Read Illusions for Free Online Page B

family
            is not one of blood, but
           of respect and joy in
                each other's life.
                                  
                   Rarely do members
                    of one family grow
                      under the same
                      roof.
     
                 I didn't see how that applied to me and reminded myself never to let a book replace my own thinking. I rustled down under the blanket, and then I was out like a bulb turned off warm and dreamless under the sky and under several thousand stars that were illusions, maybe, but pretty ones, for sure.
                 When I came conscious again it was just sunrise, rose light and gold shadows. I woke not because of the light but because something was touching my head, ever so gently. I took it for a hay stem, floating there. Second time I knew it was a bug, swatted wildly and nearly broke my hand... a nine-sixteenths end-wrench is a hard chunk of iron to swat full speed, and I woke up fast. The wrench bounced off the aileron hinge, buried itself for a moment in the grass, then floated grandly to hover in the air again. Then as I watched, coming wide awake, it sank softly back down to the ground and was still. By the time I thought to pick it up, it was the same old nine-sixteenths I knew and loved, just as heavy, just as eager to get at all those pesky nuts an bolts.
                 "Well, hell!"
                 I never say hell or damn-carryover from an ego thing as a child. But I was truly puzzled, and there was nothing else to say. What was happening to my wrench: Donald Shimoda was sixty miles at least over some horizon from here. I hefted the thing, examine it, balance it, feeling like a prehistoric ape that cannot understand a wheel is turning before its very eyes. There had to be some simple reason . . .
                 I gave up at last, annoyed, put it on the toolbag an lit the fire for my pan-bread. There was no rush to go anywhere. Might stay here all day, if I felt like it.
                 The bread had risen well in the pan, was just ready to be turned when I hear a sound in the sky to the west.
                 There was no way that the sound could have been Shimoda's airplane, no way anybody could have tracked me to this one field out of millions of midwest fields, but I knew that it was him an started whistling. . . watching the bread and the sky an trying to think of something very calm to say when he lane.
                 It was the Travel Air, all right, flew in low over the Fleet, pulled up steep in a show-off turn, slipped own through the air an lane 60 mph, the speed a Travel Air ought to land. He pulled alongside an shut own his engine. I didn't say anything. Waved, but didn't say a word. I did stop whistling.
                 He got out of the cockpit an walked to the fire. "Hi, Richard."
                 "You're late," I said. "Almost burned the pan-bread."
                 "Sorry-"
                 I handed him a cup of stream water   and a tin plate with half the pan-bread and a chunk of margarine.
                 "How'd it go ?" I said.
                 "Went OK," he said with an instant's half-smile. "I escaped with my life."
                 "Had some doubts you would."
                 He ate the bread for a while in silence. "You know," he said at last, contemplating his meal, "this is really terrible stuff."
                 "Nobody says you have to eat my panbread," I said crossly. "Why does everybody hate my pan-bread? NOBODY LIKES MY PAN-BREAD! Why is that, Ascended Master?"
                   "Well," he grinned, "-and I'm speaking as God, now-I'd say that you believe that it's good and that therefore it does taste good to you. Try it without deeply