He just keeps getting wilder,” one would say. “What do we do?”
A long silence would follow.
“I don’t know,” the other one would answer.
That year brought about changes for me, too. I began competing in track and field, and though not great, I was one of the better freshmen on the team. This isn’t saying much, since in the distance events, there were only a handful of us.
Still, I loved track and field, and as fate would have it, there was a genuine track and field legend who also lived in Fair Oaks. Billy Mills, an Oglala Sioux Indian raised in poverty in the Black Hills of South Dakota, had won the Olympic gold medal in the 10,000 meter run at the Tokyo games in 1964. It is still regarded as the greatest upset in Olympic track and field history. He’s the only American ever to win the Olympic 10,000 meters, and proving his talent for posterity, broke the world record the following year. Years earlier, I’d read about him in one of the many almanacs I’d perused as a kid, and I’d been fascinated by his story. When I learned that he lived in Fair Oaks, I was ecstatic, and I remember running to the kitchen to tell my mother.
“Oh Billy,” she said, nodding. “I know him and his wife, Pat.”
My eyes widened. “You do?”
“Yeah,” she said easily. “They get their glasses at our office. They’re wonderful people.”
All I could do was stare at her, thinking that I