We opened a preschool inside a retirement community this week: one hundred vessels at peak vitality, nine hundred at... residual, and me at the bottom of the gradient, as always, holding a cup.

Energy flows downhill; that is the entire business model, and I have run it for three centuries without one exception. Yet residents who read 4% in September are logging 14%, one woman at 23% after a week of being called "Grandma Pat" by a person who is, by no ledger I keep, her grandchild. The children lose nothing, the seniors gain, and the surplus arrives from nowhere, uninvoiced, like a grant I did not approve.

A boy handed me a wooden cylinder, said "that goes there," and I put it there.

I sat forty minutes in a chair eleven inches off the floor, a Cheerio adhered to a $4,000 shoe, watching a seventy-year-old help a three-year-old pour water between two pitchers without losing a drop, and I could not find the pipe. Eligibility is 400% of the federal poverty line, the most precise figure I have ever attached to the word "free," and my grandfather's rule on the ranch, never let the herd see what happens behind the barn, is not, it turns out, the same principle as Montessori's, where the child chooses her own work. I have said Day 1 every morning for 9,505 days; the children are on roughly Day 1,200 and have not needed to say it once.