The Perfect Skill

For nearly an hour one afternoon, a boy with nothing to do stood under a walnut tree, tossing and catching a walnut.

The boy became so familiar with the weight of that one walnut and the height and configuration of one part of one branch — a place where the branch forked, one half of it angling upward from the other — that for five, ten, nearly 20 tosses in a row, he could make the walnut rise rom his right hand, float in a rounded arc between the two parts of the branch, then fall into his left hand. He became, for about 10 minutes, an expert at it: afterwards, he never again tried it. He barely remembered doing it.

But if the safety of the world, at that particular hour, had depended on precisely that skill, this boy would have been our savior. He, and no one else in all of time could have done it. ~ April 24, 1982