Biographical blurb

Thomas Parkin is, for better or worse, a man of our times; but given his druthers, he’d have been a man of 1930s Los Angeles, 1920s Buenos Aires, or the English Lake Country of the 1810s. The first half of his life was an adventure. To commence the second half of his life, he went to college, where he is studying history. He views his classmates with a paternal regard. He hopes to do post-grad work in Latin American History, or Latin American Studies. This is because he likes Hispanic people better than he likes you, and because even he can see the writing on the wall. He has little hope of ever getting another job, but the thought of being called “Doctor Parkin” for the last few decades of his life charms him. He never has taken seriously the instruction to ‘write what you know.’ He prefers to write what he is just about to know. Actually, he never taken all that much thought about it, but now finds that he must, like a very drab, unpack his heart with words. Someone has said that you shouldn’t write unless it is life or death to you. He disagrees, but is beginning to understand the sentiment. He considers “dithering” a moral virtue. He has a deep fear of being misunderstood which he compensates for by being unintelligible. He wishes you’d get your mind out of the gutter. He finds the mystery of grammar more impenetrable than the mystery of God. He has been in love for a long time, and is still in love. The first three principles that he walks by are, first, Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; second, Repentance; third Baptism by immersion (preferably in the ocean, but a lake or a river of the right depth and will do in a pinch). He believes that everything else is contained in the Gift of the Holy Ghost, worlds without end.