Nicol Said to Jonah...

I am normally leery of anyone or anything that smells of moralizing, and "words of wisdom" usually sound gratingly hollow in my ears. A side effect of having grown up where noble words were routinely manipulated to serve sinister purposes, I suppose.

But I do like what a young amateur jockey told an ex-jockey one afternoon at a racetrack in the novel Knockdown by Dick Francis, one of the rare detective genre authors I genuinely admire.

And so Nicol said to Jonah:

"I'll tell you...I learned something from you. I learned not to go around squealing when things weren't fair. I learned to shrug off small injustices and get on with the next thing and put my energies in the future instead of rabbiting about the past. I learned not to mind too much when things went against me. And I reckon I owe you a lot for that."

I will try to remember that.