Deer Assassins?

I hope this blog finds you doing well. It leaves my brain doing well.  It is a bit windy; which is a pain in the butt while bike riding, but nothing that can't be overcome with persistence and an easier gear. I never know. Is the proper term a higher or lower gear? Feel free to let me know. I don’t want to look dumb at the national conference of geeks in biking shorts.

For those of you who have been following "You Said What? Roger" the past three weeks, this week is the payoff. The previous two weeks have been the set up for this week's blog.  Do you feel like you're in church? We have been having a three week sermon series on bike riding. I apologize to the church phobic in my audience for not explaining my nefarious plans before hand. You're here now though so you might as well go sit down in the front row.

Over the past two weeks, I have written about remembering a ride 40 years earlier and the benefits of night riding. Today I bring you the finale. We live in the country. As mentioned previously, the Sharritt farmstead is comprised of the Fall Creek valley. As such, the northern edge of our farm is a deer highway. Year around the deer are on the move. In fact the first four rows of the neighbor's corn field have been decimated by the deer as they move through. During hunting season, herds of 30 to 40 deer will dot the harvested cornfields of the Pendleton Correctional Facility to the East of our farm. They congregate there because the shooting stops as they cross the road that separates our farm from the Reformatory and enter the no hunting zone. It appears that the governor doesn't appreciate armed hunters roaming across his fields.

With this population density, I figure that is just a matter of time before I commit vehicular deer slaughter. I have been driving 33 years, and it hasn't happened yet. So rather than having one mishap in 64 years, I figure that I will have this unsightly encounter sometime during the next 31 years.

Armed with this statistical knowledge, one evening last summer as I was coming out of a wooded area on my ride a deer burst out of a bean field onto the road about 20 yards in front of me while I am coming off the steepest hill on my ride at a brisk 28 mph pace. It scampered on off across the road with no harm being done.

There you have it; a completely benign encounter with nature. Or was it? What if that deer was an advance scout for a group of assassin deer. What would happen if after years and years of being on the losing end of car deer encounters, the deer have figured out that while they may be a little bit bruised they would win a bike-antler encounter. Just to be clear, by win, I mean bike rider ends up in the hospital having antler wounds sewn shut at best and at worst the surviving family unit is responsible for maintaining a road side memorial with little white cross and a replacement stuffed Bullwinkle every six months as a grim reminder that all is not safe in the country.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks as I pondered the possibilities, I decided that this scenario was completely possible. Not the assassin deer part but the deer getting to my point in the road at my point in time that is totally possible. As a self-described control freak, totally possible passed from possible to likely, through highly likely, to just a matter of time.

Then during a ride in late August, I witnessed a nice 8 point buck stalking me from the middle of another bean field on down the road. He was giving me the stink eye as I labored North at about the halfway point of the ride. I could tell by his demeanor that things had changed. The deer had organized and targeted little ole me as one of their first victims.

I shared these concerns with all of my family. I just wanted them to know how to alert the police in case I experience an untimely demise while on a bike ride. Did I garner support from my loved ones? No; I was ridiculed by my loved ones. "There is no way that will ever happen." "Why do you go to hyperbole in every situation." "Drama; get over it. It is just a bike ride." I was ridiculed at every turn by those I trust and love and lean on for support during these trying times.

Left to my own devices, I have had to constantly change my routine. Even as I changed tactics, I could see the signs of the deer as they used new and more exotic weaponry. Dropping walnuts from trees in hopes of causing disorientation so they could attack after hitting me in the head; that diabolical plan didn't work out because I was wearing a helmet. Then they tried to debike me by dropping hedge apples on my head. Hedge apples for those of you who do combat with deer from the comfort of your 2500 lb automobiles are those green brainy things that country folk sell to city folk with outrageous claims of spider repelling properties. While formidable, I managed to stay astride in spite of several near misses.  

Now I hear rumors that they have a new plan during my night rides. According to my spies, the deer will use a decoy that will stand next to the road and feign an attack just in my peripheral vision which will cause me to jerk my handlebars to the right to gain distance between me and my attackers. As I swerve to the middle of the road, a buck will be standing there with his antlers down allowing me to do all the work as I skewer myself.

I hope that you take note because this is not hyperbole. I have evidence. This past week my sister-in-law posted the following video on my facebook page. I warn you it is not for the weak of heart.

