Good Morning. It's raining.

Photo: iChaz, Flickr Creative Commons

This morning as I was stirring my coffee I noticed a single grain of demerara sugar stuck at the top of my travel cup. I stirred faster and the crystal was sucked down into the whirlpool so fast it seemed as if it had just disappeared. I tried for a while to turn that into some metaphor for something. I ended up with nothing. We're all probably better off that way.

Tennis practice was canceled yesterday. I'm not really sure why. I'm not the coach who makes those decisions and we'll usually even practice in the rain, working on hitting volleys and half volleys to keep the kids from having to move too much on the wet courts. I took advantage of the time off and went home. I'd gotten my work for my classes done for the week so I didn't even have to lock myself away in the office for that. Flush with time and energy, I asked Little Gandhi if he wanted to go hiking. Of course he was thrilled by the idea, so I changed shoes and we got mommy and went off into the fallow fields and stands of pines for our hike. Gandhi did about three quarters of it on his own. I carried him on my shoulders somewhere in the middle and taught him what deer tracks and dog tracks looked like. He spent the walk across the peanut field to the main dirt road identifying every track we came across. With the number of tracks in that field, you'd think the local deer and my parents' dogs had discovered industrialized society and the morning rush hour. When he tired of the animal tracks, he pointed out the triangles and rectangles made by the supports for the crackling power lines that stretched across the field in the same direction we were headed.

My dad says we need to get a cross country team started up at my high school before Gandhi gets there. I hope the kid stays active, especially through the joy- and love-killing changes that come with puberty and turn active kids into apathetic blobs, but I'd rather he be smart and academic than athletic if I had to choose. Hopefully he'll take after me and pursue a little of everything. He may struggle with disappointment and and vague sense of being lost like his old man if he inherits my tendency toward many passions, but he'll be more interesting. At least to me. I hate specialists.