History’s legend claims the Roman emperor Caligula so loved his horse Incitatus that the animal was housed in a stable of marble, dined from an ivory manger, and dozed beneath blankets dyed a precious and beautiful purple. History also testifies to famines suffered by the citizens of the Roman empire. Now that our white house will soon shelter a man whom Holden Caulfield would have likely called a “prize horse’s ass,” we might want to brush up on some of those spicier historical stories.

In my own very minor public service on a local school board, always absent at the board table is the kindergartener who’s wearing a worn-out pair of shoes with laces he can’t tie – and yet every decision made considers that child. It’s folly to forget the little ones… and what’s the other word again? Full of hubris.

Here’s a line I gleaned from the library conference I attended yesterday:

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched back to everything else in the universe.

– John Muir

twilight, heading home, Elmore, Vermont