Bruce Cameron

Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2009.

Before I went to college, I made a little money painting houses part-time. But after I became a college-educated man, I got serious about a career and began painting houses full-time.

I was contemplating this complete-circle process one hot day in southwest Kansas, a piece of real estate that completely disproves the theory of roundness as a property of the planet Earth. Show a resident of this flat place a pancake, and he’d ask, “What’s that incredibly round and mountainous thing you have there?”

There’s nothing to stop the...