A devout cowboy loses his beloved Bible out on the range — so the story goes.

A few weeks later, a chimpanzee shows up with the treasured book under his arm. The cowboy can't believe it. He takes the book from the chimp, raises his eyes to heaven and shouts: “It’s a miracle! A miracle!”

“Not really,” the chimp says. “Your name is written inside the cover.”

It’s an Aesop’s fable of sorts but I keep wondering what drove the monkey to show up. Did he know what it felt like to lose something and wanted to save someone grief? Do monkeys see the world that way?

Why didn’t he throw the book away? Was he devout too? And where’d he get the address! How’d he get there, Uber? Can a monkey be in charge of his own destiny?

These are all questions of political economy — the energy a person uses to manage his life — and are based in how a monkey feels about things and acts accordingly. It always includes a sense of justice.

I can say something intelligent about these things now because I just finished reading (studying) Frans de Waal’s new extraordinary book “Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves.” It just came out in March (W.W. Norton).

If someone asked me to describe the book in a sentence, I’d say it’s about the inner life of animals: how they feel about themselves and others, the pains they suffer and those they inflict, as they negotiate their needs in life in a community of others seeking the same thing.

I started reading de Waal 30 years ago, impressed with his desire to understand the psycho-social life of animals — especially chimps, bonobos, and capuchins — and how his findings always wind up pointing a finger at the human race.

“Mama’s Last Hug,” which has gotten rave reviews, is about the last days of an agèd chimp, Mama, who was once a major player in the community in which she lived. At the very end, she tenderly rubs the face of her friend (and collaborating-researcher of 40 years), Jan van Hooff, with her old wrinkled hand. Jan had come to see her off; she was a relative.

I get the sense Mama could feel the loss her friend would feel when she was gone — like a cherished Bible.

Mama’s, and all the other stories de Waal has told in his decades-long exposé of justice among animals, are always about the animals but, again, the morals of their stories keep pointing at us.

One of the reasons I liked de Waal in the beginning was that he had tapped into the work of the great Russian/World Citizen, Geographer/Gandhi-like anarchist and social theorist, Peter Kropotkin, especially his landmark “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution,” which appeared in 1902.

As a young man, Kropotkin, assigned to Siberia in government service, set out to test Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” principle only to discover that living beings embraced another ethic — mutual aid — when members of a community gather around those in need to alleviate their suffering. Those who are best at it look for nothing in return.

Kropotkin saw that, when mutual aid was practiced, the persons and groups involved stood a greater chance of making it to the future as well as enjoying quality-of-life now. Win-win for everyone.

That’s all I’ll say about Kropotkin except to add that every high school student in America who takes Biology or Earth Science — or whatever their current versions are — should be required to read (and be able to discuss intelligently) the basic tenets of “Mutual Aid,” clarifying, for example, how Kropotkin and Darwin converged or differed on the chances of a society making it to the future.

I might add that Darwin was perplexed by the mutual aid thing: Why would anyone live for the benefit of another? And would a chimp return a Bible to a fellow chimp just like he did for the cowboy?

De Waal and his colleague Sarah Brosnan homed in on these questions by asking members of their capuchin monkey community how they felt when someone treated them unjustly — being defined as less and being paid less in return.

Political scientists would call it the unjust distribution of resources (rewards, compensations), when one gets less for doing the very same thing someone else did, and under the same conditions.

De Waal and Brosnan situated two capuchins, who are ace barterers, in side-by-side cages so that each could see what was going on with the other.

A pebble was thrown into the cage of monkey A — let’s call him Arthur — to retrieve. He easily did and was given a cucumber slice as a reward.

The researchers then threw a pebble in the cage of monkey B — we’ll call him Bob — and Bob retrieved the pebble and got a cucumber slice just like Arthur. Things were going well.

Then the researchers repeated the experiment but with a hitch: This time, when Arthur retrieved the pebble, he was given a big fat juicy grape, a lot better than a cucumber chip.

But when Bob performed the same task, he got the usual cucumber chip. He got worked up: Cucumber? Where’s the grape! Arthur got a grape!

