"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a moist,
gray November in my soul; whenever I find myself expecting to be cut off in
traffic, to be shortchanged at the store, to hear an ominous clank in the
transmission, to catch a cold, to be ludicrously over-billed by the insurance
company, to find the library closed early, to endure computer malfunction, to
discover the wine sour, to lose my keys, to discover a city of slugs in the
cellar, and to find a dead owlet under the cracked front picture window, then I
account it high time to get to a kindergarten as fast as I can. There, I sit
myself down in a tiny chair, in which I look not unlike a large, hairy,
bespectacled, bookish giant, and inquire after the lives and dreams and feats of
the small populace, and listen with the most assiduous and ferocious attention,
for I find that as few as twenty minutes with people no taller than your belt
buckle is enormously refreshing, and gloriously educational..."
Brian Doyle shares more in this beguiling piece.
