“What started all this?” I asked, trying really to evoke some shared recognition of how far this talk had come since he first sat soggy down and told me how Glenn Barrett had told him I was a writer and maybe could help him with his university application.
“Walesa,” he said calmly and, I think, a little sadly, and feeling guilty I took the Flintstones for myself in grudging recognition of his courage.
Courage, that is, to trudge Pleasant Lake in search of not an honest but a cultured man, not all this bullshit about Solidarity and the little red jailhouse. Any fool can get caught up in history, but it takes a brave man to walk the shores of an out-of-the-way lake looking to change his life.