Bob, no pun intended, had gone ape.

The experiment was conducted with many groups of monkeys over time. Those who got the short end of the stick, the lesser-prized rewards, generally got testy; some hurled the pebble back at the researcher; some whipped the cucumber at him: How dare you!

Such anger grows out of a sense of being defined as inferior: doing the same thing as someone else and getting less for it. We look at what the other got and are wounded.

It’s like when Thanksgiving rolls around — maybe it’s just the kids — and the slices of pie are meted out; we look around and see we got the smallest. The feeling is always: Why do I get the short end of the stick? Where’s my grape!

This kind of reactive anger and resentment exists in all social institutions in the United States today. A lot of people see what a lot of other people are getting and get fired up with injustice. They start flinging their cucumber chips back at society and the more-crazed do it with a spray of an AK-47.

I sometimes talk to these fired-up souls — with a sympathetic and open mind, I really want to know — and have discovered that, after a sentence or two of outrage, they are unable to describe what’s going on in the feeling department.

They’re can’t articulate envy, jealousy, and the injustice they’re feeling: analytically and therapeutically.

A few weeks ago, Congresswoman Katie Porter from California, quizzed Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive officer of JPMorgan, during his appearance at the House Financial Services Committee.

Dimon had just received a $31 million juicy grape from his company’s reward-distribution center, called a bonus.

Porter greeted Dimon cordially but then homed in on why some monkeys he worked with got cucumber chips of $16.50 an hour while he got his $31 million carload of  grapes.

Porter asked: Are you aware that, when the resource-distribution-center in your company offers many of your monkey-colleagues cucumber chips worth $16.50 an hour, they are barely able to survive? That they are flooded with constant anxiety over how to make ends meet?

Watch Dimon’s response on Youtube: he mumbles, he homina-homina-homina’s like Ralph Kramdem.

If a consulting monkey was called in to set that reward-distribution system straight, he’d say: The great big fat unequal grape-cucumber chip compensation system — $31 million versus $16.50 an hour — is flooding society with hordes of short-stick-enders who, filled with anger and rage, go rogue, and sometimes in beastly ways.

But, as we know, when some monkeys hear the words “equal distribution of resources,” they go ape and, quite strangely, among them are those trapped in a $16.50 an hour cucumber-chip existence.

That is one reason America is not happy these days. Would taking the blindfold off the eyes of Justice be a first step toward healing?

One of the great benefits of growing old(er) is that I have been able to free myself of all the prejudices I harbored as a youth.

But despite such progress, there’s a person, or type of person, who still gets to me — on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day.

I’m talking about Plastic Paddy, the Irish-American stentorian gasman draped in emerald blaring his 2 a.m refrain of  “The Wild Colonial Boy” unable to count the many sheets to the wind he’s become — and thinking Castlemaine is a large building in the State of Maine.

And how often is this Paddy accompanied by a lass sporting a Kelly green T-shirt inviting oncomers to “Kiss me I’m Irish.”

I’ve talked to a number of these Hibernophobes and realized that the St. Patrick’s Day they celebrate has nothing to do with Ireland and the people who live there.

They might claim Irish heritage but the Irish part is subculturally divorced from the people who call the Kingdom home.

I have also asked these Paddies what poet they like best: Seamus Heaney, Paddy Kavanagh, or Paul Durcan?

And asked as well: Can you tell me why Ireland was the first country in the world to sanction same-sex marriage by popular vote — a country whose ties with the Roman Catholic Church was hithertofore impregnable.

The Plastic Paddy phenomenon has not escaped the attention of others, some feeling their patience tested as much as mine.

In October 2016, the Irish journalist Rosita Boland explored the world of Plastic Paddy in an article for The Irish Times, “How Irish-America sees Ireland.”

Boland sought to find out if the “Irish” in Irish-American was grounded in a cultural reality. She headed to Boston, the city whose clannish Irish-American population is the most concentrated in the United States.

Like an unabashed ethnographer, Boland entered the lives of eight Irish-Americans — who had never been to Ireland — to query them about connections to their roots.

