Why Some Men Do Crazy Things

Was it true, as his father suggested, that he had the brains of a squirrel...or was there a deeper reason for lying down on a busy airport runway? Jim Shepard tries to explain...

How stupid were my friends and I, growing up in Lordship? It goes without saying that we were unsupervised (in the early '60s, most parents--at least mine--expected their kids, once past the age of, say, 7, to disappear on nice Connecticut Saturdays, and not return until dinnertime), and in that unsupervised state, it fell to us to keep ourselves entertained. We always came up with something. And all of it fell into two categories: things that were stupid and things that would have been fine, had they not been done stupidly. We gloried in the brainlessness of both. We had such an appetite for the kinds of activity that would cause a parent to despair that my father ran out of ways of insulting us, and he was easily one of the most verbally inventive people I knew. He got tired of announcing that I had the brains of a squirrel, for example, and started substituting around in the animal kingdom, and beyond: an ant, a flatworm, a walking doorknob.

Why can't you entertain yourselves the way the normal kids do? he would plead, searching for just a glimmer of reason.

Read more on Oprah.com