Is it too very selfish to pray that your hair stylist will recover quickly from kidney stones because you need a hair cut?

Oh!

I kind of thought so.

Peripheral vision alerted me to the movement. Turning my head and looking outside the window I saw it. The first leaf of Fall floating slowly to the ground.

I looked beyond the tree in our front yard and observed the tree in the neighbor's. A few errant leaves were already atop her grass.

Yet the saddest thing is that the neighbor has children.

I have never seen the little girl from that house sitting out under that tree. No doll bed set up for her pretend family; no lemonade stand for thirsty dog walkers; no blanket upon which she could lay on her back and read or discover cloud creations.

Growing up I had a mulberry tree in the side yard of our house. The branches fell all the way to the ground making a secret drapery of leaves and juicy fruit. Between the mulberry and the catalpa tree I could string a line and throw my brother's pup tent over. Summer's were spent in long lazy days of delightful imagination, through books and made-up adventures.

"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Anatole France

And that's what I think about it.

The soccer coach is livid. His varsity team is lazy and unmotivated...his words. And so tonight, in about an hour and a half, he will start the reserved team. Oh my!

That is a no-win dilemma for my two freshmen grand daughters who will start. The varsity players will be angry at them...since teenagers rarely take responsibility for their own actions and the parents too, like somehow this is the junior varsity's fault that the varsity is sitting on the bench. If they lose, well, no one is happy including the players who took the field.

Best scenario? The reserves start and gain a 2-0 lead over the opposing team. At half-time the coach puts the varsity in and the game ends with a 3-0 shut-out.

I'll finish this post after the game.

Days later:

So the coach was more interested in winning than making a point and started the varsity. At 6-0 he let the reserves play. The game ended 7-2.

I was so hoping to end this post with a moral. But I can't think of a good one from this scenario.

That's what I'm thinking about.

The Nina and Santa Maria, replicas of course, were in the area over the weekend.

Coercing two high school freshmen, who are also grand daughters, to go with us, we drove the short half hour to the river town on the Ohio where the ships were moored.

Tiny little things they were.

Like Disney rides in Pirates Cove; from a distance they looked like the two-quarter rides for kids on the sidewalks outside of grocery stores. Or like part of a backyard play set for children.

One of the original ones that Columbus sailed, survived a hurricane at sea. One carried 120 passengers. I counted fifty of us yesterday who were crowded unto the deck. Claustrophobia started to set in. I read that it took over a month to get from Portugal to Hispaniola. A month crammed into quarters that today would hold...five people maybe ten.

Columbus' dream of finding a way to the orient by sailing west was not shared by many. It took seven long years for him to gain enough support to start his journey. And even then he did not get to the orient by sailing west but discovered a New World.

Hurrah for Columbus.

Here's what I think about this. People today have dreams but we live in a society that sometimes does not value one person's dream. We discount what we do not share and laugh at those who against all reason think outside the box. Pressure from without mounts and sometimes overcomes the dreamer and that dream is put aside, trampled or stuffed deep inside in order for the dreamer to 'fit in' and be considered 'normal' and sometimes in order for friends and family members not to be embarrassed.

I wonder what we have lost by not encouraging outrageous dreams.

And that's what I think about it.