do glad.

Today not tomorrow, that's what I've been saying.

So, when my wife's busy work/school schedule found her observing in an operating room for the day, babysitting options weren't available and I needed to skip out on work to watch Piper, I made the most of my time out of the office by dropping the car off for a much needed repair and heading to a nearby diner to enjoy a rare Daddy-and-daughter-and-nobody-else breakfast.

Piper Bea settled happily into her pancake, a pickle and a tall cup of chocolate milk.

I sipped coffee and listened to her tell me about whatever popped into her about-to-be-4-year old head.  Sipped, listened and smiled.  Taking full advantage of not being interrupted by her verbose big sister, Piper covered a lot of topics while we sat in our little booth-for-two.  She didn't make me swear to secrecy, but, all the same, I think I'll not share the details as it makes me feel like I alone was invited "in".

As we neared the end of our meals, the television monitor perched in the corner of the room showed the portrait of a woman celebrating her 108th birthday.  My not-what-they-once-were eyes couldn't read her name in the captioning and the sound of the TV was drowned out by our conversation and the crooning of oldies drifting from the overhead speakers...which was fine by me.

One hundred and eight years old.

Can you imagine?  You can't.  I can't.

Trying to imagine brings "today not tomorrow" right back into the discussion.  Perhaps if you make it the whole way to 108 you start believing that you'll never stop ticking and the days'll just go on and on forever.  Maybe that's the fear.

Or the hope.

Or maybe every day feels certain to be the last.

Who knows?  Not you and not me.

I silently wished that woman well and hoped that she was better able than me to make sense of the dizzying ways in which the world has evolved.

In that very same diner, two older (suddenly, mid-70's didn't seem all that old) gentlemen sat poring over a road map.  

Remember those?

I do and you do too.

But, maybe just maybe, our kids won't or at least not outside the context of museums and quaint postcards.  Of course, museums and postcards might not be long for this world either with any and all information available at our fingertips and the mail system, our modern day pony express, likely going the way of, well, the pony express.

I marvel at how much has changed in my lifetime.  Can't even begin to wrap my head around it, actually.  And, despite what my children believe, I haven't been alive all that long.

Here are a couple of the significant events that occurred in the year 1905, the year today's birthday girl was born.  The first forest fire lookout tower went into operation in Greenville, Maine.  Ty Cobb made his professional baseball debut.  A physics journal published the article that unveiled Albert Einstein's E=mc2 equation.  The Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the US was founded (it wouldn't officially become the NCAA until 5 years later).

One year earlier work began on Grand Central Station, the Wright brothers took their initial flight, fingerprinting was first introduced as a way to investigate crime and the ice cream cone was invented.  The ice cream cone was invented!

CAN YOU IMAGINE?  You can't and I could drive myself mad trying to...today not yesterday, today not tomorrow.

Piper Bea and I left the diner, she with cookie in hand, and we found the car repaired and waiting for us.

As we drove home, we passed by a beautiful restored farmhouse that I recalled residing in a different location just a few years earlier.  A construction/restoration group had plucked the once ailing structure from the ground, ratcheted it up onto a wheeled platform and towed it to a new, more idyllic, perch a few miles down the road.

I CAN imagine, but only because I saw it with my very own stunned eyes.  Amazing and certainly unthinkable not all that long ago.  I'm betting an undertaking such as this would have qualified as science-fiction back in 1905.

And I'm guessing "science-fiction' was hardly a household term at the time.  I should visit a museum to find out for sure.  Or, wait, I could just ask my phone...yes, I could actually speak into my phone and just wait one second for the answer.

Geez.

I have a 50-mile race coming up on Saturday, the FebApple Frozen 50 in Maplewood, New Jersey.  It seems a daunting undertaking this early in the year, especially with sickness and subsequent inactivity not too far behind me.

However, it doesn't seem nearly so daunting when held up against waking, rising and making one's way through the day, every damn day, for 108 years.

The woman in that photo was smiling and it was a beautiful, happy-to-be-alive smile.  Could've been taken a few years ago, of course, but that hardly tarnishes the message if she was, what, 105?

And maybe it was that smile that jarred something in my holes-punched-in-it memory about the number 108.  I did a little digging (you bet I employed my phone) and discovered that it is a Harshad number, an integer that is divisible by the sum of its digits (1 + 0 + 8 = 9 and 108 divided by 9 is 12).  That's a curiosity but what I found more interesting was the fact the "Harshad" is derived from two Sanskrit words, harsa and da.  Harsa means "joy" and da means "give".

Joy giver?

Seems too good to be true for the sake of this story, but it goes a long way toward explaining that lovely smile and the unmistakable happiness I felt in seeing it.

So, 50 miles?  A hundred?  No problem.  A blink of the eye really.  A joy.

Glancing at Facebook upon arriving home, I discovered a typo in a friend's status update.  She was sharing her relief at sneaking in a run before expected freezing rain began to fall.  "So glad" was accidentally replaced with "Do glad".

DO GLAD!

I love it.

I turn 39 this year.  Piper Bea will be 4 in April and her sister turns 6 just two weeks later.  People are celebrating 108 years on this planet.

What a gift.

