The best fun he ever had as a child was watching his mother and other women come charging into Brink's Saloon brandishing rolling pins and smashing every bottle in sight.
``Bessy! Bessie,'' his father cried as he cowered under a shower of blows, his toupee sideways on his head.
But that kind of thing didn't happen every day.
Most days nothing happened except weather, and the Nebraska summer supplied little but sun and wind and an occasional thunder storm.
The farm kids worked hard all summer, but his dad worked at the store. He was a town kid so he spent his time staying out of the house. Watching the poker game at the Mercantile. Picking up prune stones and cracking them and eating the kernel. Collecting bones and waiting for the buyers at the station. There were bones everywhere in those days, but there wasn't much money in them.
That was the summer he kept finding things in his pocket. He'd start the day with empty pockets but by noon there'd be stuff in one of the side pockets of his waist overalls. Nothing valuable. A river pebble, a twig, a scrap of bright paper.
The day he found the river pebble he'd brought a sack of bones to the station. He stood in the bright wind and waited for the train. An old woman was trying to write a letter, but the wind kept blowing her papers around. He took the pebble from his pocket, ``Here, this will help,'' and he put the pebble on her paper to hold it down. She thanked him.
The day he found the twig in his pocket, he used it to retrieve a ring that had fallen into the linotype machine at the newspaper office.
One day he went with his mother to take a loaf of bread to a woman who lived alone on the prairie. Her claim shack stood alone with no tree or water. The woman was not there. The boy's mother wanted to leave a note with the bread but there was no paper. The boy took the scrap of paper from his pocket and they left the warm bread and a friendly note written on bright paper on the table.
He found a shred of scarlet silk tattered and blowing off a barb wire fence. He wrapped it around a piece of broken mirror to make a soft frame and he gave it to his sister.
In those long summer days he found his quiet talent - for taking almost nothing and turning it into almost something.