Her conclusion was, “When Irish-Americans talk about identifying with the Irish they mean the Irish who came to settle in the United States and their descendants, not those of us living in Ireland.”

Her Bostonian sample saw Ireland as an “abstract, romanticized receptacle of dreams and green fields, and the place that will soothe a lifelong ache.” The sweet ersatz isle of John Ford’s “The Quiet Man.”

One of those interviewed by Boland was Rob Anderson, a Natick man who plays bagpipe in two Celtic bands; he himself was perplexed by his Irish-American identity. He said he was aware of, “the expressions that people in Ireland have about us: Plastic Paddies and the fake Irish.”

Then he offered an apologia of sorts, “I guess there are two factions of people in Ireland, one who see us as silly and that we are Yanks, the other who is grateful that things have moved on for the people who emigrated. I know there are a number of people in Ireland who don’t consider people like me as Irish, and that’s technically accurate, but we’re doing our best to keep our Irish culture and heritage alive, and pass it on to our children. At the end of the day that should be enough.”

Case closed? Not exactly.

Anderson revealed that, when talking about his Irish self, he had two scripts: “If I’m talking to someone from the old sod — Ireland —” he says, “I’ll say I’m an American of Irish descent. If I’m talking to someone here in America it’s easier to say I’m Irish, because here everyone comes from somewhere.”

He then showed the root of his thought. He said his grandmother used to say, “Those who had to go got up and left Ireland. They endured a 3,000-mile boat journey, and when they landed here they saw signs that said ‘No Irish Need Apply.’ It’s those people I identify with. They are the people who made the Irish in America what they are today.”

Because there’s so much to unpack in what Anderson says, we’ll put it atop the agenda for St. Patrick’s Day night when, after the fifth jar of stout, we start discussing in earnest. The topic ranks up there with “identity diffusion” among Irish Americans as well as the incendiary, “Are you a Plastic Paddy?”

I would like to add something else to this agenda: the 21 A-list essays explaining how Ireland became “modern” found in “The Princeton History of Modern Ireland” (2016) edited by Richard Bourke and Ian McBride.

Of these enlightening explorations, I would require every wannabe Hibernophile to read Maurice Walsh’s “Media and Culture in Ireland, 1960-2008.”

It’s explosive. The Irish journalist looks at every piece of the cultural erector set from which the modern-Irish-self was wrought, giving especial attention to those powerful forces that sought to take charge of the identity-shaping process for their own ends, especially the Roman Catholic Church.

Walsh talks about how subversive television became in the 1960s, serving as a mirror in which the Irish could gaze upon themselves as they were — individually and collectively.

On talk shows broadcast on RTÉ, Ireland’s national television station, such as “The Late Late Show” (modeled on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson”), the Irish people from O’Connell Street to Blackwater Bridge in Kerry, saw for the first time probing questions posed to government and church officials.

Colm Tóibín, the Irish novelist, said that without such shows it’s quite possible — with respect to the touchy subject of “sex” for the Irish — “that many people in Ireland would have lived their lives in the twentieth century without ever having heard anyone talking about sex.”

And when, after dinner each night, the Irish family gathered around the television set instead of kneeling around the bed to say the rosary, officials from the Roman Catholic Church’s Marian devotion team, condemned television as harmful to the health of the family. Their view was that of the Mayo-born prelate Patrick Peyton: “The family that prays together stays together.”

But church authorities took a severe blow when the Irish investigative journalist Mary Raftery produced a three-part documentary, “States of Fear,” exposing the sexual and physical abuse of children in Ireland’s industrial and reformatory schools from the 1930s to the 1970s — by members of Catholic religious orders. The country froze in shock.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern issued an apology to the abused and to all the people of Ireland. Then, in 2000, a Child Abuse Commission was set up.

When the commission’s report came out nine years later “The Irish Times” called it “the map of an Irish hell ... a dark hinterland of the State, a parallel country whose existence we have long known but never fully acknowledged. It is a land of pain and shame, of savage cruelty and callous indifference.”

We need to add this item to our agenda as well.

