Publius and Brutus: the inspecting and righting of a teetering chair.

One had checks, but needed balances.

One had balances, but needed checks.

Many an hour they sat by the barbecue pit, eating boiled peanuts and having gentlemanly arguments about how they thought their leaders should do things: the way things should be.

They had the classical education: practiced in reading ancient Greek, modern French. George Sale “barbarian” translation of the Quran. Positively willing to whore themselves for a moment with a volume of Homer, Ovid, Virgil, Herodotus.

They could even address contemporaries, like “what Thomas Paine would do for mere pocket change”—but these shirtsleeve indignities only among themselves, not suitable for mainstream audiences.

Jeff Desayuno and Lloyd Bryn walked over from the Sip’n’Git, and they started on about not wanting to sit with a third person, much less a fourth person—which sparked a series of letters that even got into the local news print.

Old Publius, his chair had a teeter on it, and it unsettled him enough that he would splay his arms suddenly in a panic—as if the chair were to pitch him onto the hardpack.

Brutus laughed derisively, not as an enemy, but in that sort special adversarial respect among old friends, and he folded a piece of the newsprint, the local pamphlet, for Publius to shove under that one tell-tale needful chair leg.

And it worked like magic.