Story by Beau L'Amour
I have no idea of how we were trained, my sister and I, but we knew how to approach my father if he was working and we wanted his attention. We would enter his office picking our way through the piles of books and papers. We would stand to one side of him, just within his peripheral vision, and silently wait while he worked. Sometimes he would lift his fingers from the keys and say, “Just a minute.” Then he would go on and complete a thought or get himself to a place in the story that would remind him what he had been intending to say next. Then he was yours…
…for about ten minutes. Before long, you would see the story or some innate discipline calling him back. We never had to worry about interrupting him because, while he was happy to be briefly distracted, he guarded his work time very carefully, and it never occurred to us that he might behave in a different way. “You run along now, I have to get back to work.” He would lean forward then, hunting and pecking at the keyboard, back in the story and perfectly in tune with where he had left off. It seemed as if he always knew exactly where he was going and no interruption could confuse him or even make him pause for very long.*
*L’Amour, B. (2017) Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures Volume 1, xx.