Some days just hold more promise than others. Today is one of them.

I have so many choices: go to a movie, rake leaves, play Free Rice, read Billy Collins, enter a contest, order something online, sort through my desk, get a bag ready for Goodwill, try out a recipe, read the fiction in the New Yorker, do the Sunday cross word puzzle, take photos, re-arrange the mantel, download music, go to the health club, wash the car and — I’ll start with Billy Collins.

Vade Mecum

I want the scissors to be sharp

and the table to be perfectly level

when you cut me out of my life

and paste me in that book you always carry.

I looked up vade mecum. It means handbook or manual small enough to be carried along where ever. And vade is pronounced, vadee, it’s latin meaning “go with me.” I took three years of Latin in high school, had it started, “All of Gaul is divided into three parts,” I would have nailed it.