A Summer's Day

You know summer’s well advanced when you start seeing ads for the State Fair.  So here's a summer poem with the word “fair” all over it:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
                            - William Shakespeare

I had an appointment with my opthamologist yesterday, to have my eyes dilated and checked – I’ve had a number of procedures done on them (Lasik, cataract, glaucoma) so have to see an eye doctor a couple or several times a year.  This time he also decided to fire a laser into my right eye to clear up a clouded plastic lens.  But that’s not the exciting part.

The exciting part is that we suffered two (!) collisions, one on the way there and one on the way back.  Neither was our fault.  The first one was on the way, when a huge pickup truck rear-ended us as we came up to an intersection where the light was just turning green.  The cars ahead of us were moving, we were moving, and the driver of the pickup underestimated our speed and socked us in the rear hard enough to leave an apple-sized dent in our rear bumper.  We pulled into a parking lot, him behind us, he apologized, and we exchanged insurance information.  I had an instant headache that quickly cleared up.  The second one happened as we were leaving the clinic.  Ellen pulled out of the lot to stop at a shallow angle behind a car at the end of a row waiting for the light.  For some reason, she began to back up, didn’t see us, and bumped into our front bumper.  Left just a scratch, she apologized, we didn’t even exchange insurance information.  But we were super-alert on the way home, looking for yet more trouble, which didn’t happen.  Strange day, strange day.

I’m collecting information on Baptist funerals because I’m about to bury one of my victims in Knit Your Own Murder.  I don’t think I’ve ever been to a Baptist funeral and I’m a little distressed to learn that the individual churches are pretty much able to set up their own customs – but within, I’m sure, the culture of the Baptist faith, which I’m not familiar with.  See?  Kind of slippery to invent the customs of a fictional church within a culture I didn’t grow up with.  But I have three cousins who are Baptists and they’re proving helpful.  Good thing I really, really like doing research, but kind of sad I let this slide until so close to my deadline.

There’s more religion than usual in this novel – I’m also sending Betsy and Connor to an Easter vigil service – and I hope that doesn’t bother my readers.  It’s just the way this story is unwinding.  What do you think?