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Each time I type the paper’s title I’m reminded of the launch of my college career at trembling age seventeen when I was told by a happily supercilious upperclassman that Welcome Week for incoming Freshmen would have more rightly been spelled “the second e in week  replaced with an a.” I clearly felt the truth of his assertion as the jolt of leaving a Senior Class that broke 100 was a far-away cry from a student body in excess of 20,000. I felt every inch the unmanned boy that I was the late summer week I was welcomed into academia where I both did and did not belong.

It’s the autumn season brings out sentiment in me. There are spring, summer, and winter people. I’m a fall; which fits I’m told. Well, I do love it for its special aura of scents of autumn chilled air and sight of grasses run golden and trees in splendid leaf of red, orange, and gold about to pop free of their stems to form rolling carpets of wind stirred color; leaf-waves flowing along as organic rivers that will find a place to settle down to become soil of the future. I’m an autumn emoter, or is it emotee (an empty point when both are wrong). To be sure, I welcome the pastel greens of spring, the skinny-dipping languor of summer, and the perfect purity of winter light so bright and clear it takes the breath the way no mere deep freeze temp is able to do. For me it was autumn that set my heart on its rock solid reality.

A very long month or more after Welcome Weak weighted its full burden on my shoulders I returned home for a weekend and headed first thing for a place I’d used in other years. In a little spot on the Partridge River I sat as I had as a mood brooding creature of fifteen carrying thoughts deep enough to fathom imbecility. Depth lacking substance is indeed silly, but the feeling of deep connection with earth and being was one I then and now honor. Sitting in my spot on the Partridge where I could look down along the slow river flowing leaf-bedecked between banks of black water-worn rock. Doing that alone made a connection as foolish at seventeen as it is wise near seventy. A person will either feel and acknowledges their relationship with earth or they will not. Mine is felt most of the time, but  most sharply when the long chill fingers of pre-winter touch lightly on the skin of planet earth.

That may be aplenty of philosophy for now because I was also thinking lately of rules. I consider myself law abiding and rule respecting, but I picked up a Q Tip the other day and wondered how many others break the same rule. You know it. “Never put anything but a washcloth or your elbow into your ear.” It’s a good rule. How many obey it? There are surely many uses for the ever handy Q Tip, but I’d wager high stakes on one of the most frequent and popular is the old rule breaker. It is, isn’t it? If it wasn’t so you’d not be nodding in accord.

I once had an officer tell me that speed in excess of the limit to pass was illegal. Then a criminal in-deed I am.  If someone ahead is poking along my tactic is and was to get the pass over with as quickly as I could. The gas pedal exists for the sole purpose of propulsion. I see no reason not to use it so. Tromp and go is my motto. You do, after all, need to get around and in front far enough to not be a hazard. This cannot be done by poking along observing the double nickel to do so. Speed is required. I personally feel a snappy pass is preferable to a dawdling one. Too much neck-and-neck will bring out the worst in many drivers. I say get it done. (I hope this doesn’t land me in jail, but to make sure I’ll advise readers to ignore me and always obey the law. That’s best, of course, including use of Q Tips and everything else. That should cover it.)

Rules and laws can be tricky. Take the Golden one. Do Unto Others etc. Well now, see that’s a good idea but not to be followed literally by those with a ratty jalopy who will jack a better vehicle leaving theirs to a similar fate. That a desperate person would wish, for example, to be raped does not give the OK to bodily assault others with that intention in mind. Do Unto Others may be golden but it is not a general regulation. There are exceptions. Observe them, please, along the same line as my butt saving parenthetical above.

Another rule freely broken for a host of causes is Love Thy Neighbor. That one can be enough to make the stoutest heart turn icy. We can disguise our frozen distaste by saying some people are impossible to like, but so saying we are also admitting we are playing Judge and Jury which is overstepping these days even for a King or Queen. I get around that one saying I will try to like my neighbor but all bets are off if they party past midnight four nights a week or otherwise be un neighborly toward me. If one neighbor abuses another you do have the right to respond. You could say you “love” your neighbor enough to call the police the check on their wellbeing. That works for me.

Rules are funny. Some politics and religions give us rules that say destroy all capitalists or kill all unbelievers who do not submit. (Recent events in Kenya involve some of both.) Well, lucky for us relatively few nations have such politics and relatively few true believers follow their rules. But then, it doesn’t take many to make much ill.