STORIES FROM THE STEPS, THE ROLL, PITCH & YAW OF FALL BREAK ‘25:
     “Don’t let the hard days win”, six words that would have been easy to post last week amongst the surf, the sun in its rising & setting forms, & the sand. The roll, pitch & yaw of my beach chair, the “attitude” of its flight, was perfect on all 3 axes.
       Yesterday morning, quite early, the phone rang & I was informed my mom had tumbled. Her tumble sent my human spacecraft’s roll, pitch & yaw tumbling in its Saturday orbit. Twelve hours of ambulances, ER’s, & a broken arm is no way to orbit a Saturday.
      Last week, until yesterday, was the sunshiniest of weeks. Yesterday brought metaphorical rain. This morning, real rain is the soundtrack to too much coffee & a struggle for words.
      As Miss Julie drives away to another swim meet, I prep for “Sunday preachin’”, my mind wanders. It wanders in the wonder of the peaks & troughs of last week, in the positives & negatives of “why?”.
       And I wandered to a decent sermon delivered by a guy, Satchel Paige, who also delivered a decent fastball when he said, “Don’t pray in the rain if you ain’t gonna pray when the sun shines”.
       That’s how the roll, pitch, & yaw, the attitude of a beach chair or an ER waiting room chair stays aligned. And that alignment is hard, hard to remember on a beach, hard to apply in the ER, but that’s how the hard days don’t win…