During one of my spontaneous stops to shop at a thrift shop, I came across a Sears catalog-sized book by Bill Moyers. I always enjoyed his thoughtful presentations on public television, so I couldn't resist picking it up. It's titled A World of Ideas and contains 42 interviews, or conversations as he calls them, with accomplished people in a wide variety of fields.
In his introduction I liked the statement when he said ideas can liberate us from prisons we built within ourselves. Just then I felt the urge to find a bathroom while I sat waiting outside a house in Hebron where my rider called on a client. En route to the Cenex station I was delayed at the railroad tracks when the crossing arms came down for an oncoming coal train. Dispensing with the world of ideas, I sat counting the number of cars in that train - 115.
It wasn't ten minutes before, as we entered town, that we met another coal train pulled by three engines running on the track parallel to the highway. Another loaded coal train sat sidelined: three trains, 345 cars loaded with coal, nine diesel engines, all headed eastward. Something happened to the world of ideas. I sat in the real world doing simple math. Twenty trains per day, 2300 coal cars, 60 diesel engines, one big hole somewhere, .............
