Summer officially, officially came to an end on Wednesday, and with the equinox, comes fall, and apparently pumpkin spice in everything from breakfast cereal to suppositories. Fall came with much cooler morning temperatures (thankfully) and an overdue break from the sultry summer heat. People around here are breaking out their winter coats and starting to think about getting their furnaces in good working order for colder days to come.
I’ve had an interesting few days. Last Friday (or Thursday, I forget which), my son called me up asking if I would like to go for a bicycle ride. “Sure, why not,” I told him. “Are you in the area?” Well, of course he wasn’t. Not that he wouldn’t be in the near future.
The near future came Wednesday morning just before I went out the door to some meeting having to do with personal faith inventories. We set up a time after lunch to meet at the Onion Shed just off downtown Farmersville. I showed up with a street bike, he showed up with his brand-new combination trail/street bike. Neither of us thought to bring spare tubes or a tire pump. We rued our decision three quarters of the way through the ten-mile trip.
For an older man who had not been on a bicycle for the better part of a year, I did rather well keeping up with my 41 year younger son. I planned several stops to whittle down the number of geocaches I needed to come to finding a thousand total caches, finding three, making that magic number, eight. The ride and the quest did not come without consequence. The cost of exercise were some sore muscles and going to bed under the influence of ibuprofen.
I suppose I needed another reminder that I was not getting any younger.
Got another one of those reminders Thursday afternoon. Went to what is becoming my yearly visit to the eye surgeon to be checked out for glaucoma. My optometrist had me go because she thought that the pressure on one of my eyeballs was a tad high and because one of my grandmothers had glaucoma toward the end of her life. What I didn’t know was that the eye surgeon was also looking at the possibility of cataracts. I was advised that I would likely have to have cataract surgery in 3-5 years. Oh, joy, since a couple of people in my Education For Ministry group had had cataracts removed in the past year and they were not happy with the adjustment period.
Sigh…
Well, I suppose it would be better than the alternative.
Oh. And the EFM group started Thursday morning. Year three. And about a thousand pages of text to cover between now and next Memorial Day. Our first assignment is to come up with a spiritual biography for next week’s meeting. And here I am on WordPress writing an essay about the end of summer and the first days of autumn.
But here we are. Thursday night. With the Texas State Fair starting tomorrow. The weather is about to heat up again, according to our local weathercasters. There may be a little more hot and sultry left after all.
(Forgive me, but this post is a week late in getting published!)
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