June 21, 2010- Equilibrium

Kate Murr
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The morning of the summer solstice I had a conference call with my colleagues at UPsidEo. It was the one-year anniversary of our company, which despite challenges is positioned firmly upon a fantastic foundation to do good work to help develop the leaders who are changing the world. You can check out our website, if you like, here.

Perhaps the most important “to do” item on the list for the day, however, was to make the pilgrimage back to main street to visit Edgar’s Pharmacy and Soda Fountain. We’ve been to a couple of soda fountains on this trip: Stuart’s Corner Café in Tennessee and Bell Brothers in Atchison, KS. However, Edgar’s was definitely in it’s own cherry-sweet category at the tip-top of soda fountain glory.

Here’s where I would like Stuart to write something about growing up as a soda jerk on Main Street in Cabool. If he doesn’t write something here I’ll explain that he was a soda jerk, that they had very good ice cream and pulled soda and mixed pop from syrups and used the old-fashioned spoons and glasses. They did the same at Edgars. Here the polite and efficient soda jerk explains how to properly make a cherry soda, Stuart’s favorite.

We said fond farewells to the Giorgios and biked to Vermillion, which also had quite a bit of construction going on just off of their Main Street. We played in the park where we called a friend of the Giorgios in Yankton, Michael, at the Emmaus house. He had heard from the Giorgios we might be coming, so when Stuart called, he informed us that he had our room ready and we would be eating dinner at the house. The Gorgios were invited too. Rather than press on through the heat then, we decided that I should go work on the blog at the local coffee shop and Stuart and the kids would hit the library. We would wait for the Giorgios to come through town and pick us up on the way to Yankton.

Our plan was thwarted, however, when Stuart came crashing off his bike. While falling off my bike is not an infrequent occurrence, Stuart hadn’t wrecked a single time on the journey. Turns out a rather stout stick, about six inches long, had wedged into his front spoke and pushed his fender up into a mangled mess. This halted his forward progress and landed him on the sidewalk of the sleepy neighborhood street. He was stunned, but fine, and we quickly figured out what the problem was. One of his spokes was a little bent, but not broken, and the rumpled fender smoothed nicely back in to place. Still, we thought we should go consult the local bike mechanic to make sure everything was still safe.

The bike shop man was just closing up shop, but he took a look at Stuart’s bike anyway, pronouncing it road-trip-ready. The Giorgios showed up and whisked us away to Yankton, which is how we arrived, poetically, at our half-way point on the summer solstice, a day of equilibrium if not balance.

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