On the Divinity of Second Chances Read Online Free PDF

is superior to most—something to show my epic success. Why would I want to invite my family to spend my report card? Sure, I have some trusts just for tax purposes, but no one will know about them until I’m dead and gone. You know, I got in on the ground floor of some big ones. Big. Wal-Mart, for one. Wal-Mart has made me very wealthy. Most of my wealth was made in futures, though. Do you know how many people can pull that one off ? It takes an investing genius to do so.
    And although Anna doesn’t know exactly how much money we have, she knows it’s a lot and she knows I spend a significant amount of time checking on it. She knows I get cranky and sullen when the market is bad, and that my stomach hurts when it gets really bad, and that apparently I have heart attacks when it gets really, really bad.
    And so now, at Anna’s insistence, most of it sits in Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac, where I can live very comfortably on dividends and not have to watch the stock market. She wanted me to put it all in a regular old savings account. Can you imagine? A savings account! Millions of dollars not earning jack squat in a savings account? She threatened to leave me if I didn’t, saying that she did not wish to watch me kill myself with my bond market addiction. We compromised on these stable, federally insured bonds, where it earns higher interest than it would in a regular savings account, but where I don’t have to worry so much about the economy going to hell.
    It was corn that did it to me. When it hit the press that genetically engineered StarLink corn contaminated other American corn, no country wanted to import American corn. I found myself in bad shape. Didn’t see that one coming. For a while, it looked as though an obscene number of bushels of corn would be delivered to my house. I had to unload this corn, even if I had to give it away. I felt the pain in my chest shoot down my left arm. I knew what was happening. Three decades ago, when I was a young hotshot living in Chicago, I saw at least twenty men drop dead right there in the Mercantile Exchange of the same thing. Still, I couldn’t afford the luxury of a heart attack until I unloaded that damn corn. If I was going to drop dead, I wasn’t going to trouble Anna with an obscene amount of corn delivered to our house by default.
    Now, here I am, like a racehorse that injures his leg and never races again. I’ll never play the game like I used to. My genius is going to waste because my body can’t stand the stress any longer. I’m lucky to be alive; Anna insists on pointing that out to me all the damn time. Do I need someone to remind me of my mortality all the damn time? Do I need my wife to remind me that I have passed my prime and am now degenerating rapidly? No. I hated those weeks following the heart attack when Anna was nursing me. Indignant, to say the least. I had always been in charge. I had always been on top. I had been a man my family could depend on. Then, one day, I woke up to find she was stronger than me, and I was dependent on her. Where do I go from here? How do I get my pride back? By organizing garden tools in alphabetical order? No. How pathetic! What kind of man am I now? Worthless as all that corn. Sometimes I wish someone would just plow me under.
    I reach into one of my toolboxes for the latest Forbes magazine, take a good look around, and, confident that Anna is immersed in her painting, crack the magazine open. Ahh.

Forrest on Footwear and Cribbage
(May 19)
    Jade gave me a tent, but it was too hot to sleep in, and besides, I figured I’d better save it for the times when I really needed it. I slept in the open on the ground near some aspens and cottonwoods that grew near a spring. In the morning, I stared up at the beautiful branches of an old ponderosa pine and wanted to be held within them. I crawled out of my sleeping bag, took my jeans in my hand, and wrapped a leg around each side of her trunk. With one leg in each hand, I took