When I went in for the night, the bushes were all pruned back, and except for the enormous heap in the center of the yard,
things were already looking a whole lot better. The next day he was back.
And when I smiled and said, “Hi, Mr. Duncan,” he smiled back and said, “Call me Chet, won’t you?”
He looked at the hammer in my hand and said, “I take it we’re starting on the fence today?”
Chet taught me how to plumb a line for the pickets, how to hold a hammer down on the end of the handle instead of choking up on it,
how to calculate an adjusted spacing for the pickets, and how to use a level to get the wood exactly vertical.
We worked on the fence for days, and the whole time we worked we talked.
It wasn’t just about his wife, either. He wanted to know about the sycamore tree
and seemed to understand exactly what I meant when I told about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
“It’s that way with people, too,” he said, “only with people it’s sometimes that the whole is less than the sum of the parts.”
I thought that was pretty interesting. And the next day during school I looked around at the people I’d known since elementary school,
trying to figure out if they were more or less than the sum of their parts.
전체재생
다음페이지
문장검색