Rest Assured, As Long As I Am

Sometimes The Bible In The Hand Of One Man Is Worse Than A Whisky Bottle In The Hand Of Another... There Are Just Some Kind Of Men Who - Who're So Busy Worrying About The Next World They've Never Learned To Live In This One, And You Can Look Down The Street And See The Results.

There Are Some Men In This World Who Are Born To Do Our Unpleasant Jobs For Us. Your Father's One Of Them.

I Suppose She Chose Me Because She Knew My Name; As I Read The Alphabet A Faint Line Appeared Between Her Eyebrows, And After Making Me Read Most Of My First Reader And The Stock-market Quotations From The Mobile Register Aloud, She Discovered That I Was Literate And Looked At Me With More Than Faint Distaste. Miss Caroline Told Me To Tell My Father Not To Teach Me Any More, It Would Interfere With My Reading.

Now, 75 Years Later In An Abundant Society Where People Have Laptops, Cell Phones, Ipods, And Minds Like Empty Rooms, I Still Plod Along With Books. Instant Information Is Not For Me. I Prefer To Search Library Stacks Because When I Work To Learn Something, I Remember It. And, Oprah, Can You Imagine Curling Up In Bed To Read A Computer? Weeping For Anna Karenina And Being Terrified By Hannibal Lecter, Entering The Heart Of Darkness With Mistah Kurtz, Having Holden Caulfield Ring You Up — Some Things Should Happen On Soft Pages, Not Cold Metal.

I Didn't Know How You Were Going To Do It, But From Now On I'll Never Worry About What'll Become Of You, Son, You'll Always Have An Idea.