I and the Tiger

Every day - no matter who we are,

where we live or what we do –

we leave something valuable behind us forever.

If we get hung up on that part of the day-to-day,

then we will bargain away the strength

 to keep moving forward.

However, if we remember - even for a moment –

that life is an eternally repeating transaction,

which shall go on for as long as we do,

always adding something valuable to our balance sheet

while deducting something that had occupied

the new item's place the day before,

then we will be just fine.

- Samuel O'Herlihy



Wilma and Me
2017 NYC Marathon

Today is my sister Jill's birthday.  Without doubt she is pound-for-pound the toughest and bravest person who I have ever known.  While I am not really a gambler, I can say with the utmost confidence that even if I live to be a very old man, which no one other than the company through which I have purchased life insurance is rooting for to happen, I shall never meet a braver, more resolute soul.  

She is every inch our mother's daughter...it just so happens that she is not a particularly large number of inches when measured vertically.  When the great American philosopher Robert Lilly spoke of the size of the fight in the dog being a better measuring stick than the size of the dog in the fight, it was Jill of whom he spoke.  Wilma has never run away from a fight worth fighting in her life.  Not once.

"Tiger" is the nickname that WPK, Sr. gave her a lifetime or two ago.  Truthfully, until the three of us (Kara, Jill, and I) made the move to Wardlaw-Hartridge for the 1978-79 school year as members of the ninth, seventh, and fifth grade classes, respectively, I had no understanding as to why Dad called her "Tiger".  However, once at W-H and participating as a member of the school's interscholastic teams in field hockey and in lacrosse, the sobriquet the old man gave her proved prescient.  Wilma was a force of nature on the field hockey field and on the lacrosse field.  So much so that when she was a senior at W-H, she earned first team All-State honors in field hockey.  Her friend and teammate, Maria Wilson, did also.  These two, teammates from one of the school's smallest prep schools in terms of enrollment, were recognized by the sport's coaches and the writers who covered it as being among the top two dozen field hockey players in the entire state.  Badassery personified.

Not quite thirty autumns following her enrollment at W-H as a member of its 7th grade, Wilma ran the 2007 New York City Marathon. She was forty-two.  She finished in 3:35:37, a time that qualified her to run in the 2008 Boston Marathon.  On Patriots' Day 2008, she blazed through the streets of Boston as if Anthony's mom had just one dish of Prince spaghetti left and Wilma had zero intentions of letting that short-pants, patent-leather-shoe-wearing little bastard getting to eat it. She crossed the finish line in 3:15:18.    She was forty-three.

Between that November morning in New York City and that April afternoon in Boston, she was forced to take up a battle against a particularly insidious foe.  It is a battle she still fights today.  A lesser person might have used that as an excuse to not subject herself to the torture that is marathon training.  She of course did not.  Not only did she run Boston that April, as she had qualified to do five months earlier, she ran it at a sub-eight-minute-per-mile pace.  Once again, badassery personified. 

It has been forever - her wedding perhaps - since I have seen her dance so I know not just how effortlessly she trips the light fantastic.  I do know, though, regardless of how many dances she can do, none of them contains a single backwards step.  Not even one. It is not in her repertoire. Sadly, neither is the Dougie. On second thought, maybe that is not a reason to be sad.

Today, at least, let us declare a moratorium on sadness and put the kibosh on a reason to be sad.  It is Wilma's birthday.  A reason for celebration if ever one existed although my recollection of the long day's journey into night that was the 2017 New York City Marathon is that the completion of that task also likely qualified as one.  

About fourteen months ago I wrote a little book.  In light of the dozens of copies sold, and the long odds that one of the few people who read it shall also read this, I probably need not mention that what follows here is something that originally appeared there in the "Acknowledgements":

To my sister Jill.  Wilma has been one of my principal sounding boards for

the entirety of my life.  Simply put, had she not transferred to CU-Boulder

following her freshman year at Notre Dame, I would not have applied to CU,

let alone attended it. 

Once upon a lifetime ago, before the great gift of being Pop Pop was bestowed 

upon me, my most fervent wish was that in my next life I would come back as

a soul who is at least half as brave in that life as Wilma is in this one. 

Now?  Having realized the folly and the selfishness of that wish, I have traded it in

for a new and better one.  I wish that each of my grandchildren lives her or his life 

with at least half of the courage with which their Great Aunt Wilma lives hers. 

For if they do, their time here shall not have been wasted.  Not even a little bit. 

Happy Birthday, Wilma.  I love you more than I can ever properly express...

...and I always will. 

-AK