I subscribe to an daily e-mail trivia game. The topics are random, varied, and often so obscure that I wouldn't know the answer without looking it up. Yesterday's question:

Q: A librocubicularist is a person who what?

"Libro-" was a dead giveaway for something having to do with books. The only thing "-cubicularist" brought to mind was cubicles, those horrible quasi-office modules so common in many business settings, but I was pretty sure that wasn't it. This morning, we got the answer:

A: This is a term for a person who reads in bed. It was supposedly coined by author Christopher Morley in his novel The Haunted Bookshop. Also accepted "person who does something with books in a bedroom, not necessarily reading," although, quite frankly, that is kinda creepy.

Hee hee!

So it's this past Sunday afternoon, and we're having Easter dinner at my parents' house. Dad, a wine connoisseur, is pouring the Easter cabernet. He offers some to my son Dave's girlfriend, Jamie, who is under 21 and doesn't drink. She agrees to try a little but doesn't care for it.

Some time into dinner, Dad goes into the kitchen for something. As soon as he is out of site, Jamie whispers to Dave, "Do you want the rest of my wine?"

"It's alright if you don't want it," I chime in.

"But I don't want your father to feel bad that it's being wasted," she replies.

"Jamie, really," I insist, "if there's a little wine left undrunk, it's not a big problem."

"But," she says in dismay, "there are sober children in India!"

If it's Patriots Day, it's also Marathon Monday. The 110th Boston Marathon is being run today, and though the top finisher crossed the finish line almost two hours ago, many entrants are still on the course.

The Boston Marathon is the oldest annually contested marathon in the world. The current course begins in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and finishes in front of the Prudential Tower in downtown Boston. The most infamous part of the course is the notorious Heartbreak Hill, which peaks between miles 20 and 21 and has ended the marathon hopes of many a runner. Locals are less likely to be bothered by it, though; most of New England is quite hilly, so it's nearly impossible to train here without becoming accustomed to hills.

I'm tracking my boss, who as of the 30km checkpoint is on a pace to finish the race in 4 hours 8 minutes. Though I am not comfortable mentioning his name here, I am more than willing to send you to the Saucony 26 Boston page where you can watch the pictures at the bottom until you see a man wearing an orange Worcester Tornadoes hat.

Others I am following include a long-time family friend who just finished (official time: 3:28:57!), a neighbor whom I've never met but my son refers to as "the obsessed jogger lady", two of my childhood friends who are also sisters, and the sister of one of my high school classmates. Also of interest to me are three women whose husbands are Red Sox players: Dawn Timlin, Shonda Schilling, and Kathryn Nixon.

Every year, I also track the progress of the oldest registered marathoners. This year, they are 80-year-olds Emery Jewell of Florida and Regina Tumidajewicz of New York, and 84-year-old Carlton Mendell of Maine. At half their ages, I can't do what they are doing at this moment.

Today the states of Massachusetts and Maine (which was part of Massachusetts until 1820) celebrate Patriots Day, a holiday which I feel compelled to point out every year has nothing to do with the football team. It honors the patriots who fought, whether on or off the field of battle, for American independence.

The holiday is observed on the third Monday of April, but it memorializes April 19, 1775, when colonial militias fought the British "redcoats" at the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord. The events of that day are most famously, if not entirely accurately, told in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride"

What is remarkable about the revolutionary patriots is that they, and the colonial government behind them, set about to overthrow British rule without adequate equipment, without sufficient troop levels, even without an exit strategy. The only overall "strategy" was to keep fighting until they either won or couldn't fight any more. Indeed, it took six and a half years for the British to surrender, although the Continental Congress waited another year and a half to formally end the war. Rebellions sprung up sporadically for the next few years. Was the experiment of American independence turning into a quagmire? Would civil war break out? I'm guessing the loyalists (those who took the side of the British) were rooting for the insurgency and failure of the newly liberated country.

Finally, more than four years after the war officially ended, the new country began the process of establishing a constitution. It took four months for the draft to be approved by the delegates. But support for the proposed constitution was far from assured. The document was opposed from many quarters, including a group led by Declaration of Independence signers Samuel Adams and John Hancock. What hope did the new country have if even those who first advocated for independence were now critical of it? The former colonies had won the war, but could they win the peace?

We know from history that ultimately, the independence movement was successful. That didn't mean the new country was free from trouble, though. Tensions between the new United States of America and Great Britain simmered, culminating in a U.S. declaration of war in 1812. The Americans won that one too, but that didn't keep the country from very nearly disintegrating less than 50 years later in a bitter and deadly civil war.

The history of our country is teeming with examples of freedom coming at a price. There are people today, lots of them, who take freedom so for granted that they forget—or never knew in the first place—how hard it was to get and maintain. Why they think that there can ever be peace without freedom is a mystery.