A Meaningful Life Read Online Free PDF

asked.
    â€œPop what like that? I don’t know what you’re talking about. You forgot to kiss my back.” He always gave her a gentle kiss between the shoulderblades after he hooked or unhooked her bra. It was very important to both of them, and he’d forgotten all about it. He gave her a halfhearted peck, but the whole thing was already spoiled.
    â€œI mean your gum,” he said. “I wanted to know if you always popped it like that. I guess it’s not important. Let’s forget about it.”
    â€œYou bet your life I’ll forget about it, buster,” she said, swiftly climbing into her blouse and throwing her skirt around her somehow. “I’m going back to the dorm. I think you’d better take a good long ride and calm down or something. You can call me in the morning.”
    She slammed the door and strode off down the parking lot. Lowell would have followed her but he hadn’t put his pants on yet. He knew he couldn’t follow her in his Jockey shorts. The people in the other cars would see him and honk their horns. He imagined himself trying to run back to the car in a half-squat with his shirttail desperately pulled way down. Then he imagined himself actually overtaking her by some fluke and having an argument with her in his Jockey shorts. It was impossible in Jockey shorts; he couldn’t argue with anybody. Along with pajamas, Jockey shorts were possibly the dumbest garment ever conceived by the mind of man.
    It was far too late to pursue her by the time he got his pants on. Instead, he went back to his dormitory, stole his roommate’s tent, and ran away to Nevada.
    By the time he reached Sacramento, he began to feel foolish. By the time he reached the Sierra, he began to feel positively terrified. The last of his forward inertia ran out in Truckee. He pulled into a service station, filled the tank, and headed back toward school. It wouldn’t work. The life of Thoreau, testing his mettle against a harsh, muscular climate, wresting a living from the barren desert soil—it was not for him. He couldn’t do it, any more than a cow could fly, and that was that. In the only plausible vision that assembled itself before his mind’s eye, he wasn’t struggling titanically with the elements and roaring his defiance like Lear; he was sitting in the middle of an alkali flat waiting for his pocket money to run out or his tent to blow over, whichever happened first. The whole notion was absurd on the face of it. He wasn’t cut out for that kind of life. He didn’t even know the first thing about it, and he had enough sense to realize that the Nevada desert wasn’t the place to find out. He hadn’t really wanted to go to Nevada anyway. He really wanted to marry his girl and stay in town. He still didn’t know what kind of a life he wanted to have, exactly, but one thing was clear: making an ass of himself on an alkali flat wasn’t part of it. His immediate priorities were clear: first, to graduate and get his diploma; second, to get married. These were concrete desires, almost facts, almost within his grasp. Nevada was fantasy, and flight was out of the question. As for peace and solitude and the life of the mind, he would work something out once he was properly graduated and married. He never had to see his in-laws again, and after they were gone it would be as though he’d made them up in order to have something funny to talk about at parties. Anyway, if people had come looking for him in Nevada, they probably would have found him right off the bat, and there would have been a lot of embarrassing questions.
    Feeling drained but clear in his goals, he climbed back over Donner Pass in the gray false dawn, meeting trucks coming down at dangerous speed with headlights on and loads swaying. Below, on the rocks, lay bodies of other trucks that hadn’t made it, their cabs squashed, their tires burned, their vans half-buried under