Birthdays; mischief; the Fruit of the Spirit; a word association; a walk; a rogue motorcar

Happy birthday to Karin; to my sister-in-law, Ana; and, apparently, to quite a few of my acquaintances.

Here’s an old photo of Karin and her dad.


My parents baked Karin a cake. Daniel got it all over himself, and we had to toss him into the bath.

We asked Samuel if he wanted to bathe; he demurred. Later – too late – he apprehended that we were respecting his stated wishes, that we in fact didn’t intend to bathe him. He grabbed some fistfuls of cake and judiciously applied them. So we bathed him after all.

Daniel, whom we’d dried and partly dressed, climbed into the water again.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This morning, I was urging Samuel to be patient, which got him onto his favorite Sunday School topic – the Fruit of the Spirit – and so we read from Galatians 5, which also mentions walking along with (beside, behind, in step with) the Spirit; which made Samuel impatient to take a physical walk; which we did take, along the perimeter of the nearby school. We observed the physical education students riding bicycles upon the running track. I never got to ride a bicycle in P.E. in my day. … Even stranger, a few yards ahead of us, a car casually drove over the grass and mounted the sidewalk and ambled behind the tennis courts and into a parking lot. I could hardly believe I’d seen this, but I checked the grass, and the tracks were there. What was so strange was the nonchalance of it, as if it were a familiar route for that car.