See. I told you so. And you gun control fans say hunters have no need for assault rifles. A handlebar mounted AK-47 and we're having bambi stew tonight kids.

Take care

Especially out there in the woods.

Roger

http://www.whotv.com/news/nationworld/sns-viral-video-biker-antelope,0,815660.htmlstory

by the light of the silvery moon?

I hope this blog finds you doing well. It leaves my brain in fine shape. It has been a glorious day in the middle of a glorious October. The corn and beans continue to fall to their own version of the grim reaper. In fact the harvest has started in full force. As a public service announcement,; if you happen to be one of the jerks that is blessed enough to have all of the planets (including Uranus) in orbit around you, chill out. If your child is ten minutes late to soccer practice or you're ten minutes late to work there maybe some embarrassment but the world will not have ended.  If you keep your mouth shut and breath deeply the embarrassment will probably be less by being late than acting like the planet mentioned earlier.

Before I get started with the real content of this week's blog, I want to acknowledge the passing of Steve Jobs. The truest testament to his accomplishments came from The Onion, which is really just Mad Magazine for grown-ups. Their headline; Steve Jobs, the last man in America who knew what the F*** he was doing, has died. It is pretty much true. I once had the opportunity to go to an Apple store on a Sunday morning, and it was like church; there were greeters, there was a message, there was the teaching.  The only difference that I could see is that everyone there was enjoying church and the offering basket ended up being a lot fuller. I was joking with a co-worker. I said that it was pretty humbling. Compared with Steve Jobs, my co-worker and I had managed to design a mildly improved Indiana tax processing system.

I wrote last week about rediscovering bike riding as enjoyable exercise. I wrote that blog as an introduction piece to this blog. A week ago last Friday night, I discovered the exhilaration of riding a bike in the dark. Of course, I was well lit. I have a very cool red strobe light on the back. I have a blinking headlight. While in theory is it bright enough to light the way, it is really just bright enough to let people know that there is something to swerve around out in the road;  kind of like the red-devil eyes of a opossum. To address this deficiency, I had purchased a ray-o-vac headlamp. It is one of those geeky creations that is really just the Reese’s cup of flashlights and sweat bands. It works great. My helmet fits right over it, and it throws a nice beam about 15 ft in front of you as you are going down the road.

So a week ago, Bev went to Chicago for a wedding shower for our niece. This is the perfect storm for an empty nester. No kids and while I miss her deeply no Beverly either. These occasions have always been marked as a beer and Oreo weekends. That's right, 48 hours of drinking beer and eating Oreos, and if truth be known, doing things that are just a little bit dumb; ergo a night time bike ride. I didn't say that it wasn't well thought out. It was. It was just a little bit dumb. I had been noticing that the headlight wasn't going to be bright enough as the days started getting shorter and my bike rides would bump up against dusk. So on about June 23rd, I devised a plan and went out and bought the ray-o-vac and kept it tucked away for the perfect opportunity.

The Friday night was perfect. I was home late from work so I was cutting it close anyhow. It was cloudy so it got dark even earlier. The voice of reason in my life was no where near my ears. I had a cool ray-o-vac head lamp. If I went down and got hurt, I plenty of beer and Oreos to get me through to Monday morning. I was wearing a helmet. How bad could it be? I was golden.

I took off, there was just a little bit of sunlight fighting its way through the cloud cover. It was enough to get me to the more deserted roads. And then the darkness descended. I am a control freak that likes to see all of the possibilities in front of me and then plan for all of the possibilities. In my minds eye, I have the world's largest radar array in my head that is looking forward trying to figure out what is going to happen and then plan for all of the revealed possibilities. It doesn't matter if I won't use a hundredth of the permutations that my brain develops. The plans have to be developed and submitted to management for evaluation and approval. It makes me a pretty good project manager. Spontaneity not so great.

That is why I am surprised that I found it to be a great experience. While 15 feet seems like a good distance to illuminate, it evaporates very quickly at 16 miles per hour on the flats and even faster at 25 miles per hour on the hills. My world suddenly collapses to just that 260 inches in front of me. No worrying about that hill, what gear should I get ready to shift to, I didn't know that bridge had a reflective sign on it. It was so cool. What was a 12 and a half mile ride suddenly became about 4400 fifteen feet rides. It is so different.

