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Day’?s Verse:
The wife’?s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’?s body does not belong to him alone but to his wife.
1 Cor 7:3
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Since schools started, I’?ve noticed an abundance of school buses along my new bike route. The other day I estimated to Ian that I saw at least half a dozen buses a day, and that started me wondering how many I actually saw. Yesterday I decided to count, so I saw my first one of the day and said to myself, “One.” Then a van designated as a school bus drove by, and suddenly I found myself in a conundrum: Do non-bus school transports count? In Massachusetts, and maybe other places, normal old cars and vans carry some of the burden of moving kids to school, and those get lights on the top with a big SCHOOL BUS sign on them. My count floundered after that as I flip-flopped on whether to include car-buses as school buses or not.

This morning, however, I decided firmly to count only real school buses. Any vehicle transporting kids has to be large and yellow to count in my book. So I rode along and saw none for the first four miles. Then I saw one, and a mile or so later another. Then I got into Westborough proper and accumulated a count of 13, racking them up particularly around the middle school I ride by about a mile from the train station. I figured my count would stay around there, since I only see a couple buses in Worcester and I ride less than a mile to work from Union Station. Little did I know that I would see another eight buses in Worcester alone, for a grand total of 21 school bus sightings in 11 miles. (One sighting may have been the same bus twice, but I have no way of telling that for sure, so I counted it separately.)

Amazed, I pulled in to Charles River, walked my bike in to its cube (my bike gets a whole cubicle all to itself in the same room I work in; this is the only way I feel safe leaving it unlocked all day. I walk by it dozens of times all day, and know it’?s secure), and came down the hall to my own cubicle. There, majestically perched on the corner of a file cabinet, stood a glass jar full of mini-Snickers, Mars, Twix, and other chocolate bars. Trumpets played and angels sang at this vision. My boss then announced that she had brought it in to help us satiate that occasional — or not-so-occasional — urge for chocolate we all felt. Wow.