The first coating of snow on the road and the good comes out in some people. Our friend Carol and her son Tristan were on their way up for a visit from Connecticut. They got a mile from the house when they went off the road into a ditch. Someone in the campground saw them and went for their truck, pulled them out, and gave them a ride up to the house, since Carol was too scared to drive any further on the icy dirt road. They pulled into our driveway and Carol got out, stumbling, into the snowy yard and the wind. She said she'd gotten lucky. "Come meet these guys." Smiling, a big soft-spoken guy, the driver said he was Bill and and his wife was Janet, and they were recently moved in from Claremont to a trailer in the campground. Then they drove off and we went inside the warm house. It's good to know there are still neighbors like that.
Later in the day I was watching my daughter play in the basketball jamboree that kicks off the winter season for the fifth and sixth grade league. It was in a gymnasium in a neighboring town, and a sign in the gym entrance had a quote from John Wooden, the former UCLA coach. Paraphrasing, it said "Compete with intensity, but not to embarrass your opponent." And that's how the girls played. There were a lot of scraped knees and jump balls. But nobody yelled at the refs for a bad call, and nobody screamed at a kid for a stupid mistake. It's good to know there are still gyms like that.
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