Thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU!

Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am doing fine. If fact, I come to you from an entirely new PC. My 8 year old Fujitsu bit the dust. So I unceremoniously went out and bought the newest thing on sale. Plugged it in and started typing. I know. Where has all of the loyalty gone? Right out the door; I’ll tell you; it is not like the old days when things were built to last. I remember my first abacus. I must have glued a dozen beads after they cracked from intense mathematical exercises. Then one evening I carelessly left it out after an exhausting evening of homework. The dog came in and destroyed it while eating my homework. Sure I had to get a new abacus but the point is I had repaired it a dozen times before it bit the dust.

Labor Day weekend finds me on the eve of the third and final long distance ride of the season. Three century (or better) rides in one season; a century ride from Ben’s to our house on Good Friday, the 160 mile ride across Indiana in July and now a century ride for MS the first Saturday in September. All of this and I have made a very big change in my life. No, I did not decide to change the side of my head that I part my hair on. I still am sticking with my life goal of never combing my hair ever again. I just keep it short. No, I have decided to do my daily ride at 4:45 in the morning. It is very bracing. Bev and I wanted to fit a little bit more face time in daily. Since it is more face time with the lovely Miss Beverly, it is a pretty good deal.

You would be amazed at the different perspective that 5:00 a.m. will give a person. I have made it a practice to get up at 5:00 a.m. the past 7 years. In order to get to work on time, my personal grooming rituals would need to start around 6:00. However, I have found that an hour of sitting quietly, thinking, praying, reading, makes my day much more enjoyable. So I have religiously gotten up and spent this me time getting energized for the day. While I have been awake, I have missed the perspective of being outside; riding in the pitch black of predawn.

As a quick aside, the quote “it’s always darkest before the dawn” was quipped by Thomas Fuller way back in the 1600 hundreds. While Tom was good at providing prescient, uplifting quotes that Hallmark would eventually steal when it entered the public domain, he was a horrible astrologist. It is darkest when our little part of the earth is furthest away from the sun which by definition is midway between dusk and dawn. One could forgive the man waking up at 4:45 a.m. in the 1600’s, looking for the matches to light the handlebar torch, and riding down cobblestone roads, trying to illuminate his path mistaking the pitch blackness of the countryside for the deep dark of midnight. It is a pretty easy mistake to make.

My early morning rides have cued me into yet another phalanx of Assassin Deer collaborators. It seems that the skunks are the early morning assistants to the Assassin Deer. I have seen skunks on three of my four early rides so far. The first one scared the crude out of me. I was not expecting it. I was riding along in the dark; minding my own business and there was the small black animal with the white stipe running down its back scurrying down the side ditch straight for me. Luckily, the business end was furthest away from me. Consequently, he was unable to spin around fast enough to spray me. I was very fortunate. The next morning, I saw two skunks while on my rounds.

Obviously, they are the Assassin Deer’s s(c)entinels. Luckily, they are much smaller than Pepe Lepew and Warner Brothers would have you believe, and that the road is startlingly empty at 5:00 so I can ride down the middle of the road, using speed and distance to my advantage.

Looking at this third big ride of the season, this summer will be documented as a very good summer for my personal bike riding. This ride is a fund raising ride. MS has rides all of the country to raise funds for research. I have participated in one other fund raising ride. It was a Habitat for Humanity ride last year. Everyone was very generous and I was very grateful for the support shown. Your contributions helped build a very nice home for a family. Fund raising this year for the MS ride has hit a head wind. It is called the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. It is a wonderful thing. It has raised over $80 million. Last year during the same time period, ALS raised $2.7 million. That is amazing. It is also creating a strong headwind for other fund raisers.

It reminds me of a story. I was working with a group on a back to school fund raiser. The volunteers were hardworking, and loyal. They were just very few. The leader of the group was lamenting the last fact out loud during a frustrating moment with deadlines and bad weather looming. She and the volunteers had worked very hard. It would have been easier if more people would have been willing to help. She wondered why it was so difficult to get people to be involved in the community. A friend pointed out several people in the crowd of “non-volunteers” who were in attendance; there was John who was the Scout Master, April who worked at the homeless shelter, Mark who coached little league baseball during the summer and football in the fall, Carrie who put on the retiree lunch every month down at the church. His list of “non-volunteers” went on and on. His point was that we live with a group of very generous people. However, the problems and the causes are very generous also.

 

So thank you to everyone who gave to MS through my ride and thank you to everyone who gave to ALS through the Ice Bucket Challenge. It’s all good.

Take care.

Roger