- 4 -
Many words could stand for distant places and dreams, and Garcia had had a favorite since childhood-stars.
He had been born into a typical scholarly family. His parents loved each other and advanced together in scholarship and faith, leaving him seeming somewhat superfluous. But the merciful Lord's light shone upon every child and adult, and he had lived well at the church.
As a little boy, he had been energetic and easily excited, with inexhaustible energy and an endless stream of things to say.
Whenever his overwhelming desire to learn and talk kept him awake at night, he would lie in his little bed, gazing at the billions of twinkling stars outside his window, imagining their stories and dreaming of traveling to distant, mysterious places to study, just as his parents did.
In his dreams, he sometimes grew wings and sometimes boarded a little boat, drifting contentedly beneath the vast night sky.
The sisters and priests said that the Lord had created everything in the world through His mighty power, and the stars in the heavens were naturally no exception.
The breeze, the sea, the mountains, fruit trees, wheat fields-everything had been created by the Lord for humanity, His most beloved people. Naturally, humans ought to serve the Lord and praise Him with everything they had.
Garcia had spent his childhood at the church, and those had been wonderful, colorful days. He and his little friends had sung hymns together, improvised new songs to peculiar tunes, played hide-and-seek with the sisters in the garden, and listened to the priests recite accessible Bible stories from primers written especially for children, teaching them human virtues: devotion, kindness, faithfulness, justice... Garcia had done reasonably well at grammar, and his poetry and music had been passable too.
Of course, children were