So on Saturday we went to the Stock Show. First time I’d been in about a dozen years. It always makes me feel like a kid again. Now the first several times I went there, I was a wee fellow. But there’s more to it than that. Dad was not only a farm-boy, but a real enthusiast for farming. So being around the agricultural puts me in mind of his many stories about agriculture and the great improvements in agriculture in the first half of the 20th century. Farm folk until very recently lived lives that weren’t that different from the lives of farm folk of long ago. That makes me feel very modern and very young.

Anyway, we saw draft horses, mules, donkeys, scads of beef cattle (including a rather impressive bull), several dozen sheep and a few hogs. When we got home, the dog gave me a very thorough interrogation. Even though I couldn’t discern any lingering aromas from the barns, he could.

Too often I’m oblivious to any number of attitudes I pick up in the world and bring home. My heart regularly needs the kind of inspection that the dog gave my outside.