Elder Advice - Thinking Inside the Box – Week 27
As we collectively race toward the day of the Terry Fox Run, the annual accolades for one of Canada’s real icons run riot. Inevitably, the 24/7 COVID imperative requires that some idiots try to link the two, and The Globe and Mail takes the prize. In last weekend’s editorial, they attempted to draw parallels between the extraordinary achievement of Terry Fox and Canadians who wear masks on transit, practice physical distancing and wash their hands often. As if there is any comparison, much less equivalency, between an astonishingly determined 22 -year old, with cancer, a missing limb and a prosthesis designed only for walking, who ran 5373 kilometers in daily marathons … and people who finally remembered what soap is for.
Many weeks ago, I made a similar complaint in this space about the ridiculous media effort then to equate coping with COVID with wartime. When for most in this country the “fight” has been over toilet paper at the No-Frills and their “battle fatigue” comes from being a couch potato. Hardly comparable to the death, destruction and privation of actual war.
It appears another scolding is necessary. About the need to maintain some perspective. But before I provide it, a timely tale …
It was July 31, 1980 and I was at a girlfriend’s cottage near Parry Sound. Intent on persuading her parents that I was both fit and fit company for their daughter, I announced early that morning that I would be going on my daily run. Some minutes later, I found myself huffing and puffing northbound on the northbound shoulder of Hwy 69. Inexplicably forgotten in my haste was: (a) my common sense; and (b) years of hiking experience, which required that I be facing traffic, on the southbound shoulder.
The sound of screeching tires behind me drown out the many four-letter words which accompanied my leap into the nearby thorn filled ditch. A station wagon with Ohio plates swerved to a stop, in a hail of gravel, mere feet away. As I lay awkwardly, cut and scraped, half in the ditch, the passenger door of the car opened. A woman of uncertain age rushed over to me, pressed a U.S. $5.00 bill into my bleeding hand, said: “Sorry - I think what you are doing is just wonderful”, rushed back to the car and, in a thrice, they were off. Cue the second hail of gravel.
I lay, confused, in that ditch for some time before limping my pathetic way back to the cottage. To find the family clustered around the radio, listening to the deafening applause for Terry Fox as he made his way along the main street of Parry Sound.
And it all became clear.
Except, of course, how anyone could possibly confuse my lithe and athletic form and the elegant and effortless running stride for which I am convinced I am renowned ... for a one-legged man with a painfully obvious prosthesis and a strange hop and skip style. I don’t know - some of you with knowledge of my high school phys. ed. performances may have some theories.
What I do know is that Terry got that $5.00 later that day. Because what he was doing was just wonderful.