In James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” an Irish nationalist, Davin, fed up with his friend Stephen Dedalus’s lack of commitment to things Irish, annoyedly asks, “Are you Irish at all?”

An indignant Dedalus retorts, “Come with me now to the office of arms and I will show you the tree of my family.” It didn’t matter, Davin thought his friend had been touched by Plastic Paddy.

Whether one’s roots in Ireland are deep or shallow, every Irish American on St. Patrick’s Day 2019 ought to include in their celebratory discussion (as the sixth pint of Guinness is being poured) Davin’s question: “Are you Irish at all?” We all want to know.

Lá fhéile Pádraig sona dhaoibh!

Even if you’ve read the most meagre bit of psychology, you’ve run across the “true self” -“false self” distinction in personality.

The discussion is always accompanied by a list of what each self causes in the lives of others, as well as the bearer. I don’t want to give away the ending but the false self never fares well in the ratings.  

In his bold 1951 essay, “To Be That Self Which One Truly Is,” the much-acclaimed innovative psychotherapist Carl Rogers (1902-1987) says people begin to live only after they’ve found their true selves. All else is façadic foreplay.

I thought about the true-self - false-self distinction yesterday when I re-read the “Foreword” to the “Journals of Sylvia Plath” first published in 1982. It deals with false-self - true-self “stuff” in a puzzling way.

Bio-wise, Plath was a poet who seemed unable to escape the throes of despair. She solved the problem — after insulin and shock treatments — by taking her life. She was 30. To describe the details of where her two kids were when she stuck her head in an oven, is prurient. You can find out on your own.

The Foreword to the journals was written by poet Ted Hughes, who happened to be Plath’s husband for six years. What Hughes says about his wife’s search for who she was is mind-bending.

He says Sylvia struggled with who she presented to herself and to the world but the mind-bending part is when he says: “I never saw her show her real self to anybody.”

Astounding. If someone said that about me I’d be devastated.

Did Hughes mean his wife wore masks in her dealings with others? How could he tell? He starts to clarify but winds up bending the mind again.

He says Plath relied on her false-self, “Except in the last three months of her life” (December 1962, January and February 1963). I presume he means she finally became SYLVIA PLATH.

It had to be a source of relief for the poet, the true-self-self finally winning the war. But logic forces us to conclude that her true self, however well greeted at first, proved to be too much to bear.

I’m still looking for a description of the metamorphosis Hughes alludes to, the ways it showed toward him, toward the kids, and of course in her work. Had a door opened for Plath? Is that the appropriate metaphor?

Hughes says once Plath crossed her Rubicon “her real self, being the real poet, would now speak for itself, and would throw off all those lesser and artificial selves that had monopolized the words up to that point.”

In terms of work, and this is not ironic, Plath’s new “real poet self” produced a collection of poems, “Ariel,” that put her on the map of Foreverdom. Women especially continue to rate her very high.

When I first read Hughes’s assessment of his wife I wondered: If she found out, finally, who she was (the schisms being over) why did she see death as her only option? She should have been on the moon dancing with Fred Astaire.

Another thing about the journals is that Ted Hughes destroyed a batch of those toward the end. He said, “I destroyed [the last of her journals] because I did not want her children to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival).”

While admitting to controlling the narrative of Sylvia Plath, Hughes says he was justified; he said he provided a palliative for the kids. But why would anyone who had achieved nirvana, shall we say, care if it all “hung out?”

And would not a true-self-self want the world to see what a true-self looks and behaves like? A self-sans-spin, despite traits of oddity. Was that not what William Burroughs in “Naked Lunch” and Allen Ginsberg with “Reality Sandwiches” were trying to accomplish?

When biographers began looking into Plath’s life, Hughes and his surrogate, sister Olwyn Hughes, used artifice to deflect people from getting at Plath’s true story.

Poet/writer Anne Stevenson in “Bitter Fame,” (1989) — which some say is the truest view of Plath — said Olwyn interposed herself so much in the project that the book was “almost a work of dual authorship.”

For any writer to make such a statement is extraordinary. It’s like an artist handing over her brushes and canvas to a passer-by and saying: paint on, Macduff.

