Tuesday, April 29, 2008

A stormy Tuesday brings reflections

Hmmm. I just woke up from an afternoon nap and realized I haven’t even thought of anything to write about today. In fact, I haven’t even thought of writing today. I’ll blame it on the rain. Storms always drain my feeble body of any energy and strength it may have.

I did go to my Senior Fitness therapy session this morning and I worked rather hard while there. But everything called a “joint” in my body, and a few places that don’t move around screamed at me. I’ve learned over the years that I generally don’t need a weather person to tell me what the weather is. My wife is the same way; and from what I hear from many folk, we aren’t alone.

I think it would probably be just one of the reasons we don’t live in Florida where I lived for several years. She hates the place but humors me every few years to go down . It is a must for me as my parents are forever there. At least a spot I can pay my respects is there so we do visit Pinellas County. That’s where I lived when I was down there, except for the school time in Gainesville.

I’m not sure anymore when it is a good time to visit the place. We’ve been there at various times of the year and always find the humidity to be terrible. The summertime, I think is worse, as many years ago when we took our then very little children down to visit with my parents, it was almost impossible to go outside in the daytime and almost impossible to sleep at night. It was just plain oppressive.

That brings me back to today’s weather. This rain has gotten into my old body almost as much as that humidity did. Walking, bending, sitting, simple moving are all adventures. I have no one to give me any sympathy as my wife is feeling all the discomfort as well. So we’ve spent much of this day pushing forward not letting the discomfort get us down.

We have a new TV coming tomorrow for our den and over the weekend we dismantled our fish tank. It seems like a good time to complete the spring cleaning in this room. That’s what we’ve been doing, except the windows will wait until after the storm. I suppose we could have done the inside glass; but since they tilt in for cleaning the outside, it’s just about as easy to tackle the whole window at the same time. Heavy rain isn’t that time. Sheepish Annie sent me a few of her thoughts about using the tank void for knitting stuff. Thanks. I might not give my wife a spinning idea.

Changing the topic here, for many years I was involved in youth sports. Even today if young people are playing a game of just about any kind on television, it is the game I’ll watch even ahead of the Red Sox, the Celtics, Bruins, or Patriots. There is a story on today’s ESPN.com about a young woman playing college softball. She is a senior and only a small role player for her team with only an occasional game experience either in the field or at bat.

In a recent game she hit her first and only home run and there were two runners on base but threw out her knee going around first base and could run no further. If anyone on her team touched her while she was crumpled on the ground, she would have been out. The best she could do would be to crawl back to first base, touch it, and be replaced by a pinch runner, but her home run wouldn’t count.

It was here that two opposing players showed what I consider to be the ultimate show of sportsmanship. They picked the girl up and carried her around the bases making sure her toe touched each base. When they crossed home plate to a standing ovation from the small crowd, they passed her over to her own teammates. That home run proved to be the winning hit.

I don’t know how long it will be there, but if you’d like to read a heart wrenching story, you can find it on ESPN.

GiM

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