Relative Something

It all started when Kubel went yard. By now you may be able to figure out that the primary allure of the annual Jaunt with Jim adventure is not the biking. After 36 years, it has become much more of a social event. I have met some very dear friends by doing this ride. Many of them are almost as silly as me. The opportunities for belly laughs are plentiful. Only part of the time do we ride our bikes.

We have more fun than can be explained

One evening, Julie kept receiving text message updates from her boyfriend who was at the Twins game with her brother. Our group includes a large number of Twins fans and Julie was taking great pleasure in announcing the score to everyone when the runs were reported to her. When she received the message that “Kubel went yard,” and didn’t know what it meant, Rich and I hatched a scheme to pull one over on her boyfriend. We convinced her to try to out-do him with baseball slang.

This was not a feeble effort. Rich dug right in with a reply that implied Julie knew who would be coming up to bat soon, as he instructed her to type that she hoped Mauer and Morneau would both get a ‘dinger.’ Julie was convinced that he would know it wasn’t her writing and she wanted to tell him, but we convinced her to hold off for a few more texts, to extend our fun.

There was a time on these bike trips when I used to go the whole week without phone contact with the real world. Now, there are cell phones everywhere I turn. I was able to see the current radar image on people’s fancy phones. There were lots of large green blobs on the screen. It was pretty funny to be standing amid the tents with Rich and Julie, huddled together in anticipation of the next text message. When her phone would beep its little signal of incoming text, we would be all giddy with anticipation about how our little ruse was progressing.

“What’d he say, what’d he say!”

Whether or not Julie’s boyfriend was enjoying our little game, we thought it was hilarious.

It set the stage for bigger laughs later on, after we had all climbed into our tents. Rich texted Julie a silly message which got her laughing. It led to more messages and then prolonged and uncontrolled laughter that is incredibly infectious to hear, and even funnier when picturing that it is someone right next to you, alone in their tent, surrounded by over a hundred others in their tents. I marveled the next morning, as we relived the humor of the night before, how the message would leave Rich’s tent and travel up in space to a satellite and then return to earth to reach Julie’s phone, just a few feet away from Rich.

Sometimes space limitations force us to get really close to our neighbors

I spent some quality time in my tent this year. Due to the wet conditions we were experiencing, it was less convenient to pull out my guitar and play in areas where people spontaneously gathered. On several occasions, alone in my tent, I pulled it out before I laid down for the night, to do some quiet fingerpicking (the nails weren’t ideal, but certainly adequate). I was aware that people in tents nearby would be able to hear, and sometimes they clapped or voiced appreciation, but I was surprised how far it actually carried and how many nice comments I received on the following mornings. Luckily, folks were polite and only voiced that it was a pleasant sound to hear when falling asleep.

I think I enjoyed sharing my music from within my tent at bedtime almost more than when I’m visible to my audience. Does that reveal something about me? Maybe I’m more of a shy person than my silliness suggests, after all.