Not yet, at least. It was the PACER 1st Annual Run/Walk/Roll Against Bullying. I was looking for a 5K, but the cause and the location - supremely beautiful Normandale Lake in Bloomington (MN, for those wandering by) - cried out to me.
There were tons of kids there. It was good to see all the kids, some in wheel chairs, all happy and well-behaved, with no one yelling at them. It looked to me like they took their cause seriously. They were living it.
Kids are good when you understand what they're trying to achieve and try help them.
That park is just awesome in the fall. Most of their trees still have their leaves and they're just twenty miles south of here. They and we are both past our peak for fall colors, but they've got a lot more than we do right now.
The maples around the parking lot are all grown up. They'd just been planted the first time I walked around there. When I was delivering paper and copy supplies for Beckwith (who were based in south Edina) I used to walk around the lake on my lunch hour. When I became a floater, I sometimes worked in the building across the street, so I got to do that in all seasons for the next seven years. I don't think I've been back there since about '98. I feel regret when I'm going near there and can't stop by.
I wonder what people would have thought if I'd walked up to one of those maples, put my hand on its trunk and said, "You've grown so big!" I'm pretty sure they were all liberals, so their edging away would only have meant that they were giving me a private moment with my tree.
I wish I had done that.
I saw a bald eagle in a tree there while I was walking around before the race warming up. He (or she - what do I know?) stayed there while we ran past him twice. I saw that he did turn around and face the trail the first time past. The second time I was pushing harder, so I just checked that he was still there.
Walking back to the car, I saw another one flying way up above the parking lot. I checked to see if my guy was still in his tree and he was. I could see him from a spot about thirty yards from the truck.
Last weekend we went up to the in-laws place on Lake Vermilion, 200 miles north, and the only trees that had any leaves were the willows down by the water, but they glowed a beautiful golden from dawn 'til after sundown. We were stowing the docks for the winter and it was hard to take my eyes off them. The tamaracks are gold up there now, too. Highways 169 and 53 go by and through a lot of boggy land, so it was like driving through the leprechaun's cache at the end of the rainbow on the way home.
It's been a gorgeous autumn.
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