Don’s aide phoned about a couple things and then asked how he had made out when the teachers’ aides walked out of school for one day last week.

“I was just sick about it,” she said, “not knowing how he’d take it, whether he’d be all right or not.”

He’d been fine, once it was established that he could still go to school. He loves school.

“Well, they’ll take good care of him no matter what," she put in. "The teachers just love Don, you know.”

I’ve heard that before. Everyone loves Don, wherever he goes. It’s always been that way, from the day he was born weighing less than three-and-a-half pounds and the nurses in the intensive care unit fussed over and admired him because he was “a really beautiful baby,” they said. His head was about the size of an orange.

It’s always good to hear; it’s heartwarming.

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Barney has hauled out his baby book and been reading it from cover to cover here in the living room (okay, office). That’s no easy feat, because it is a three-inch binder overflowing with papers, pictures and artwork. But he’s got a postcard to mark where he left off when he gets interrupted, and he comes back to it time and time again.

His delight as he reads my accounts of things he said and did as a toddler makes me think there may be some use for my trunkful of diaries after all. Some day he may very likely read through them and be just as incredulous at what he finds there.

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A native Indian said of the white man:
“Smart but not wise.”