A Meaningful Life Read Free Page A

dream.”
    â€œLet me do that,” said his wife, confiscating the carrots with a loving expression.
    Later, seated alone in the dimly lighted, curiously shaped living room of his apartment, full of dinner, sexually sated, and still pretty drunk, Lowell sipped ice water and brooded about his life. His parents owned a motel on Highway 30, just outside of Boise, Idaho. They were absentminded, pale, thin people who seemed completely unaware that they were running a love nest for downtown merchants, students from the junior college, and state politicians, among whom they were treasured for their permissiveness, probity, and discretion. (Actually, it was mostly just absentmindedness.) Lowell had a pleasant, undemanding childhood, free from influences either stimulating or depressing. He did well in school, largely because he had an excellent memory and an undemanding personality. It was some years before he realized that his parents ran a kind of self-service whorehouse, and even then it didn’t bother him much. Nobody else seemed to think anything of it; a couple of the regular girls had been his mother’s coffee friends for as long as he could remember, and it neither impressed nor upset him to think that some of the most respected and powerful men in the state took off their pants in rooms he cleaned every morning. He graduated fifth in his high-school class, behind three home-economics majors and a strange-looking veterinarian’s son who had bad skin and never talked to anybody, and who committed suicide the following September, the day after Labor Day.
    On the strength of his grades (and somewhat to his surprise), Lowell was accepted at Stanford, but his family had never made any money out of their motel despite the fact that it never had a slack season, and they didn’t have the money to send him. Lowell wanted to go to Stanford pretty badly now that it had accepted him, and after much thought he screwed up his courage and wrote a letter to the most powerful politician he knew, Judge Lionel B. Crosby. Judge Crosby stopped by the place every once in a while, and he was fond of saying that if there was anything he could do for you, just call. He had often expressed an admiration for Lowell’s intelligence, putting his hand on Lowell’s head and sort of kneading it as though trying to feel his brain through the skull. Lowell didn’t like him very much.
    Dear Judge Crosby [he wrote],
    I would not bother a man of your importance with a matter that cannot be very important to you, although it is very important to me, except that you have often suggested that if I ever encountered some problem, you would like to talk it over with me. I have decided to take you up on your offer. My problem is as follows: I have been accepted at Stanford University in California but they didn’t give me a scholarship and my family can’t afford it, so I was wondering if there is any fund or source of funds that the state, county, or other municipal body provides for any of the expenses of (prospective) college students in my position. If you know of any, I would certainly appreciate word of them. If you are too busy to do this, I will understand because I know what an imposition it is and I would not have written if you had not so kindly encouraged me to do so in the past, and I will just have to think of something else.
    Sincerely yours,
    Lowell P. Lake
    Lowell read it over and decided it was a pretty terrible letter. It didn’t look a bit like the kind of courtly, terse letter people were always writing to Sherlock Holmes when they implored his assistance, and Lowell put it aside. He made three more attempts. He was unable to finish two of them, and the syntax of the third was so tangled that it made no sense whatever. He scarcely knew what to do, and with a kind of sick despair he mailed the first letter after all. He immediately thought better of it, but it was in the box, and there was nothing he