Running Days
It was a beautiful day yesterday. I had lunch with my daughter in the old stomping grounds of Pasadena. The city of my wife and the city where my family came to life and took shape. Then I came back to my son’s home, and we went to see his daughter run in the district track meet, the final one, her senior season. She did well, qualified in four events to move on to the area meet, and in a stirring race to end the meet, she came from behind to grab third place and ensure her team it’s second consecutive district title.
The beautiful part about the last race, however, besides winning, was that a girl who had just finished running a mile and coming in second was asked to run a leg of the relay and did. She ran the third leg and my granddaughter anchored and it was exactly similar to a district meet in their eighth-grade year and the moms even have pictures taken after that meet, and now they have pictures take after this one and that’s how memories are made, and maybe at some point if they have kids of their own the pictures will come out and everyone will laugh and be happy.
Now we’ll do it all again next week at a higher level as the competition intensifies and there will be more heartbreak and joy, winners and losers, just as there is in life. Some may even go on to greater glory. But no matter how it turns out, they can rest assured that one day when they’re sitting behind a desk or changing a baby’s dirty diaper or maybe burying a loved one, they can look back and remember the day they were young once and ran like the wind.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale