The purple book was very old had yielded to age and was in two pieces when it reached me. Its title was W.H. Seward's Travels Around the World. It has been published in 1873 and had no author. Further investigation yielded the fact that the scribe was Seward's adopted daughter, Olive, one of his traveling companions. In the manner of Victorian women, she did not put herself forward.

I briefly checked Seward's bio, learning that he was twice elected governor of New York before becoming Lincoln's Secretary of State. That role is the one he is best remembered for, including his purchase of Alaska, an act not universally appreciated at the time he negotiated it. I had totally forgotten that he too was wounded in the plot to assassinate Lincoln. He recovered and went on to serve as Secretary of State under Lincoln's successor.

All that aside, the yellowing volume on my desk is an incredible reflection on what the group of people who traveled with Seward saw and noted during a 14 month trip around the world, a trip that began in his hometown of Auburn, New York, and which headed west to board a steamship in San Francisco.

My eye caught half a line of a book review recently. Apropos of something, the reviewer wrote: "We live in an age of too much information."

I thought about that, and I believe there is a level on which I agree. We are saturated with words, bits of very personal data we put out on the electronic waves, private conversations that are shared with everyone lucky enough to be on the same bus or street corner. I have several times thought that if I only knew more about the stock market and had more money, I have just heard some great inside info.

If we add to that the vast array of opinions on everything from medical issues to what kind of skis someone should have used on Mount Whistler, we are all on the road to overload. We reach it when we stir in all those tidbits about celebrities, half of which are sheer invention. We can absorb no more.

I know that many of us suffer from some kind of Olympic fever at the moment. However, it's only a temporary disease for us viewers since we are afflicted only quadrennially.

Despite the angst of not enough snow and too warm temperatures, despite the selection of a city where the average February mercury usually is around 50 degrees, despite malfunctioning ice machines—in the end it is all about the athletes. And they inspire me.

Their background stories are of dedication and deprivation, of entire families who have uprooted themselves so this special child could develop all of his or her gifts. We ooh and aah as we hear them, but then the competition begins.

It is great to get up and discover what one might learn today. I always told my high school students that that was the reason I came to school each day, and I promised them that the day there was nothing more to learn, I wasn't coming again. Happily, it never happened until the moment I decided to recycle myself into a newer learning experience.

And in a recent news article I discovered what could have been my motto, although I had no way of knowing it then. It is ABO. Borrowed from the electronics' world, it is translated as: Always Be Obsolescing.

We know about it. Before we fully unwrap that new gadget, it is already old model. One gets the feeling of never quite catching up. That is as the manufacturers would have it.

Don't you love it when one of your cherished ideas is validated by experience? I do.

As I have aged, or mellowed, or matured—you choose—I have often found myself bumping against prejudices against the "older" members of society. I excuse the very young for whom anyone over the age of 18 is already halfway to pasture, but our society seems unable to reap the full benefits of those of us who have both life experience and energy as well.

Freud was recently quoted on the OP-ED page of the NY Times: "Old people are no longer educable." Is that so?

I came up the street behind them, two young women with a very small toddler between them. They were responsible adults, holding her hands firmly so that they did not lose her on the streets of New York. She was adorable in her pink and purple striped tights that emphasized her little legs. The adults had carefully adjusted their pace to her much slower one in her minute pink sneakers.

So why did I notice them? Because the adults were missing it all, that's why. Since she was so much tinier, her eye level was on things of which her companions were totally oblivious as they chatted away, above her head.

Her eye was attracted to the man drinking coffee on the doorstep of the building undergoing renovation, to the two workmen piling their equipment onto a scaffold about to leave street level, to the passing jeans wears whose artful hole in the knee was exactly at her eye level.

All right, I'll admit it. I am a newspaper addict. It stems partially from my love of reading and partially from the need to make my prayer net be as far flung as possible. How can I pray for the needs of the world if I don't know what is transpiring?

The radio is more up to the minute, but so boringly repetitious, probably because of the lack of reporters. TV has crossed the line from news to entertainment. Someone (who makes these decisions?) has decided that no viewer has a concentration span of more than two minutes. The end-result is sensation-prone, disaster-inclined reportage, in little snippets of info, with longer commercials in between. (And if I were a parent, I'd be in a panic about what my children, at far too young an age, are taking away from those commercials. Are there boundaries?)

No, for adequate and wider coverage, I need my daily newspaper fix. I usually read two: one, my hometown paper where the mayor, the head of the detective unit, and many of the business people passed through my classroom, and a bigger paper with world coverage.

I am sure it has happened to you too. You see a new word, or an interesting idea startles you, and then you promptly see that "newbie" two more times in the next week. You are left asking: "Where have I been all this time?"

My new thought came from one of my noontime group attendees who brought me a delicious copy of a page from a medieval Book of Hours which shows Mary in the stable of Bethlehem busily reading a book. Joseph is outside gathering wood and a midwife is washing some little garments. Mary with her book is a delightful anachronism which the accompanying commentary attributes to the noble woman who owned the Book of Hours desiring an expression of her own deepest desires.

And then came Christmas, and I received a card with a similar concept from two different friends.

It was a copy of Rembrandt's Holy Family, the original currently in the Hermitage Museum in Russia. Joseph is barely visible, woodworking in a shadowy background. The Baby is sleeping in a wicker cradle, covered with a very Dutch red blanket. A buxom Mary is interrupting her reading to check on the Child. In her hands she is holding a huge book, obviously a double-column Bible from the 17th century press.

I am sure each of us could find many reasons to ask "why?" at the beginning of this new year. Why are the commentators so anxious to find a name for the decade just finishing? Why do we always have to list 10 people who best exemplify the events of history? Why is the weatherman so often wrong with no need to apologize?

I could go on in my best two-year-old style, but you get the drift. We do have many unanswerable, sometimes philosophical, questions that are just part of living. But...

As I check the morning I did have to wonder why Dubai felt it necessary to build the world's tallest building. The statistics are impressive. More than 12,000 people will work there. It's elevators can reach speeds of 40 miles an hour. From the top there is a 60 mile view. However, it also seems that the structure has a 4 foot sway in a brisk wind. That might be one reason why I'd rather not work there.

It was a moment that remains in memory's treasure box.

I was teaching in a K-12 school, and each grade had a part in the Christmas pageant. The kindergarten was offering a pint-sized living Nativity, with minimal speaking parts. They had done reasonably well during dress rehearsal (I was a backstage curtain-puller; hence, my presence at these sometimes agonizing run-throughs.)

There were just a few hitches: Peter was a bit too vigorous as the donkey and his artificial head threatened to fly off during his energetic braying, and Mary wasn't too sure she needed to hold Joseph's arm since she was an independent 5-year-old. However, things looked promising as we neared the night of the SHOW.