If This Be Treason…

Dearest Rachel –

When you come down to it, this is probably one of those stories that I don’t really have the right to tell, since it’s not exactly mine. I may participate in it, to be sure, but my perspective on the event is merely from the periphery. At the same time, it’s not as if she is going to write you about this (and there’s a certain amount of the goings-on that she wasn’t aware of – intentionally – so she couldn’t tell you anything anyway), so perhaps the task falls to me regardless.

While I’ve stayed out of the training and other preparations for the event this time around (because I’ve learned both my limitations when it comes to running and my preferences when it comes to exercise), I’m well aware that the Chicago Marathon is upon us this Sunday. And I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’ll be doing a similar ‘wandering cheer section’ routine as I did two years back – and for much the same reason. As such, the running community still seems to accept me as an honorary member – to be fair, there’s still support for another Ragnar-style run to camp, and they’ll need support personnel for that, as well, so maybe there’s an advantage to including me in certain events like this.

What event, you might ask? Well, it’s something of a pre-race pizza party for the church team as a collective, complete with a briefing for the relative newbies – including a discussion of info that might be germane to pass on to family and friends who may want to stake out places along the course to cheer each of them on along the way. After all, timing, transportation and positioning will be a logistical challenge, unless you’re either prepared or lucky.

I’ll let you guess which one I was last time around. And for what little I’ve done thus far this year, I’ve got to hope that holds again this time around, too.

The thing is, there was another, secret agenda to last night’s get-together. Well, secret to all but one of the group, and even she might have had an inkling about it, for all I know. After all, if anyone knows when their birthday falls, it’s the birthday girl herself. And not just any birthday, but a milestone one; that of turning forty (which used to be considered over the hill in my parents’ day, but things clearly have changed since then. Or maybe it’s just the kind of people whose circles I traveled about in). That, in fact, was where I came into the picture. You see, this was pitched to Erin as a pre-race party, complete with plans, instructions and advice about when and how to get there, et cetera. On the other hand, I had first heard about it three months ago from another non-runner who was in on the preparations, and would be attending as well; the story I got was of a surprise party, while the pre-race stuff slowly blended into it as a cover. I was also instructed to say nothing to her about this, and to feign ignorance should she bring the subject up – but also, to make sure that our little group didn’t make any plans to get together that might steal the thunder from this particular event.

Setting aside the absurdity of the six of us making such grandiose plans, especially in comparison to this, her own aversion to being the center of attention tended to preclude our doing something to celebrate ‘her’ day, in any event. I had hoped that if I managed to reach – and hold onto – my license weight by then, I could get the gang together to celebrate at a Brazilian steakhouse, using her birthday to justify our insistence that for once, she not consider herself obligated to pony up for her portion of the meal. And while I’m pretty much there, at this point, there was no getting us all together anyway, thanks to scheduling conflicts, and there was the fact that last night’s event needed to not be upstaged. So any thoughts I might have would have to be tabled for now.

So we kept quiet about it, and made no extraneous plans within our little circle. We did a few other major get-togethers in the meanwhile, of course, but the first couple of weeks of October were set aside. The fact that running was eating up her time more and more – as the training ramped up in terms of the distance required every day or two – and that she had plans to travel with her family shortly after the race (I mean like, flying out of town the day after the race) contributed to us not making group plans, as well.

But, as she had been told a specific story about last night’s purpose, when she arrived at the restaurant (after having run there – this is the sort of dedication to the cause that will come into play later on), she must have had an inkling that something might be up when she saw Daniel and myself, as well as Joan. We weren’t runners; what were we doing here? And while I could pass myself off for a while, having a certain rapport with various members (especially the leaders) of the team – including having spread sponsorships about, rather than giving to just one person like last time around – the fact that I’d had to feign ignorance up until now came back to bite me. I admitted that I’d had to keep quiet about my knowledge about this whole event up until now. I’m sure it was all I needed to say for her to get her guard up.

And considering your own aversion to surprises, you could probably imagine what she must have felt like throughout the course of dinner, although nothing was said at first. In fact, the meal was completely straightforward, as was the information session thereafter. I even made a few recommendations for family and friends about getting a day pass for the ‘L’ lines to get down there, rather than messing with driving and parking and whatnot.

But eventually, Yuko took the megaphone to announce that there was one other reason we were there, and poor Erin’s eyes went wide and her face blushed a shade of crimson I’ve only ever seen in an anime. She knew she’d been set up, and even Daniel found the need to apologize profusely for having ‘betrayed’ her.

Well, if this be treason, as the saying goes, make the most of it. And the team had certainly done so, with all the trimmings: cupcakes, balloons, flowers and gifts.

Everyone was telling stories about her and her enthusiasm; the fact that she’s always at church serving in some capacity, her energy when she’s out running… indeed, the capper was from several people telling their individual perspectives on the Sunday previous, when everyone was to meet and run three laps around the local park district track (a distance of about twenty miles in toto, as the circuit was about seven miles). She had run a lap with one group before meeting up with a few stragglers and dropping her pace to encourage them, even to the point of skipping along the course at some point, resulting in her running four laps of the park, thereby ‘accidentally’ running an entire marathon’s length. Oh, and did I mention that this was all in the middle of a downpour? Because it was.

Throughout all of these tributes, she was clearly embarrassed by the attention. I pointed out to her that the team saw her as clearly someone special, which she vehemently denied. “I’m no more so than anyone else here!” Ah, but that just makes you more so, girl; not everyone would have denied their own significance, especially when so confronted with it in so great detail. Even the fact that she ran several miles to (what she didn’t know was, but which turned out to be) her own party was commented upon; just one more proof of a dedication over and beyond what most people would be able to do. She can say otherwise as much as she cares to; the fact is that other people think of her as special, and nothing she says or does will disabuse them of that belief.

Neither will it keep them from celebrating her, even if it is in a manner that she might not have preferred. I found myself thinking of a line from the old Pogo cartoon strip, where the title character is yet again drafted into a presidential run, complaining that he doesn’t like all the speeches and the food served at these political fêtes, to which his friend Porky Pine points out that “when your friends wanna honor you, son, they ain’t gonna let your personal taste stand in the way.”

Sometimes, that’s just the way things have to be, in order to present someone with the honor they deserve. If you have the chance to visit her in her thoughts and dreams, honey, wish her a happy birthday. And maybe, a little luck of her own, too; she might just need it.