On Saturday, when I awakened, King Charles III was getting his crown. While writing with the TV on, I half-watched the horse races leading up to the Kentucky Derby and then the derby itself.

They were a perfect pair. The Coronation and the Derby were British and American versions of Rich People Looking Ridiculous. It was sort of a rare occurrence, a Halley’s Comet of cosmically aligned absurdity.

I put a good bit of thought into it, and all I could compare it to was a day, many years ago, when fate and resourcefulness led me to hitchhike from a small town in New Jersey that I tried and failed to remember or find this morning, and Princeton, where I caught Amtrak to Philadelphia, Pa.

Suffice it to say that I intended to take a bus to Philly but found at 9 a.m. that the only daily bus had left at 8. While devising a plan, I watched a parade in the small town, read the morning paper and enjoyed a frosty beverage.

It took two rides. One was in the back of an old pickup truck, where I first learned long before the NASCAR years that there are rednecks everywhere. Two guys wearing beat-up cowboy hats sat in the cab, and it was me and a keg of Schaefer in the bed. One of them good, old boys told me to help myself. A George Jones eight-track was blaring from the cab.

The latter was with a Princeton professor in a Volvo. He was a sober, sensitive fellow.

It was a hot June day, and I arrived at Princeton University on Reunion Weekend. I drank beer with affluent people who were busy showing their arses, looking ridiculous and caring not even a little. Entire tents were occupied by people wearing polyester pants with Tigers running up and down them. Not real Tigers. Cheap simulations thereof.

I told them I was one of the Clinton Duttons.

Back to the present.

First was I disappointed that the shiny gold carriage didn’t turn into a pumpkin – it possibly did at the strike of midnight – and then was I disappointed that Mage won the Derby because, all else being equal, I wanted the most handsome horse to win, and that, my friends, was the lovely gray colt King Russell, which finished a picturesque 15^th.