The Quantum July by Ron King

Author:Ron King
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780375890635
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2007-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

13

Danny stood with the whip in his hand.

“You really do have a gift, you know,” his father said from behind his shoulder. “You remind me of my friend Jerome. The first time he held this whip, it was like he was born for it.” He looked at Danny more closely. “That’s a strange thing, to see that someone is born for something. It almost never happens.”

Danny’s head swam. It was as if his father had reached into his heart and touched the very thing that mattered most to him in the world. What were you born to do, Danny Parsons?

“It’s funny,” his father continued. “Our purpose—what we’re supposed to be—it sits in us like a piece of sand in an oyster, and we work it and work it in our own way. If we’re lucky, we get a pearl. Not many people are that lucky.”

“Are you still looking?”

Danny’s father took the whip from him and looped it in his hand. “I look every day. I never stop looking for who I’m supposed to be.”

“But you know it isn’t a guy in a grocery store,” Danny said, laughing.

His father didn’t laugh in return. He stared at the whip. “I don’t know if that’s true, either. I don’t know a lot, although Jerome did everything he could to help me.”

“Your friend from high school?”

“My best friend. We graduated together, he went to Stanford and I went to Harvard, and then, about fifteen years ago, he took me to Tibet. Ever hear of it?”

Hear of it? Danny wanted to say. Just ask me. Gross national product, major crops, population, borders, religion. He knew almost everything about it. It had been one of the most exotic places he’d ever imagined being from. But he just nodded at his father.

“Jerome’s still there.”

“In Tibet?”

His father nodded. “He’s a Buddhist monk. He lives in one of those remote Himalayan monasteries that the Chinese government leaves alone.”

Danny sat on a bale staring at his father. The afternoon light behind him was strong, and he almost glowed. Could this really be my father? he thought. Could it? “But you came home?” he asked.

His father laughed. “I don’t think I was supposed to be a monk. When Jerome gave me this whip, he meant for me to understand that I was supposed to be something else. I like to think of it as a metaphor. In one object, so many things are expressed. It is power, it is the opener of doors, it is the creator of order. Mostly, though, I just like using it.”

“So what happened when you came home?”

“I’ve told you all this before,” his father said, smiling.

No you haven’t, no you haven’t, Danny screamed in his head. “Tell me again,” he said. “Please.”

Danny’s father hung the whip on a nail on a center post of the barn and sat across from him. “I came back to finish my graduate degree. Met your mother. Moved to the family farm. Worked at the SuperValu for a while, then moved on to other things—more interesting things.

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