I

AFTERWORD

t’s getting to be early evening now, and about time for me to get up
from the computer, having made some progress on the pages you
just read. Years ago I got myself out of the busy city and set up my
family here, on a little spread outside town, with a picture of Oliver
Sacks and his “No!” sign hanging above my desk. Now that my
writing day is done, I’ve got work to do on the farm—chickens to
feed, some donkeys to sneak carrots to, and fences to inspect. Not
unlike the plot of that Zen poem about the taming of the bull, my
neighbor’s longhorn has gotten onto my property, and I need to go
find him.
My young son helps me load some tools into the back of the ATV
—“the tractor, the twahktor!” he calls it—and then I hug him and
head down the levee, through to the middle pasture, and back down
by the creek. The fence there has started to weaken, from the
elements and the explorations of the wayward bull, and I spend the
next hour grabbing and pinching T-post clips. You take the clip and
wrap it around the back of the post, grab the end with the pliers,
hooking it over the wire and twisting it tight so it can’t come loose.
Wrap, grab, hook, twist. Wrap, grab, hook, twist.
No thinking, just doing.
The sweat gets going quickly in Texas, and my leather gloves are
shades darker almost as soon as I start. But by the end the fence is
tight. I tell myself it will hold—or so I hope. Next up is moving the
hay, backing the buggy up to the round bale, letting the arm fall over
top of it, and then gunning the engine of the ATV. It catches, teeters,
flips up, and falls over, two thousand pounds of food now lying flat
on the trailer. By the time I’ve driven to where I need to drop it, the