Blue Ball of Urine

It is getting darker earlier in the evenings and every morning daylight seems to linger longer over the eastern horizon before showing its face. The weather is still warm during the day, but there is crispness at night that hints at the weather to come. Some of the leaves are turning yellow and even falling off. Louise suggested that I should do my first rake of the season, but a good strong wind should take care of most of the early arrivals.

We don’t get the rainbow of colours that some places get in the world. The leaves on our trees just turn a golden yellow, while the bushes will turn red. Most of the trees happen to be coniferous, so the palette is mostly green with splashes of gold and dashes of red. It is quite lovely, but not as breathtaking as it can be in southern Ontario during a good year.

 

I have to say that I am looking forward to the fall, it is my favourite season. To me, the autumn signifies a new beginning, much more than the New Year does in January. Perhaps it’s because this time of year has the best of all seasons. It is generally warm during the daytime and cool at night making sleep something that comes to you as opposed to something that you have to chase. It is harvest time so there are all sorts of products from the fields available. It’s nice to be able to eat food that is grown in this country for a change. The kids are back in school after trying to keep the boredom away for the summer months.

I loved getting back to school in September. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t looking forward to feeling like an idiot in just about every class, but I was looking forward to reuniting with school friends. School friends are those people who like you as much as you like them, not enough to hang out together outside of the classroom, but they are the ones you could be close to if given the right circumstances. I have never been very good at time management and because of that, I suppose that I have let some very good people drift away from me.

The same has happened to people that have entered into my adult life. Something would bring us together, kids or work I guess and when the kids grew out of that activity or I changed places of work, those friends just drifted away. We would meet every now and then and promise to get together, but it would rarely come to pass. My fault I imagine, that time management thing again. I read once that when you run into one of these fringe friends, instead of just promising to get together, you should suggest sharing a coffee then and there. This does a couple of things, it makes you feel as if you have gone that extra mile and it puts the ball in your friends hands as to whether the friendship continues.

The problem comes when your friend says “Sure, that is a great idea!” Right then and there, you know if this is someone you need in your life. If you, at that precise moment, when he or she says “Sure, that is a great idea!”, hope that a large, blue ball of ice plummets from the toilet of a passing flight to London, smashes into your skull, that is not someone you want in your life. There is a good chance that you will hope the blue ball of urine smashes into your friend half way through the coffee. Sometimes there is a reason you didn’t remain friends with that person.

 

I hope I run into one of these people on some crisp autumn morning sometime soon. I just hope that when we finish coffee, he isn’t checking the sky with a hopeful look on his face…