[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

There’s a BarBQ place a mile and a half from our house that my children like to ride their bikes to, get an order of fries, and spend an afternoon downing soda and reading books. Monday, I hopped in the car for a quick trip to the store and came up on my youngest cycling, about halfway to the restaurant, and pulled over to ask if he wanted me to pick up anything while I was out. He told me I wasn’t the first person to pull over and talk to him that afternoon. Some persnickety woman rolled down her window a block or so from our house to “Make sure everything was all right.” She told him it wasn’t safe to be out biking.

The kid is thirteen. When did it become an oddity that one of his tribe might be outside by themselves? We hope she does it again. Next time my kid is going to point at her and start screaming “Stranger Danger!” at the top of his lungs.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Go outside and have some fun. Make it an honest to God POETS Day. Skip out of work and be as free and independent as a kid on a bike.

***

East Coker is a real place. Barely. It’s a tiny village in Summerset set as inland as can be, sandwiched between the Bristol and English Channels, on the north and south respectively, somewhere between Southampton and Plymouth on that southernmost extension of Great Britain the Pilgrims watched sink below the horizon. Wikipedia counts the population as 1667 souls as of the last edit and pictures tell me it’s the kind of quaint English village ripe for a festival-related trio of murders only a clergyman or spinster can solve, to the embarrassment of the local constabulary.

The hamlet is famous as a vehicle for T.S. Eliot’s contemplation in the eponymous poem “East Coker,” the second of the works in his Four Quartets. It was, or is, the ancestral home of the Eliot line. The family left for the American Colonies in the early 1600s and a return by T.S. as a representative of the American diaspored is the occasion for reflections and assertions of the cyclical nature of being, continuity, decay, and rejuvenation.