We spent Christmas in central New Jersey, at the home of a very dear couple and their four (almost suspiciously) well-adjusted children. After a delicious turkey dinner and more helpings of pie than is elegant, we settled back in their cosy rumpus room to review, over a snifter of bourbon, the year's highlights. It's something my parents like to do at the end of any holiday, or significant period of time; a kind of stocktake, or personal "top-ten".
On our host's list was the funeral of a dear friend of his from Yale. The funeral, while naturally sad, was an affecting reminder of the difference a resilient spirit can make in meeting life's challenges.
He told us his friend, Jim, was a 300-pound Ivy league footballer and handsome theater major, who one night in 1985, shortly after graduating, was struck down by a New York city bus. He was pronounced dead on arrival (they actually drew the chalk outline), but after 18 hours of surgery he stabilized, and awoke from his coma relatively in tact. Minus his left leg below the knee.
So, he worked and trained and transformed himself into an 150-pound iron-man triathlete, setting records and routinely finishing ahead of 80% of the able-bodied athletes.
Then, in 1993 while he was racing on a closed track triathalon in California, a marshal misjudged his speed and directed a van to cross the road. The van and Jim collided, sending him flying into a signpost. He broke his neck and was paralyzed.
The story goes on; he begins again, this time setting up a charity known as the 'Choose Living Foundation', and on and on, right up to being presented with an Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the 2005 ESPY's, by none other than Oprah Winfrey.
Last night it snowed. New York was hit by about 20 inches in less that 24 hours. A bone-fide, history-making blizzard. So my journalist husband insisted I join him and his camera out in the street, that I may experience history as it happened.
This is something of what that experience felt like:
This morning I left the house around 7am. It was light, but no plows or pedestrians had carved a path. I was a pioneer, sometimes steeped in snow up to the thighs; certainly plenty found its way inside my rather useless gumboots (or wellies, or rainboots).
In a moment of grand delusion, I imagined myself to be just like a child living in a remote, third-world village, having to cross a rushing river to get to school. Except my river was soft and fluffy, and eventually deposited me into the subway, and directly into Manhattan, where the snowplows and the Starbucks were all up and running.
...
In all my New-Year-resolving and goal-setting, I have made a lot of noise about twenty-eleven being 'The Year of Making Strides', but when surviving the first snow fall of the season marks an epic victory, I can't help but wonder if some peoples' strides are more impressive than others.
Now, I know these encounters and life lessons have a way of wearing off, giving over to the neuroses and trivialities of the every-day. Yet, while I never expect to live life with the sort of true-grit and seismic impact of a Jim MacLaren, (or for that matter the boy our other Christmas host taught in Haiti over the summer, who crossed ACTUAL rivers as part of his three-hour journey to school), I wonder if in 2011, I might set the bar a bit higher for myself, and when I feel like I'm failing or limping through life, to imagine what it would be like to make strides with just one leg.
At the very least, it might lend a little more grace to the occasion.
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