That is the temporal title of one of my favorite books on baseball, by Thomas Boswell the distinguished sportswriter for the Washington Post. Or there’s always the goofy but irresistibly endearing movie It Happens Every Spring starring Ray Milland as a hapless professor who accidentally discovers a substance that makes a baseball repellent to wood and improbably becomes a major league pitching sensation.

Most mornings before work find me at the gym taking an indoor cycling class. It’s a very tough aerobic workout which is why I like it. If I’m going to drag myself out of bed at the crack of dawn to exercise then I might as well make it worth my while and push myself.

Yet I don’t always push myself. Not that I intentionally slack off but no matter how hard I am breathing and sweating, if I don’t change something about the way I’m riding that day I won’t really progress. In fact I derive less benefit from the ride doing it the same way.

Early this morning I was walking Millie when one of those little mop-like dogs I can never identify emerged from a brownstone on 29th St., tugging a middle-aged man on a leash. Of course Millie had to stop and say hello and get in a little pre-breakfast play. The mop-dog was named Boris.

“How old is Boris?” I asked while Millie rolled on her back and let Boris climb all over her. 

“Five.”

“Funny, I’ve never see you two out here. Millie knows all the dogs in the neighborhood.”

I was editing a story this week for the magazine about a family dealing with Alzheimer’s when I was reminded of an incident with my own mom when she was in the early stages of the disease.

Mom was still able to live on her own at that point, but she required such careful watching that we had moved her into a house next door to my brother. One week Julee and I flew out to Michigan to spend time with her. We brought along our young cocker spaniel, Sally, whom Mom took to instantly.

It hit sixty in New York this weekend. In Florida and Arizona baseball spring training is well under way. All over the country we turned our clocks ahead one hour. Is there any doubt that spring is here? 

I don’t want to give you false hope. Winter is always ready to give us one last blow. This time of year temperatures can go from mild to frigid overnight. Still, I am optimistic; I think we may be done with winter.

Nobody’s got any money. It’s true. Everyone is broke. Most of us have never seen things this bad. I remember my father’s generation talking about the Depression. It always seemed like such a remote period of history, like talking about dinosaurs.

Now it doesn’t seem so distant. Not that we are there yet. But this downturn has really caused people to change the way they live to an extent that I have never seen. And as a Guideposts.com poll revealed last fall, the hard times are compelling folks to not only reassess their finances but their values as well.

I almost skipped my blog today. I woke up with a cold and all of you, especially this time of year, know what that’s like. 

It’s the dreaded office cold, that annual bug that burns its way through a staff. Those who contract it first are the lucky ones—they get the misery over with. The rest of us cower behind our desks, avoid contact with the infirm and wash our hands so frequently that the skin begins to slough off.

One thing that always interests me about GUIDEPOSTS customers is how they discovered our magazines or web site. I first encountered GUIDEPOSTS on a business trip back in the '80s. My boss took it out of her briefcase while we were waiting for a plane. In all honesty, I was a little surprised. She wasn’t the type I would have expected to be reading religious material. But as Jenny explained, that wasn’t what GUIDEPOSTS was. “It just has these great stories. It’s really a magazine about people and how they use their spirituality to deal with life.”

Marko is the young Egyptian who mans the register at the little corner grocery store Millie and I stop into every day (the store is owned by a Korean family who bought it from a Puerto Rican family some years ago—I love the fact that New York really is a melting pot on full boil). Marko gets a huge kick out of making Millie sit and give him a high five (Millie digs it too, especially if treats are involved, which Marko keeps behind the counter). “We don’t have dogs like this in Egypt,” claims Marko. In Cairo Marko was trained as an accountant.

This week Julee had to have a second surgery on the collarbone she fractured at Thanksgiving. It was a very disappointing setback and put us both in a troubled mood. I was telling a friend about the situation when in mid-lament he whipped out his Blackberry and started texting, thumbs flying. Unbelievable! I fumed. My annoyance must have been evident in my expression.