It's a Lovely Fall Saturday, and ...

... not too much is going on. Over in the Hudson Green--less than a block from our house--is one of the final farmers' markets of the season. Lots of folks (many with their dogs) are over there with reusable shopping bags and with concerns about what they could do with all the pumpkins.

Joyce has headed off to the local tire store checking the tire pressure in our Prius--the warning light was on this morning. Sometimes this just means add a little air; other times, you need a new tire. Which ain't cheap.

Then she's heading out to a local body shop because our Prius lost a recent wee battle with a rock in a neighbor's driveway, and the front (plastic!) bumper is cracked and will no doubt have to be replaced. Oddly, this is the third time this has happened to the car in the last few months. We've had it 3.5 years. And now this.

Once (maybe twenty years ago)--with another car--we had another impossible series of mishaps: three windshields cracked by debris flung at us by another driver's wheels--all within a matter of months. Our insurance company began asking us uncomfortable questions (Have you been doing off-road driving? and the like), but we'd done nothing but suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. (I just made that up, that slings and arrows stuff ... impressed?)

(Thursday, driving under a Hudson railroad bridge with a train roaring overhead, we heard/felt a thunk! on the windshield. The train had knocked Something loose, but the Something did not have sufficient determination to do more than leave a smudge. Still ... startling.)

Earlier today Joyce had gone out to the health club, as is her wont six mornings a week. We both were weary more than usual this morning because we got home late from a production of King Lear in Cleveland (about which I'll post tomorrow in "Sunday Sundries").

Still, I got up at 6:30, fussed in my study a little bit (posting some doggerel), walked across the Green to Open Door Coffee Co., muttering along the way the three most recent poems I've memorized ("Casey at the Bat," "Jabberwocky," Shakespeare's Sonnet 27 ("Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed")), probably alarming the farmers on the Green who were setting up for the market. Here comes that Old Guy again--mumbling. So sad ...

And for a couple of hours I sipped coffee, read the New York Times on my Kindle, read twenty-five pages of The Teacher Wars, a couple of stories in Joy Williams' new collection (The Visiting Privilege). Caught up on Facebook and email--amazing how little of the latter I get now that I'm retired. Mostly junk and invitations to spend money. Worked a little on a poem about my dad. Walked back home, again muttering the three recent poems, alarming the swarms of market shoppers, who drew their children and dogs close when I passed by (I exaggerate).

At home, I talked with Joyce about the car's troubles, then went to work in my study. Wrote my weekly letter to my dear former Harmon School colleague Andy Kmetz (who's now in an assisted living facility in Kent) and figured it would be really exciting to write an account of our morning. So far.

So here it is ... and it's only 10:49.

I'm sure things will pick up soon. The mail carrier usually comes about now. And maybe I'll get a call from a telemarketer, too.