How could you not do glad?  You can't.  I can't.

Do glad and do it today...AND tomorrow.

the snowy day.

If I concentrate really hard I can remember a time (I think) when it snowed in the Susquehanna Valley. Even then though, a pre-winter snowfall of any significance was a rarity. Forecasts call for snow several times a year, but some slight shift in the weather pattern or uncooperative temperatures usually turn promises into wintery mixes, sleet or cold, cold rains.

Tired of the boy crying wolf, when the weathermen were projecting 8"-12" of the white stuff on December 19, I turned a deaf ear. But, sure enough, they got it right this time. Snow it was without a single drop of anything else.

My day began with a quick dash to work to pick up a pair of snowshoes before ducking into the grocery store for supplies other than milk and bread. Snow was already falling, but the roads were in decent condition. At least they were when I left the house. By the time I left Manheim behind me and started the drive "up" into Sporting Hill, conditions had changed dramatically.

Getting home via Mt. Joy Road was out of the question as a jack-knifed feed truck had gobbled up both lanes of traffic and cars were standing in line in both directions. I hung a quick-thinking left hand turn, dropped across the covered bridge on Sunhill Road, crossed over the railroad tracks and...failed to make the inclined turn onto Junction Road. After spinning wheels for a moment, I eased off the gas, put the car in reverse and backed up enough to hopefully get the momentum required to make it up the hill. It sounded great in my head but it didn't work. By my second attempt, other cars had caught onto my brilliant detour and were crowding me from the rear. I-own-an-SUV impatience convinced one driver to pull around me while I backed up and I inched over to the right to create a bit of space between our cars. The end result was the passenger’s side rear tire of my Ford Focus becoming pathetically ensnared between a railroad tie and the actual rail. There I sat directly on the railroad tracks going nowhere.

But I digress. My escape is a story unto itself, but is not the story of my snowy day. Suffice to say, friendly roving snow Samaritans and eventually AAA combined to deliver both me and the vehicle to the safety of my driveway and garage. And, believe it or not, I was grinning the entire time. Snow in December brings with it boundless hope.

Paragraph 2 of this post contains a lie. I tried to turn a deaf ear to the prognosticators but I didn't succeed entirely. On Friday night I found myself wandering into the local hardware store in search of a sled. I left with two. I was fully prepared to hang them in the garage for some later date, but I really, really hoped that they'd get some use the next day. And they did.

After being bundled up by her mother to the point that her arms were suspended straight out at her sides as though her coat was still on its hanger, Lily offered me her mittened hand and we headed for the backyard. Our deep is on a downhill slope that butts up against a decommissioned elementary school playground. The playground also slopes away before joining a farmer's field. Lil and I had a couple of acres all to ourselves though we needed little of that expanse.

Eight inches of powder was enough for the two of us to "wahoo!" and "yay!" maniacally. I'd daydreamed about this day long before actually becoming a father and it was as joyous and magical as I'd imagined. Sub-freezing temperatures, however, cut our festivities short as Lily's sensitive skin was beginning to light up like Rudolph's nose. Whether because she's a trooper or because she sensed Daddy's enthusiasm for sledding, Lil never said a word but there was no hiding the fact that she was frigid. I delivered her to the safety of the house, Lindsay's shared blanket and a steaming cup of cocoa.

Snowblowing blows, but having a long driveway and a short attention span for chores, I ignored the shovel and blew snow. My run was calling.

I own a pair of Crescent Moon Gold 12 running snowshoes, but they've been little more than decorations on my garage wall for the last couple of years. I blew the dust off of them (literally) and adjusted the bindings to accommodate my Mountain Masochists. I had a vague notion of covering the two miles of farmer's fields between my backyard and the nearby section of converted rails-to-trails but was happy enough just to be on snowshoes after a long hiatus.

Running snowshoes are much more compact than traditional snowshoes so that the wearer isn't tripping all over himself or herself. The tradeoff is that these "shoes" don't have the surface area needed to effectively keep wearers up on top of the snow in deep powder. In other words, I and my Gold 12s needed a packed trail or a compressed, icy snow pack of which we had neither. Three-quarters of a mile into my "run", I knew it was time to turn and make this a short "out-and-back".

Except for stopping to snap a quick photo, I ran the whole mile and a half, but I ended up feeling like I ran 10 miles. By the time I got back to the house, I realized that I was absolutely exhausted. I also realized that I still had the same ridiculous grin on my face that had been there since the first flakes began to fall that morning.

To be completely honest, I think that grin had made its way onto my face the very first time I heard mention that it might snow. Deaf ear? What can I say? Snow hope spring eternal.

pacifier perch.

Though Lily is an unapologetic creator of messes, she has little patience for the clutter of others. While determining where to settle in for optimal Baby Einstein viewing, she was agitated by the stray nuk that had tumbled from Piper Bea's mouth earlier in the evening and now lay in the middle of the living room. Measuring 3" x 2" at most, it shouldn't have been much of a bother, but Lil was not going to accept it dwelling anywhere near her chosen resting place.  Of all the potential relocations sites, she quietly decided that Daddy's Pearl Izumi would make the perfect pacifier perch.  And for some reason I just can't bring myself to move it.