Janet Malcolm in her brilliant “The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes” (Knopf, 1994) takes on the true-self - false-self issues related to Plath but quickly takes aim at those controlling Plath’s narrative.

The book reads like a mystery, a who-done-it (like all Malcolm’s do) as she tracks down those intent on photoshopping Plath and, to mix metaphors, muddy the waters of veritas.

There are other pieces to the puzzle that need attention. First, the younger of Plath’s kids, Nicholas — who was left with his sister in the other room on Fitzroy Road — hanged himself in 2009. He was 47 and had been a successful academic. Some have commented on the trans-generation thing.

Nick’s sister, Frieda (now 58) — a poet, writer, painter — the other child in the room at Fitzroy — remains alive and fighting: she will not shy away from digging into all of her mother, especially at the end — and is always curious as to what her father was doing each step of the way.

Frieda (Hughes) wrote the Foreword to the newly-released (November 6, 2018) “The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2: 1956-1963” (Harper) where Plath is there for all to see. For those interested in the life travails of a literary personage, it’s rich.

Frieda says her real concern was the 14 letters her mother wrote to her psychiatrist, Dr. Ruth Beuscher, the last three years of her life, the last dated Feb. 4, 1963, a week before Sylvia died.

In this final letter, the poet says her grim-psych-pall-over-existence-self had returned, “What appals me is the return of my madness, my paralysis,” she says, “my fear & vision of the worst — cowardly withdrawal, a mental hospital, lobotomies.”

In an earlier letter she avers that when she was pregnant, Hughes knocked her around and she miscarried shortly after — though medical evidence shows she had a serious appendix problem and had gone out of her mind in a fit of jealousy.

She thought Ted was out with another woman and tore into tiny (non-stickable-back) pieces his recent work — a play, batches of poems — when there were no computers to back things up). She had destroyed a piece of his heart and he was never the same after that.

Ted found solace in Ms. Assia Wevill who, after Plath’s death, helped raise the kids — and even had a daughter, Shura, with Ted.

But Weevil ran into trouble too. She too stuck her head in an oven, taking Ted’s 4-year old daughter with her.

Though Hughes appears to have been upright in many ways, as husband and father, a lot of people say he brought Plath down. Some showed up at his readings and guerilla-warrior-like shouted: “murderer!” “murderer!” Poet Robin Morgan begins her poem ''The Arraignment” with, “I accuse/Ted Hughes.'”

And on the cemetery stone where “Hughes” appears after Sylvia’s name, marauders have come in the night to chisel the “Hughes” off.

Emily Gould in an enlightening essay “The Bell Jar at 40” — the “Bell Jar” being Plath’s only novel — says everything we know about Sylvia Plath requires “closer reading.”

She says then we see, “another, more nuanced story about Plath as a woman and as a writer, one that shows the writer’s sense of terror about the consequences of becoming herself.” That is, the consequences of becoming “That Self Which One Truly Is.” It is an issue folks don’t like to grapple with.

I mention this because America is going through a true-self - false-self conflict right now. And, looking from the outside in, I see not only a nation being torn apart but also a generation of cynics being born who refuse to eat the reality sandwiches being served them.

For many years now, when Thanksgiving rolls around, I find myself thinking about gratitude.

“Plagued” might be a better word, in that folks, dead and alive, who have done “good” things for me over the years, enter my consciousness and demand attention.

They come in a parade of sorts and are persistent, but in no way Felliniesque. Perhaps you experience something similar.

I know the paraders are not there bodily — many are dead or live far away — but the result of introjection, my taking on the life of others from another world. I know it derives from a continuing sense of obligation and indebtedness.

That is, I remain emotionally whelmed (not over) by how generous people have been in freeing me of worries and debilitating burdens. One came to pump out my cellar during a hurricane, another jacked up the house to make it even again.

You can understand why I’m attached to these “creatures” in a dependent sort of way. They reflect an emotional connection — even though I’m still not able to define it. It’s related to humility though.

I said the paraders persist; they do not leave until acknowledged. They’re here this very moment; I think they’re behind me writing this.

