“Oh, yes. But I had a book about boxing—with pictures. You can’t learn much from pictures, but I got some practice too, and that helped. I didn’t want to win, anyway. That’s what I like about games of strength or skill—I’m fairly matched, and I don’t have to be always watching in case I might show off or try to boss somebody around.”
“You must have tried bossing sometimes.”
“In books, they all cluster around the boy who can teach new games and think up new things to play. But I found out that doesn’t work. They just want to do the same thing all the time—like hide and seek. It’s no fun if the first one to be caught is ‘it’ next time. The rest just walk in any old way and don’t try to hide or even to run, because it doesn’t matter whether they are caught. But you can’t get the boys to see that, and play right, so the last one caught is ‘it’.”
Timothy looked at his watch.
“Time to go,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed talking to you, Dr. Welles. I hope I haven’t bored you too much.”
Welles recognized the echo and smiled appreciatively at the small boy.
“You didn’t tell me about the writing. Did you start to keep a diary?”
“No. It was a newspaper. One page a day, no more and no less. I still keep it,” confided Tim. “But I get more on the page now. I type it.”
“And you write with either hand now?”
“My left hand is my own secret writing. For school and things like that I use my right hand.”