When was the last time you had an exciting, new experience? Can you even remember the last time anything really titillated your senses?

If you have been seeing, tasting and smelling the same old things week after week, year after year, you’d better cultivate a few new friends who can broaden your horizons.

It was on a very recent Thanksgiving Day that I soaked up an inordinate amount of this mind-expanding cultural enrichment, and we will talk about that now. It all came together while eating a typically exceptional Thanksgiving dinner at the home of my in-law’s in-laws.

Eating out was a welcome change; it is only with the help of a cane that my wife, Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, can now get from the sink to the refrigerator, so this Thanksgiving was an easy one for her. The only things she had to prepare and bring along were the turkey, stuffing, potatoes, wistful husband and pumpkin pie.

An uncut Halloween pumpkin on our doorstep had already provided a substantive excuse to bake three or four pies. It gave me the opportunity to whine to my Facebook friends that this season our financial situation was so bad that we had been reduced to eating old holiday decorations.

As I said, we took one of the pumpkin pies to our hosts, who live up the road in what I call “Captain Freddie’s house.” When Captain Freddie died in 1966, I bought the place for $5,000, which was close to my salary for teaching that year.

(Yes, my young friend, there was a time when a Maine schoolteacher could buy a solid, furnished house on an acre of land with his or her first year’s salary.)

Nothing need be said about the food or company. You know that Thanksgiving dinners are always times of reminiscing and much laughter.

I noted that since I’d lived there in the late ’60s, another owner had knocked out three walls, making one big family room where Captain Freddie’s dining room, bedroom and front parlor had been before. So this talented young family ate, studied, worked and played in this one big room.

They even had what I think is called a changing station in this room, and it was the first time in 80 years I ever saw someone change a baby’s diapers at the foot of a table where people were eating a Thanksgiving dinner.

As a man who has raised only animals, I was also captivated by a chubby child playing happily on the floor. Too young to walk, he rolled from side to side, kicking, and putting anything he could get his hands on in his mouth.

Why did the child on the family room floor put everything he could get his hands on in his mouth?

Do children have some kind of intuition that they lose as soon as they are able to think?

Children design intuitive computer programs that cannot be used by adults, who are equipped only with reason.

For example, I Googled, “How do I add italics to Facebook?”

“Go to your Page and click the ‘Offer, Event+’ Button above the Status box.”

“How do I find the Status box on my page?”

I turned up, “I have no box atop my newsfeed or on my personal timeline to post a status.”

“How do I find my newsfeed on Facebook?” I asked.

“Click in the top-right corner of any Facebook page (ex: your home page) Select News Feed Preferences.”

In the top-right corner of my Facebook page is a little thing that looks like a ventilator. Clicking on it turns up a list of options. Nowhere in the list do I find “News Feed Preferences.”

Dead end there.

“How do I find my personal timeline on Facebook?”

Many links turned up, all telling me about the problems people have with their personal timelines, but not one word that tells me where a personal timeline can be found on a Facebook page.

Instructions for Facebook are non-existent. Facebook is made for children who need no instructions to do anything. Seeing the child rolling on the floor, poking things in his mouth, made me realize that little fingers do everything intuitively.

Many years ago, my young friend Doreen was already famous for her ability to utilize the intuition of young children. When she’d visit a girlfriend who had a small child, she’d throw a handful of raisins on the floor and say, “That’ll hold him for an hour.”

The humble Farmer can be seen on Community Television in and near Portland and visited at his website:

www.thehumblefarmer.com/MainePrivateRadio.html