Traditional

As soon as you’re riding bikes with three-dimensional human beings, you’re playing with house money, so to speak.  Everything else after that these days is just gravy.

Or waffles, as the case may be.

Since even carrying an electric batter-cooking iron at the traditional location these days probably qualifies as illegal camping paraphernalia, it was much better to enjoy the traditional February feast at a non-traditional location, although one which has, of late, been host to several traditional, and at least one unexpected, congregations.

And however you feel overall about trucks, there’s no denying their pickup flatbeds make a swell kitchen table from which Spiderman hotcakes issue with abandon.

Drivers were unusually aggressive; maybe it’s the recently-melted snow and pent-up desire to go faster, but, since a good deal of the route ended up being on less-travelled roadways, the occasions for douchebaggery were adequately spaced-out and not too troublesome.

One never tires of heeding St. Ignatius’ inspirational message to “Go Forth and Set the World On Fire,” which, taken literally, might already have been accomplished many times over, but received as metaphorical advice lends itself to a sufficient breadth of interpretation that pretty much anything, even standing around a propane fire ring suffices.

It’s no surprise that when there’s one flat tire, there’s two, especially when it’s a pair of unmediated remediators; what is unusual is for a February evening to have been so dry, particularly following a week when you’d have had to be the person you were more than a decade ago to have been willing to be out in it otherwise.

In Muriel Sparks’ best-known novel, The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie, the schoolteacher protagonist, a women in her prime, Miss Jean Brodie, contends that it’s not safety third, but in fact, safety fourth!  Preceding it are goodness, beauty, and truth.  

If so, mission accomplished, with the undeniable goodness of traditions revisited in new and different ways; and the beauty part: that’s the truth, 

Omens

 The dominoes keep falling to reveal whatever it is you’re noticing and there are still vistas no one else has ever seen even in their own background.

Surely, there are forces unbeknownst to us afoot; otherwise, why would some dreams seem so relevant?

It’s been said so many times it doesn’t mean anything anymore but it’s still the case that regret is consistently more about what you didn’t do than what you did.  That seems to be what the Universe keeps telling us.

And besides, these days the opportunities are so limited that any opportunity is an opportunity not to be missed.  Especially on the driest evening in weeks, with gusts from the South that make even the stupid, unnecessary climb towards home not all that awful.  Again, why consider the superfluous superfluous?

There’s really no reason not to feel happy even if the hoped-for future doesn’t come about.  It’s probably better to have been excited about what doesn’t happen than already sad about what hasn’t happened yet, right?

Of course, home and hearth are hard to resist but here’s a data point of evidence to consider: even a box of macaroni and cheese, chattering in the pocket is insufficient to persuade the open-minded to head straight home and the reward is not only the eternal gratitude of one’s future self, but also, an opportunity to visit first-hand a dream of some tomorrow and also, to reflect upon it right beside the very body of whatever without which none of this would be possible.

Once again, serendipity shows the way.  Mistakes are just unexpected choices and as long as you get home safe and sound, it’s even hard to call them that.

There’s a place for everyone and everyone in their place. 

And nights like this are a reminder that not only is there no place like home, there’s no home like the place you ride to and no ride like the one you come home to.