Mein Knie

On, I think, the Thursday in the guys’ week, Dan Murray was having the 9:00 meeting. He had an object lesson to illustrate one of his points. His point was (if I remember correctly) the values we place on different choices, and the object lesson was as follows: he would pull an item out of a small cardboard box he held in his hand and toss it into the middle of the room. We guys could choose individually whether we valued the item enough to dive for it and try to grab it first. The first item was a blue crayon. I chose not to dive for it, but some of the other guys did. Next was a piece of paper, and then a small stick of pink chalk. As at the first, several people dove for those things, but I refrained. Before Dan pulled out the fourth object, he mentioned that it was the last thing, so I prepared to jump. Seeing a flash of green as Dan pulled the item—a dollar bill—out of his little box, I made a decision to dive, and I did. It was a decision I would later regret. I did get the dollar, but being the first to the floor, I ended up at the bottom of a pile of young men that included Ben Holscher, Justin Lerra, and Andrew Bean, among others. Their collective weight ground me into the carpet in the Fellowship Room of the church, and I came away from the room a dollar richer but possibly scarred for life.

Well, although I was planning on limiting myself to one story per post, I may have to amend that to mean one old story per post. If I didn’t, I would constantly end up being about three weeks behind in what I wrote about. With that in mind, here’s a little update on the news here: The Holschers stayed here for the weekend and Uncle Dave went sailing with Daddy and one of our neighbors. I drove them down to Portsmouth, RI, and then drove back. This is news because the car I drove on this trip has a manual transmission, and it was about the second time I had driven it. It was certainly the first time I had driven it farther than the top of Chestnut Hill. I did fairly well, but this was only because of the lack of traffic. I didn’t have to shift out of fifth from as soon as I got on the highway in RI until I came to the big intersection where Rte. 101 meets Rte. 114 in Bedford! Naturally, starting from there I jerked and bobbed and screeched and felt very conspicuous. However, I went with Daddy on Monday to Portsmouth, NH, and back in the same car, and I did much better—and that time we DID have stop-and-go traffic.