While I won't become a nocturnal rider and will still do most of my rides in the light of day, I do think that it is a road that will teach me something illuminating about myself and how I look at the world.

Take care

Roger.

a 40 year bike ride?

I hope this blog finds you doing well. It leaves my fingers on a beautiful fall evening the day after the 1st frost of the fall. For you almanacers out there, it occurred on October 2 this year. This frost only occurred in the outlying areas. That means for all of the city folks, your impatienses are safe for another two weeks. For those of us who live in the upper Fall Creek Valley, we know that the possibility of frost in the “outlying areas” means to put on a jacket and go out and glean your garden because the fat lady is about to sing. So I wasn't surprised last night on my bike ride to see all of the neighbors out picking the last of the peppers, the green tomatoes, and a few peppers. Yes, in Ingalls, the garden party is over.

I have mentioned my bike rides from time to time during my blogs. Yet, I haven't used bike riding as the main theme during the past year of blog writing, even though two activities have coincided. Bike riding started a year ago last July and the first blog in this format was September 24. I haven't written about bike riding because I am always suspicious of people who extol the virtues of exercise. "I run 20 miles a day and I love it" "I have never felt better in my life." This is as they are limping out of the doctor's office after receiving a cortisone injection.

I think that most exercise is a fad; Tae Bo a fad, jazzercise a fad, shake weights a fad, weighted hula hoops a fad, (I looked this one up) the face bra sadly a fad. Link to the face bra   http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-415610/Would-wear-face-bra.html  While biking has had a really good run, any garage sale next May will have more than one Schwinn or Huffy looking for a new home. Then the next level of biking, takes the fadness to an entire new level; $1500 bikes, spandex shorts and shaving your legs. So last summer, when I decided that my theory of exercise maybe incorrect, I decided that if I rode my huffy for 800 miles, it would be safe to go out and purchase a better bike.

Oh great guru what was your previous insight on exercising? I am not very proud of it, but I had a theory that I only had so many heartbeats left. So rather than go rushing to my quota through exercise, I was prepared to go to low and slow to the end. That wasn't working great. Last July I started riding that Huffy and had literally ridden the wheels off it. Receiving a 200 mile reprieve, at 600 miles a very nice $600 bike was purchased right before Memorial Day and a thousand miles later, it has been a very good summer.

Every time I go out for a bike ride the same vision flashes through my mind. Sometime during the ride, my mind flashes to a vision of a ten year old, riding a bike around a suburban block endlessly. My mom had a nursing friend, Terri Oiler, a single mom with three kids about our age. Mom and Terri in an effort to save their kids from the farm and the burbs respectively did a kid exchange over a couple of weeks for my tenth and eleventh year. For me that meant an above ground swimming pool for six hours a day. For some reason, it wasn't safe to get in before 11:00 a.m. By 5:00 p.m. with bogus claims that my skin would stay pruney if I didn't get out now, I was forced out of water world. I went straight to a Schwinn with banana seat and sissy bar and rode until forced to come in to eat at 6:00.

"Why do you ride like that honey? Look at your face; its all red. You’re burning up."

"That's the only way I can keep cool.  The wind feels good and keeps me cool."

It happens every bike ride. No matter where my mind is at the beginning, sometime during the next 45 minutes, I'll be that 10 year old again; zooming around the four corners, seeing how far I can ride hands free, trying to pop a wheelie, the wind rushing through my hair and best of all the 6 foot skid mark on nice white concrete.

Weird huh?

But probably not as weird as the face bra.

Take care

Roger

Cornbread Sun?

I hope this blog finds you doing well. It leaves my fingers doing well. It is moving through my input device and transmitting via blue tooth into my Ipad with almost no latency. Later it will saved to my drop box account in the "cloud", which is low, cold and gray today. Then I will move it to my laptop for the final edit, and then it will be posted to the internet in my blog.  I know what you are asking. Roger how do you make something so technical, reverberate with such soul and humanity. I am indebted to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and those goobers who created Google for the technical side. The soulful humanity is brought to you by Alfred P. Newman, Red Skelton, and Hee Haw. (Doom, Despair, and Agony on me).

