Better-Late-than-Never.docx

Unit3 passage1

Better Late than Never

[1] He was lying there in the grass, hiding and thinking.
[2] He had studied the little girl's habits. He knew she would come outside her grandfather's house mid-afternoon to play.
[3] He hated himself for this.
[4] In his whole miserable life he'd never considered anything so callous as kidnapping.
[5] Yet here he was, lying in the grass, hidden by trees from the house, waiting for an innocent , red-haired, two-year-old girl to come within reach.
[6] It was a long wait; there was time to think.
[7] Maybe all his life Harlan had been in too much of a hurry .
[8] He was five when his Hoosier farmer father had died.
[9] At fourteen he dropped out of Greenwood School and hit the road .
[10] He tried odd jobs as a farmhand, hated it.
[11] Tried being a bus conductor and hated that.
12] At sixteen he lied about his age and joined the Army—and hated that, too. When his one-year enlistment was up he headed for Alabama [N], tried blacksmithing and failed.
[13] He became a railroad locomotive fireman with
the Southern Railroad. He liked that. Figured maybe he had found himself.
[14] At eighteen he got married, and within months, wouldn't you know she announced she was pregnant the day he announced he'd been fired again?
[15] Then, one day, while he was out job hunting , his young wife gave away all their possessions and went home to her parents.
[16] Then came the depression .
17] Harlan couldn't win for losing, as they said.
[18] He really tried.
[19] Once, while working at a succession of railroad jobs, he tried studying law by correspondence .
[20] But he dropped out of that, too.
[21] He tried selling insurance , selling tires.
[22] He tried running a ferryboat , running a filling station. No use.
[23] Face it—Harlan was a loser.
[24] And now here he was hiding in the weeds outside Roanoke , Virginia , planning a kidnapping .
[25] As I say, he'd watched the little girl's habits, and knew about her afternoon playtime .
[26] But, this one day, she did not come out to play, so his chain of failures remained unbroken .
[27] Late in life he became chief cook and bottle washer at a restaurant in Corbin. And did all right until the new highway bypassed the restaurant.
[28] And then his expected life span ran out .
[29] He was not the first man nor would he be the last to arrive at the twilight of life with nothing to show for it.
[30] The bluebird of happiness, or whatever, had always flown just out of reach.
[31] He'd stayed honest—except for that one time when he had attempted kidnapping. In fairness to his name it must be noted that it was his own daughter he'd meant to kidnap from his runaway wife.
[32] And they both returned to him, the next day, anyway.
[33] But now the years had passed by and a lifetime was gone and he and they had nothing.
[34] He had not really felt old until that day the postman brought his first Social Security check. That day, something within Harlan resented , resisted , and exploded.
[35] The Government was feeling sorry for him.
36] It was time to give up and retire .
[37] His restaurant customers in Corbin said they'd miss him, but his Government said sixty-five candles on the birthday cake is enough. They sent him a pension check and told him he was “old”.
[38] He said, “Nuts.”
[39] And he got so angry he took that $105 check and started a new business.
[40] Today that business is still prospering . For over twenty years until his death he carried on with remarkable success.
[41] For the man who failed at everything but one thing... the man who might have been a law-breaking kidnapper had he not also failed at that ... the man who never got started until it was time to stop... was Harlan Sanders.
[42] The new business he started with his first Social Security check was Kentucky Fried Chicken. Now you know the rest of the story. ( 649 words)