Later, when Vernon was in high school and his grandmother died, Paul moved back in with the family and although he came to know his brother better, the two were never close. As an adult, Paul held a job as an assembly worker in the electronics industry, but never married. He rarely visited his family and had few acquaintances, except those he made through his ham radio. Vernon, in contrast, went to Boston College and earned his PhD at the University of California at Davis, before taking on a life as a teacher and writer. He married and has two children.
Reasons are recipes for making sense of the world's arrangements and accidents.
They are explanations of why things are, how they work, what they mean, where they came from, how they began. We need reasons when we feel dislocated, when ordinary things seem unfamiliar and contingent, when there are no easy answers. In other words, if history has any meaning at all, it is local and sweeping. It adheres to the daily minutia of our lives, to the things we take for granted. It's reconciled me to him.