At Thanksgiving dinner, sometimes the person saying grace touches on gratitude by mentioning someone who did something for the family, but always in passing. Folks at the table nod but want to get on with the meal.

I always want to know what lies at the base of that person’s gratitude, especially the connection between speaker and person mentioned. It would say so much about how people experience gratitude.

And I never heard gratitude mentioned at Thanksgiving dinner that wasn’t received with gratitude. It’s always heartfelt.

Because my parading “friends” show up seeking attention, every year I’m forced to withdraw for a bit to attend to their needs. It’s a retreat of sorts as I spend my time figuring out what I’m feeling. It used to be hit-and-miss; now it’s a calling.

I’m on retreat this very moment. And because of what the practice requires, Thanksgiving time has turned into a kind of New Year’s for me, a time to assess where I’m at and what resolutions I need to make to do things better.

I do not make resolutions exactly but I do examine the foundation stones I walk on and weigh the emotional solidity they afford, especially the gifts of those who’ve come before me.

Solidity is a good word. It sometimes shows in directives telling me how to live a healthier body-mind.

You can see it in my consciousness, in the language I use. Language is telltale, it always says where a person’s at maturity-wise, especially how gratitude fits into his life.

I could give you the name of every person in my parade this year — right down to a librarian who walks an extra mile for me almost daily — but you’d say I sounded like the Academy Awards.

If you read at all, you will have noticed the continuing flow of articles about gratitude in newspapers and magazines and on the Internet.

Whole sections of conferences are dedicated to understanding its transformative power. Scientists come with data on how gratitude metamorphizes.

I know that anyone who lives a mature spiritual life (non-pious-oozing) will tell you how intimately they are involved with gratitude, pointing to where it resides at their core.

The data I’ve collected say gratitude is reflected in a level of consciousness that can only be described as equanimous, a mind-set that allows a person to be at ease in the world — because he has solid foundation stones to stand on.

I know there are those with nothing and especially those whose mind nothing has control of, but they too are faced with issues of gratitude in their daily life; no one is exempt.

Taking the time to talk to the paraders is always a joy; a believer would call it a godsend. It’s like spending an afternoon with nine Carthusian monks at the heart of a fiery furnace.

I mentioned “spiritual life” before. Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu saints say gratitude is essential for living like a god on earth. St. Therese Lisieux said “Prayer is an aspiration of the heart ... a cry of gratitude and love in the midst of trial as well as joy.”

Do you buy that? Is gratitude that central to your life? It’s not something that can be bought or sold.

The neuroscientist Alex Korb, in his recent “The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time,” starts talking about how to deal with depression, and unhappiness generally.

Then toward the end he comes up with a startling revelation: Gratitude can reverse psychological (and physical) ill-being by rewiring that part of the brain (the anterior cingulate cortex) that controls our psychological elevator.

Who are you to believe, Therese or Korb?

The answer is both, because both are saying the same thing: There’s a level of consciousness where a person understands the importance of all the gifts given him and is thus transformed into a person of peace. Gratitude makes us stop poking other people’s eyes out.

The first person on my parade this year — and he’s been there for 40 years — is Kevin O’Toole, the builder from New Scotland. His unending intelligence in solving structural, electrical, plumbing, remodeling, and hurricane-effect problems has been a foundation stone for me and my family to walk on in peace.

He’s a portrait painter too.

I could say the same about Rich Frohlich, who ran a garage in Voorheesville for 40 years but Jim Giner and Bill Stone, two members of the Voorheesville Fire Department, keep tugging at my pen.

They’ve been walking in my gratitude parade since August 2011 when Irene flooded us out like a river. There was Jim in the middle of the darkened road, red wand in hand, waving cars by, battered by sideways needles of rain.

Then every few hours Chief Bill Stone appeared on our lawn to check the generator the department had set up, asking if we were alright.

At different times, when I saw Jim in Smitty’s, I’d treat him to a drink at the bar, a tiny gesture to help him (me) dry out from the storm.

This is how my Thanksgiving has begun this year. I wonder if you’re experiencing the same sort of thing.