I found an old paperback…well no “found” isn’t the mot juste . In our house there are generations of books; sometimes one just kinda…surfaces, like a long buried artifact might work its way to the surface. It’s more like occasionally, a book finds me! Whose was this yellowed little Penguin paperback of John Steinbeck’s The Short Reign of Pippin IV? Not mine, I’da written my name in it. No matter.

But here’s what: one character just “said” as I’m reading:

“Men are either children, or they are old. There is no in-between.”

Do you agree?
(I don’t: the man I know best, as I see him, was born a responsible adult. Of course I didn’t know him when he was a toddler, but the anecdotes I have heard bear this out. Also I can never imagine him as a “slippered pantaloon”. )

But I think it is true…