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,