A confession.

My wife has an impending business trip--a creative presentation--slated for Salt Lake City next week. She asked if I'd like to take a few days off and tag along and spend the weekend in the "Beehive State." I demurred, but her offer got me thinking.

A lot of people who read a lot know words but, because they've only read them, aren't quite sure how they're pronounced. For the life of me, I don't know how to say "hegemony," though I know how to use it in a sentence.

I've always read a lot even when I was a little boy. The internet, with its tangents and interstitial connections, is comfortable to me. I browse and read peripatetically, leaping from one subject to the next. I'd probably be teaching "Moby Dick" at a university someplace if my learning was more focused and less eclectic.

Be that as it may, when I was a kid, my father took me and my cub scout den up to West Point to visit the Military Academy. While we were there we took a walk through the West Point museum where they had a series of engravings depicting the migration of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith from the east to Salt Lake City. These engravings had captions, if memory serves, like "The Mormons trek across the great plains."

Well, this was probably 1966 and I had never read the word "Mormons" before. So I read it as "Morons."

I couldn't believe there was this huge community of Morons who had been persecuted in the east and settled in Utah.

OK. No point here. Just a recollection