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When I was an infant, we lived in Alpine. My Dad was a graduate student and had a teaching assistant's job at Sul Ross.

Just after high school graduation, my Dad and I and a friend and his Dad spent nearly two weeks on dirt bikes in Big Bend. Dad was a natural storyteller, and evening camps were a perfect setting. When he came back from World War II and the South Pacific he had a 90% nervous disability, what would be called PTSD these days.

He horse-traded into a BSA Golden Flash and spent a couple of years in the interior of Mexico, came back with experience of what cane farmers endure, and earned an economics degree from Vanderbilt. And then kept it a secret, never listing it in his resumé because he thought economists were a dreadful lot.

He didn't need it. By the time he finished curing his PTSD he had three undergraduate degrees, a master's, his PhD, and many miles on his BSA.

I'm humbled to come from such stock, particularly since one summer when I was still a tricycle pilot Dad saw a chance to get some extra money, working construction as an electrician at Dow Chemical in Freeport. How many PhD's do you suppose are comfortable in the ivory tower, can tie their own shoelaces, and can wire three-phase 440?

Anyway, Dad loved poetry and literature.