Chapter 23

New Year’s Eve morning promised to be a new experience for both of us. Lisa had seen a flyer for a “Resolution Run” tacked to a bulletin board in a coffee shop near her office. The $20.00 entry fee, quite reasonable for any race, offered an indoor 5K at the local mall, with the proceeds to be donated to the local food bank. I had never done an indoor race before, and this would only be Lisa’s second race ever.

Dating me had turned Lisa on to the music of Harry Chapin, a folk-rock singer whose heyday was in the 1970s, and who was passionate about the cause of ending world hunger. He, in fact, had been on the way to perform a free concert to benefit a food bank near his home when he was killed in a car accident in 1981. Even today, nearly 40 years after his death, his music continues to sell, and his family takes all the proceeds from those sales and donates them to an anti-hunger foundation he started, which was called World Hunger Year at its inception, and is now called WHYHunger. When she saw the opportunity to not only race, but to contribute to WHYHunger’s local counterpart, she immediately signed both of us up online.

(Please see author’s note at the end of the chapter.)

We arrived at the mall relatively early on New Year’s Eve morning. Lisa was clad in a shirt I had found for her on eBay. They used to be sold at Harry Chapin concerts as a fundraiser, and said, “Every year is World Hunger Year.” In this spirit, I wore a shirt that I had also found on eBay some time back, with a picture of a banana and the words, “Harry, it sucks” in honor of his brother’s assessment of Harry’s song, “30,000 Pounds of Bananas.”

The race was sponsored by a sporting-goods store in the mall, and approximately sixty of us were gathered around their front door as an employee came out for pre-race announcements. She explained that the perimeter of the entire inside of the mall was approximately one mile, so the course would be one lap around the lower level, then upstairs for one lap around the upper level, before ending with one more lap around the lower level. As well, it was a fun run, meaning it would be untimed.

As is generally typical for any race, the race was preceded by the National Anthem, performed by members of the local high-school marching band. A referee’s whistle, rather than a starter pistol, sent everyone on their way, and Lisa and I found ourselves surrounded by a surprising number of others who were also walking the course. I decided, in the interest of keeping attuned to my surroundings, to turn off my music for this event.

“Hey,” a voice behind us said. “Didn’t I see you guys at the race at Southpoint a few months back?”

I turned and looked, and determined that I did not recognize the woman speaking, but is isn’t uncommon for people to recognize me when I don’t recognize them. “Probably,” I affirmed. “We were pretty much the DFLers for that race, but yeah.”

She smiled. “I wasn’t all that far ahead of you, actually. Anyway, you know what they say. At least we...”

“ ... beat everyone sitting on the couch,” I finished with her.

Lisa interjected at that point. “Lot of people walking this morning.”

“A lot of us are mall walkers. The mall opens at 5:00 in the morning for people who just want to walk around and get exercise, and a bunch of us get together every Saturday. We walk around for an hour or so, then we go get breakfast together. I’m Kathy, by the way.”

I nodded toward her as we kept walking. “Nice to meet you, Kathy. I’m John, this is Lisa.”

“Nice to meet you both,” she returned. I took a moment to take a bit more stock of her. Kathy was built like many people who tend to walk rather than run a race course. She seemed a bit older, perhaps early 50s, and she was a bit stocky. Not fat, exactly, but stocky.

The three of us spent the first mile exchanging basic pleasantries. Kathy hailed from nearby Clayton and was raising her granddaughter while working as an academic advisor at North Carolina State University. Her granddaughter, Ariel, was clearly the apple of her eye, and Lisa and I got to spend much of that first mile hearing about Ariel’s love for Disney movies – one in particular, naturally – and for going to the Raleigh-Durham airport to watch planes take off and land on the runway, which was where she was this morning with her grandfather.

“Ariel wants to become a pilot when she grows up, but she’s missing most of a couple of her fingers and she worries about being as good as someone with a complete hand.”

Trying to make conversation, I asked, “Oh ... what happened to her hand?”

“Uh ... well...” Kathy chuckled ruefully. “It’s nothing scandalous, necessarily. Her fingers got slammed in a car door when she was about a year old and her ring finger and pinky finger on one hand were crushed pretty badly. They couldn’t fix them.”

By this point we had arrived at the one-mile mark, a water station at the base of the staircase we would take to go upstairs for the second mile. As the three of us paused for a drink, Lisa asked, “If I can ask, where’s her mom? How did she end up with you?”