Curmudgeon goes on a field trip

Long Suffering Spouse's school goes down to Springfield every couple of years -- at least the middle school students go to Springfield -- there to visit as many of the Lincoln sites as they can in a single day.

I last went with in 2009. I wasn't asked to go again until yesterday.

"We need another male," I was told.

Well, OK, I thought, that's fine.

"We need someone who's mature," I was told.

Well, OK, I thought, that's kind of a nice way of noting that I'm not as young as I used to be.

"We need someone who knew Lincoln personally --"

Now cut that out!

Sadly, the gloves I wrote about in 2009 were no longer on display at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. I asked what had happened to them. "They're being given a rest," I was told. "We like to rotate the artifacts we have on display."

There were a lot of retired schoolteachers at each stop on our itinerary, leading the tours or supervising the exhibits. I got something from each of them; I'm not sure how much the kids picked up, of course, but you never know what might stick, even by accident, inside the mind of a junior high kid.