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Pluto Too small and weak to push anyone around, Pluto’s fallen out of the panoply of planets. It kept its place for seventy-six good years, this old friend of our childhood— last in line, taking up the rear, lingering on the edge of every schoolboy’s imagination. What happens when a planet swims out of our ken? Would Keats have found his Chapman so ecstatic had there been one fewer celestial object in his demesne? What happens to the homely girl in glasses, the small boy with his pants pulled to his chin, the butt of jokes, the last one chosen, when they move on and we can no longer feel so much bigger by comparison, without them eternally orbiting on the periphery of our lives? And do we now abandon our old and inWrm when they’ve run their course? Retire them after years of faithful service with not so much as a watch or a fare-thee-well? Ah, Pluto, will you putter about on your heedless way out of sight, out of mind, if occasionally underfoot in Neptune’s pathway? Old friend, even though you were always just the tag end, hanger on, the one we might, at best, name a 57 cartoon dog after, you were, nevertheless, one of the certainties of our childhood, we knew you would always be there, in the shadows, on the edge of our attention—our homely girl, our scapegoat, our wild surmise—and that in your erratic orbit we could shine. 58 ...

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