A Quiet Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

working, albeit at a welfare workshop for people with handicaps. In any event, if Eeyore was in an accident, that in itself would be a serious matter!
    When it comes to such seriousness , undoubtedly Mother knows more than any of us. She's the kind of person who, once she falls silent, dwells on a problem all by herself until she comes up with a satisfactory solution. So it goes without saying that Mother must have had good reason to decide to leave us here and go to America. I tried not to be too nosy, but I asked her before their departure what it was that had set her heart on accompanying Father.
    Father was motivated to go to one of the several campuses of the University of California as a writer-in-residence because, having already attended a number of symposia at UC, he had made friends he respects in the English and history departments there. If this was all that had motivated him, though, he could very well have gone by himself, and lived in the faculty quarters as he had on previous occasions.
    Mother's laconic explanation for all this was that Father was in a “pinch.” She also said that Father himself had admitted to her that it was a “pinch” such as he had never experienced.
    If I detected any change in Father these days, it was only that I sometimes found him distracted. Because I'm the type who doesn't immediately feel shock when I hear something, but who slowly dwells on it afterwards, Mother had already filled me in on Father's condition by first telling me he had previously experienced several “pinches,” each of which he had managed to overcome. Once, for instance, by secluding himself in our cabin in Gumma, and another time by taking on an agreeable job at a university in Mexico. What Father needs at such places of shelter is a lush growth of trees. Serious as she was, Mother chuckled when she said that no matter how shattering Father's many pinches had been, he had always taken stock of the trees that were essential to his hideaway: the Erman's white birches in Kita-Karuizawa, the bougainvillea and flame trees in Mexico City, and now the live oaks and redwoods in California. While this was somewhat amusing, at the same time I felt sorry for Father, knowing that he had grown up in a valley enclosed by forests, and so in a pinch would try to return to a place where there were trees.
    This time, too, it so happened that Father, to overcome a “pinch,” would go to California, a land of trees he himselfhad already taken measure of. At first he was to have gone alone, as he had until now, but in the meantime Mother began to feel that, in any event, Father was too distracted. … First she thought of having Eeyore accompany him. However, an acquaintance of hers at the welfare workshop, a person with some experience, told her that someone with a mental handicap would encounter visa problems. So one morning, a couple of days later, Mother disclosed her intention to go with him. Father himself was there at the breakfast table, as large as life. Father is the kind of person who, whenever he feels he might inconvenience any of us over something about himself, excessively tries to make up for it by carrying everything on his own shoulders. But this day he remained totally distracted.
    Reorganizing my thoughts now, I think I embraced two conflicting sentiments when seeing him in that state of mind: one, a feeling of anger at his slack attitude, irrespective of the nature of his “pinch”; the other, an immediate feeling that he was aging. Having seen Father confronted with similar predicaments even before their marriage, Mother said she was used to it, but. she gave me no concrete clue as to what the new “pinch” involved. And so mingled in me were the fear and sadness that, despite all the “pinches” Father had overcome by himself, he was now facing one in which a mere seclusion of his person at a place of shelter offered him no solution at all.
    The manner in which I have written about things until