Fall didn’t think that the vernal equinox and a blog wasn't enough to celebrate its arrival last week. Fall had to go for a full court press this weekend at our place. High in the 50's and a cold rain has been on the menu for the past two days.  I have taken a proactive combative stance of two-two hour naps this weekend and plan on pulling out the ham and bean recipe for Monday. Yummy. The secret weapon will be a skillet full of cornbread. When it comes out of the oven, that golden orb will look like a sun all warm and toasty. It will embrace the golden butter and flow to the cockles of my soul and give me warm fuzzy feelings while I eat the second and third and fourth pieces. The whole time I will be hunting for that big piece of ham that fell off of the bone as those beans simmered in the crock-pot all day.

Fall is definitely the time of the year when imagery returns. Summer is too bright. It washes all brilliant imagery away in its blazing light. Oh we try; hotter than a firecracker (adequate), dryer than a desiccated cockroach in the Mohave desert. (not heard of that one? Of course you haven't. I just made it up because I needed another image to go with hotter than a fire-cracker.) We have only one lousy firecracker metaphor for summer.

Back to my point that summer is not the time of imagery. At the end of July, I was riding my bike when I came across the two boots in the picture at the bottom of this page. It was at the bottom of this long really steep hill and I was going 32 mph. Going 32 mph on a bicycle, really helps the concentration. So I quickly thought "that's cool" and let it go, continuing my search for other obstacles that might end my ride faster than a French photographer in the Tour de France. (I know another summer image reference, but admit it you have no idea what I am talking about. Only .009 % of the population does and we are all those goofy spandex, bicycle, short wearing geeks that know exactly how fast we were going down a hill when we pass a pair of children's boots laying on the side of the road.) While I didn't pay much attention to the boots, I did tuck the image away thinking it would be good to build a blog around. I am always looking for a good soulful blog topic.

I even got my daughter, Grace, to go out and take the pictures so I could hold on to the moment, and if the word count for pictures is correct I could put a caption underneath that said "Small cowboy runs out of boots on cattle drive up Southeastern Avenue saying "That thar hill is just too steep to run up in fur-lined boots when it is hotter than a fire-cracker" and viola I would have had a 1033 word blog.

One-sixth of a year has passed since then and nothing. NO INSPIRATION at all from those cute little fur lined boots. I think it is because summer burns off the imagery from our lives. The sun leaves no shadow. It is always overhead burning off all of those extraneous thoughts that live in the shadows. Boots on the road in July are just boots; probably a purchase at a garage sale that fell off the top of a car because a harried shopper didn't get all of their 25 cent treasures tucked into the back seat.

Imagine that picture taken on a bright late September day at the same time of the day. The shadow would have trailed off toward the East. The sun would be igniting the first hints of fall foliage to a deeper gold. Those would be the boots of a boy who had come to this bridge to go fishing in Fall Creek with his dad or grandpa. The grass in the sideditch would have turned lush again with the cooler temperatures and recent rains. The sun had brought some warmth and burnt off the dew and cool that the boots were brought for. So this kid convinced his dad to sit down on that rail and shuck those hot things off and run for the creek bank in his bare feet.

On Monday, it is no wonder that boy will imagine that that cornbread is a big pale fall sun and smile as it warms the cockles of his heart.

Take care

Roger



Small cowboy runs out of boots on cattle drive up Southeastern Avenue



Falling?

I hope this blog finds you doing well. It leaves my finger tips with the first inklings that the year has turned the corner. Farmers are starting to cut beans. The cloud deck is low, and last night we sat around a fire eating smores and slowly inching toward the fire seeking the comfort of the warmth on our faces and leaving the cool on our back sides. Hoping that the kids would go play hide and go seek, so that we could use their absence to shorten the arc even more and get a little closer to that heat that my being will be aching for in two months.

This turn comes every year. It is real. I know it it coming but I am always caught off guard by it. I suppose that part of the issue is tied to day length. I suddenly find myself needing more sleep. This body that could stay up way past 10 p.m. waiting for the sun to go down in July, and hop out of bed at 5:00 a.m. ready to start the day is starting to cry out for bed at 8:30 and is hitting the snooze four and five times barely 60 days later. Three weeks ago I was able to start my bike ride at 7:45 and finish up at 8:30 with enough dusk in the sky to not worry about turning on the head lamp. Now if I am not out the door at 6:45, the 7:45 light will be fading fast and full dark will be here 15 minutes later, and forget about it if there is any cloud cover.

