Ideal

According to Stephen Mitchell, translator of a 2013 rendering of The Odyssey, (yes, you're re-reading it before going to see the film), the ancient Greek work terpein means to “have pleasure or joy, to delight in,” and it is the same word, says Mitchell, used to describe the experience of life on Olympus, where the gods “spend their days in pleasure.”

So, no wonder you feel so god-awful good when terpein-ing the ideal delightful summer combination of bike-riding and lake-swimming, especially when the bodily immersion takes place at the very same moment that the sun is sinking beneath its own horizontal plane, as well.

Maybe you didn’t have to wait as long for this feeling of joy as Odysseus did upon his return to Ithaca, but it sure felt like a kind of homecoming to delight in the first—finally—of what should be a least a few more of such combinatory opportunities before this summer is over.

The western sky went from red to orange to violet, skipping the cool shades of the rainbow, but nothing, really, was left out, not even conversations that went from brand-new parents to old dead parents in a flash.  (Not, however, the fabled green one, although the sun did disappear with a wink behind the downtown skyline.)

And, for the first time ever, Terms of Service (TOS) rule #22 (“No Pets Allowed on Rides. Not on a leash, not in a trailer, not even in a box with a fox. You cannot bring your dog.”) was broken with no ill effects for either human or canine, and, in fact, the pooch got to enjoy its fastest downhill experience ever without being screwed (as the idiom goes.)

You may have turned in—that is, turned off the path—rather early, but didn’t mean you missed anything that wasn’t missed.  Everything, all of it, was there, just as Zeus and his pals up on the mountaintop would have terpeined it, too.