Spring Break

Winter quarter comes screeching to a halt; grades are mostly turned in and suddenly, I’ve got time on my hands—enough, anyway, to take yoga classes, practice softball, and drink beer in the afternoon while watching a college basketball game—and so now, at dusk, I don’t quite know what to do with myself.

I’ve already ridden the tall bike and slapped the bass in the basement a bit; chronicling this is a way to kill another twenty minutes or so; maybe we’ll go out for dinner in a while to fill up more hours along with our bellies.

I started re-reading John Fowles’ novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which I last perused more than three decades ago, and one of the passages that struck me right from the start was a reflection by the narrator that in the mid-1860s, it wasn’t like today, where everyone feels he or she doesn’t have enough hours in the day; rather, most people found the challenge of having too many far more daunting. With so much leisure time to spend, your average gentleman had basically two choices (and I paraphrase): to be a claret-swilling fox-hunter or an inward-looking stuff-collector.

I find myself somewhere between the two; the thrill of the chase doesn’t really thrill me, although I could probably get into the claret-swilling thing; and while I’m certainly something of a navel-gazer, I’d prefer not to amass a collection—except when it comes to bikes, I guess.

I look forward, though, to the relative calm of the next seven days or so. At this point, all roads, pretty much, lead to the 327 Word Prime Time Trial next Saturday; I’ve got the spoke cards cut out and the route pretty much decided upon.

Sometime between now and then I’ve got to ride the entire thing just to make sure I’m not asking too much—or too little. That’s what spring break is all about: just the right amount of leisure.