Day length isn't the only symptom that binds me to this turning of the year. My history is all about the fall. At Sharritt Dairy Farms, fall was always about laying in the reserves to get through the winter. Sure Henny Penny planted in the spring, but it was fall when she harvested the wheat and made the bread for winter. Fall was when we harvested the 100 tons of silage to place in the silo that would feed the cows until the grass greened next May. Fall was the time when that corn silage, having had all of the oxygen packed out of it, would ferment in its juices leaving that sweet, biting smell when we started using it in mid-November, that now I only catch when I open a cider jug that has set a week too long in the fridge.

September was when we started freshening cows. Dairy cows do not react well to the heat. It makes them give less milk. Think about it. You are asking a 1500 pound cow to secrete 65 to 75 lbs of a watery substance every day. Ask her to do that and sweat like a pig you are just asking for too much. So after waiting patiently, the fun began on September 1. From September 1 through December 1, if the bull cooperated (he always seemed cooperative), 100 cows would have their calves in 90 days. And the twice daily ritual of milking would stretch from 45 minutes to 2 and a half hours.

Fall is here, summer is gone. It is a good thing I suppose. The summer that appeared to be a time of continually expanding possibilities has had its wings clipped. It is a season of such wild exuberance that I am surprised that an unimpressive season like fall can overcome it. It will though. Summer tried to run into fall. It tried to push its way through. 100 on Labor Day weekend was impressive. Sure it will rally a time or two in early October with Indian Summer. But the sun will point to its falseness; its low angle too weak to fight its way through the dust generated by a harvest in full swing. In the end, that low angled sun will have to fight through the gray days of November.

Fall is that time where we lay the ground work to get through winter. We pull out the sweaters, find the hot chocolate and chili recipes. We rediscover soup and find the register that has the warmest air from the furnace.

We spend every possible moment we can around a campfire with friends outside moving a little closer to the core wringing every moment from a glorious summer wanting just a little bit smore.

Take Care

Roger

When I remember 9.11, I?

I hope this blog finds you doing well. It leaves my fingers doing well.

I wasn't going to write about 9.11 today. I wasn't going to do it. I had thought that if I would write a blog it would only say “When I remember 9.11, I cry.”

What more is there to add?

Then on the way to church, the flag wavers were on the overpass and church had an interview with a local fire chief that had friends in the twin towers. The chief is a man who on the gayest of days has a face that expresses that the cares of the world are pondered and carried behind his eyes.

It was very moving. Yet, the thing that changed my mind was my high school Sunday school class. I think that I have mentioned that I love this group of kids. If I haven't, I love this group of kids. Week in and week out they come together and wrestle with whatever tough questions they come up with. They disagree with one another in a loving manner and accept that any opinions expressed there are not stupid and are important enough to be shared.

We started the day with "even though you were in kindergarten or 1st or 2nd grade, what do you remember about 9.11, and how did it affect you?"

As you can imagine there was a lot of head nodding as the kids shared that they really didn't know what it meant. They knew something important had happened. A common refrain was that their parents just stared at the TV when they got home from school. They knew something big had happened, but no one had words to express it.

Then suddenly someone piped up and asked me what I remembered; "you were an adult then." Yes, yes, I was. I was well into adulthood at the time. Bev and I had a couple of sobering moments this weekend where our maturity was on full display. This was one more. Who knows it may make a blog in the future? Of course, we will be older by that time.

Yes, I remember 9.11 very well. We were still farming and that Tuesday was chicken killing day. I guess it wasn't a good day to be a chicken either. We had just started and I had heard that the plane had hit. After running to the house and turning on the TV, I realized that I wasn't watching a replay of the event but was watching the second plane crash in real time. In shock, I went out to the barn to continue the work of the day and listened as the Pentagon was hit, a plane crashed in Pennsylvania, the towers fell with a large loss of life, the President was being sent to an undisclosed location, and all air traffic was grounded. 

I remember the kids getting home and after finding out that they had watched the coverage most of the day, I took them out to the yard that overlooks the valley that is our farm and told them that it was going to be okay. That things had changed in a great many ways. The United States had been attacked, but it is a big country. I doubt that Ingalls was going to be a target. Bev and I would do everything we could to keep them safe.

