Cotton

There's this game I would love to play with my students, if any of them (besides Mari Luz) actually owned unlingual dictionaries. It's called The Delphic Dictionary. You think of something - a problem, an issue - then you close your eyes, flip the dictionary open and point to some word on one of the pages. The task is to then draw a parallel between what's on your mind and what's on the page.

Today's word is pedestrian enough: cotton. A fitting word, really. The sheets are in the washing machine; I'm looking at a cotton hankie given to me by a guy named Craig, who I taught with when I lived in Prague. Cotton is porous, easy to wash, requires ironing and smoothing out to be presentable, is used around the world, is comfortable.

It looks like I'm going to Bilbao by myself. Jesús and AG don't want to ride the Clásica in the rain, and I have no idea whether Luis is going to bail or not. Josu's going to be up there, staying with his family, but I don't really have a lot of contact with Josu any more. No cotton in the rain; it'll have to wait until after the post-ride shower, comfortable clothing for the bus ride back to Madrid on Sunday. I hope I don't have problems taking Ellie on the bus. AG is not particularly chatty today. I don't know if he's mad at me for not riding the Brevet on Saturday or he's ashamed to admit that he's already made up his mind that he's not going to Bilbao, but he hasn't told me. I am porous. I don't care. The Clásica was one of my target rides for this year. I can deal without them - there'll be three thousand other riders.

I have a new riding buddy. His name is Charles and he's a Protestant minister who works as a consultant to various Protestant churches in the Madrid area. He, his wife and kids have been in Madrid for about three years. He's like me in that he knows he wants to get as good as he can get now that he has a bit more leeway to ride; culturally, I'm much closer to him than I am to the Saturday guys. The Saturday guys tease me for what they consider to be a Lutheran way of looking at cycling, but you have to keep in mind that "Lutheran", to them, is the opposite of "Catholic". As in, not like us. I never got through enough of Max Weber to get a grasp on what "the Protestant Work Ethic" was, in Weber's eyes, but I have a sense that a lot of it is you do what it takes to get the job done. Keep your head down and don't complain. If you really want it, you do what you have to do. Can bicycles be seen through the eyes of religion? Because they sure can be seen through the filter of culture.