I filed it.
The outer community correspondence was, I had come to understand, the most important thing on my desk. Not because the individual items were always significant in themselves — most of them were not, in any grand sense — but because each item was a person in the pack's outer circle deciding that the formal structure of the pack was worth trying. That the correspondence would be read by someone who had the authority to act on it, and who would act.
If that expectation was met consistently, the pack's cohesion held. If it wasn't, the outer community started managing its problems without the pack structure, which meant the structure got smaller while the community around it got more independent and eventually more disconnected.
I met the expectation every day.
At twenty-six wee