Looking back, I think that was an error. Well meaning but I was wrong. Safety in this world is an illusion. We would do all that we could to keep them safe but there would come a day when our kids would go out with friends, take Grey Hound trips across the country, go to college, jump out of perfectly good planes, and go to Ghana to fight human trafficking. Safety is an illusion. It is an illusion that we hold onto tightly. It is an illusion that we will spend the national treasury in order to have. With the illusion firmly in our grasp, we can go on and make other plans, think great thoughts, pursue true love, live our lives. I get all of that.

The other thing besides the national treasury that we have given up is our freedom. Since 9.11, I have been frisked walking into an NFL game, had my privates displayed on a screen so that a TSA agent could check out my "package", had my phone calls and library loans monitored. I think that is too much. You may disagree. I don't blame you.

One of the kids disagreed this morning. She feels comforted knowing all of the steps that have been taken. She feels safer when there are snipers on buildings around big events. The frisking that I received was not overly intrusive. If those steps were to be stopped, she is sure that we will be attacked. I cannot disagree with her. We may well be. In fact, I will agree that there will be more attacks.

But it strikes me that now the government has created 300 million enemies. Each of us is an enemy until we have been cleared and placed in a controlled environment. I admire those dedicated law enforcement professionals committed to our safety. Still I pause when I think that during my lifetime I will be in the crosshairs waiting for a decision to be made about my lethality.

But what about the more attacks? It strikes my that most of the publicized foiled attempts have been foiled by street vendors telling the cops that that guy looks suspicious, or by airline passengers pouring water down the terrorist's underwear. Why don't we trust our citizenry? We have a stake in the war. We believed that the citizenship grade was important in elementary, and we believed that it would go on our permanent record. We are not the enemy. We can be trusted.

And what about when we are attacked again?

We will know who the enemy is, and he is not us.

Take care.

Roger

What a night in the theater?

Friday night I had an experience that I have only had one other time. Bev and I went to a reading of a play in Muncie. This play was the product of an immersive learning experience that blended students from the sociology department and the theater department. On paper the evening was an amalgam of writing a play that wove in the results of the recreation of a sociology study that was first conducted by Robert and Helen Lynd. The first study occurred in 1929 and because of its iconic status among sociologists, it has been repeated six times in the intervening years. The culminating homage resulted in a PBS documentary in 2000.

That is on paper. However, in the alchemy of placing young people in a high pressure situation with high expectations and dedication to a high standard of performance what you get is a group of young people who are transformed and do something that is beyond their previous capabilities and talents.

As I mentioned, this is the second time that I have had the opportunity to witness such a moment. The first time was six years ago when we went to see Pendleton Height High School drum corps present their national contest winning performance. I was amazed. The thing that amazed me most was how much they enjoyed playing together. They knew they were good. They were confident that all of the work that they had put in towards their goal would not abandon them during their performance. They could let loose and let the music flow from them. I was moved.

The catalyst for this amazing group of kids was a band director that had taken a group of kids that had never successfully competed for anything and turned them into one of the best high school bands in the nation. The great thing about this was that he found a way to inspire the kids so that they truly enjoyed the hard work. Thankfully cooler heads intervened and insisted that the band skip a competition so that it could play during half time of the school’s football game in the RCA Dome. The director finished out the year and took his talents to a school that had different set of values. Predictably, the band has reached the same level of mediocrity as the football team during the intervening time.

It strikes me that there was more to this group of Ball State students transformation. The teachers were active and involved but at the end the play while listening to plans and dreams for the future of their creation, it seemed that the youth's drive and determination were still on the up swing. The adults, however, had counted the cost and had delivered all that they could deliver. Igniting and extending a passion in some twenty students will not a full professor make. There are grants to write and papers to publish and careers to establish.

No I think what happened here was that 20 young people in the prime of their idealistic, I'm going to change the world passions, rubbed shoulders with a group of people who had had many of their ideals worn out of them by the realities of life. Rather than finding them wanting and in need of saving, they found people taking stock of their lives and making decisions that were indeed the best for them, their families, and their communities. They found simple people, who have no great desire to change the world, acting in such a way to make it a better place.

Being kind to others, humbling making changes in areas where their lives are lacking, staying in a place because the place is home, are the ideals of the unimaginative and the limited. They thought.

Actually, they found people whose lives were full, robust and truly worthy of celebration, and their own lives changing from the example.

Take care,

Roger