Please read this...If you come to a fork in the road...have dinner

I hope you folks will forgive me...I was getting in a hurry, 'cause a deadline, once again, was rapidly approaching...

...actually, the deadline came and went sometime last Thursday or Friday...so this won't be the most original of colyums...

The deadline, in this case, is self-imposed. I try to compose an award-winning column on the Thursday or Friday prior to publication. Sometimes, as I've noted many times (probably too many), the words, and the clock, just don't seem to cooperate.

Last Sunday afternoon, I decided to go for a walk. The day was absolutely gorgeous: sunshine, bright blue sky, nice and warm, with just a hint of fall in the air. 

About halfway through the walk, I came to a fork in the road. Really. There was a white, plastic fork in the road. Well, technically, I suppose it was a street. But fork in the road works so much better.

The fork in the road got me to thinking about, well, about finding a fork in the road. And that got me to thinking about an observation once made by the late, great philosopher Yogi Berra. 

Mr. Berra, as you may know, played baseball, and played it very well, for the New York Yankees. He also was famous for what were known as "Berra-isms."

As USA TODAY explains in a posting on its website, Berra-isms are "colloquial expressions that lack logic." They're fun, too. Even if he might not have said many of the things that he was supposed to have said.

I hope the fine folks at USA TODAY won't mind if I share some of the Berra-isms which were listed on their website. And I hope you don't mind that I'm sharing some of them with you, just for a bit of a laugh on a Thursday (or whatever day you happen to read this). You may have already seen, heard or read some of them. Number one on the list, by the way, was: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." 

2. You can observe a lot by just watching.

3. It ain’t over till it’s over.

4. It’s like déjà vu all over again.

5. No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.

6. Baseball is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical.

7. A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.

8. Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.

9. We made too many wrong mistakes.

11. You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.

13. I usually take a two-hour nap from one to four.

17. The future ain’t what it used to be.

23. Why buy good luggage, you only use it when you travel.

24. You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.

28. He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.

31. I don’t know (if they were men or women fans running naked across the field). They had bags over their heads.

36. I never said most of the things I said.

37. It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.

38. If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.

44. Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.

47. I’m lucky. Usually you’re dead to get your own museum, but I’m still alive to see mine.

48. If I didn’t make it in baseball, I won’t have made it workin’. I didn’t like to work.

49. If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.

50. A lot of guys go, "Hey, Yog, say a Yogi-ism." I tell ’em, ‘I don’t know any." They want me to make one up. I don’t make ’em up. I don’t even know when I say it. They’re the truth. And it is the truth. I don’t know.

By the way, when I came to that fork in the road last Sunday afternoon, I left it, so somebody else could find it, and maybe remember some of those Berra-isms.