You could not have heard me for very long without hear me making references to my early childhood

and my boyhood. And the fact that I was quite a mischievous little fellow. And for my mischievous

deeds, I received a little bit more than my fair just reward from my father.

My father believed in one form of justice, his.

Mercy was only administered on few occasions at the insistence of my mother.

And so you can understand my ardent desire

that whenever I got into mischief,

I wanted to run as far away from my father as possible,

especially if he saw me.

Now, if he had not seen me, you can understand also my ardent desire to try to beg,

bribe, and plead with my siblings not to tell him.

Suffice it to say that at the age of 11, I changed schools without telling my father.

And he had to find out the hard way.

I was what you would call full of initiatives since I was a little fellow.

I really was. That's the nice way to put it. But the point I'm

trying to make is beyond this, is that I did have a boyhood friend, and my boyhood friend

got into some trouble, not as much and as many times as I did, but he got into some of the

trouble with me.

And what used to really confuse me and has confused me for a long time is that when I got into trouble, I ran away as far as I could from my father.

But when he got into trouble, he ran to his father.

And I couldn't understand that.

That was very confusing to me.

...