God Drives a Tow Truck (7 page)

The “long day” was supposed to be a fifteen mile run, but I never managed more than twelve miles. I did not love those long runs. My mother did. She would travel all over the hills and dales of the Binghamton area, usually with her dog in tow. Everyone in the county knew my mother, at least by sight. To train for a marathon, one needs to run all the time, everywhere. Mom faithfully did so, cheerfully, and consistently. When she traveled by airplane, she always had a carryon bag with her running clothes in it.

“If they lose my suitcase, at least I can still run in the morning,” she said.

Meanwhile, I ran every day, but I always skimped on the length of my run. I was busy building a fledgling career, and going to school. Who had time to run fifteen miles, and even if one did have time, who really wanted to?

However, I did book a flight home to Syracuse to be there with my mom on the momentous occasion of her Marathon. My dad had carefully plotted the route, and we intended to drive the whole way, stopping at strategic spots to cheer her on.

The morning of the race, I put on my running clothes. I layered my sweat suit over them.

“Why are you in your running clothes?” asked Mom, as we drove in the early morning to Syracuse. The race began along Onondaga Lake. The day was cool, but sunny. A perfect day to take leave of one’s senses.

“I may as well run with you,” I said, as though we were just going to run around the block.

“The whole way?”
“Well, at least I will start with you. Then we will see.”

A marathon is a little over 26 miles. The marathon was named after an event that occurred in ancient Greece. The Greek messenger,
Pheidippides,
ran 26 miles from the battle against the Persians in the city of Marathon to Athens, with the news that the battle was won. He delivered his message, probably with heaving gasps, and then he died. If that story isn’t enough to demonstrate the lunacy of running a marathon, I don’t know what is.

Now my mom, who was privy to my training schedule, knew I did not have enough training to run a marathon. I knew I did not have enough training to run a marathon. However, knowledge and preparation are rarely a part of my attempts to do the impossible, so I shrugged out of my sweats, and lined up at the starting line with my mom.

The first ten miles went well. We paced ourselves at ten minute miles, in no danger of breaking any records, but not bad for a fifty year old and a poorly prepared lunatic. We took frequent pee breaks in the outlying forests, being similarly afflicted with miniscule bladders. The sun was shining, and the birds were singing. My dad appeared nearly every mile, cheering us on. God was in Heaven and all was right with the world.

Until around mile 13…..

Remember, I had trained to run twelve miles, and through youth and force of personality could probably squeeze out another five.

But as the miles pounded on beneath my untrained feet, I began to see the flaw in this endeavor. Mom, well-trained, and still relatively energetic, coddled and cajoled.

“You can do it,” she urged me. She made me stop at every water station and drink, so I would remain hydrated. She insisted I take a few bites of the bananas the volunteers along the route handed out.

“However,” she warned me, “Keep your feet moving. DO NOT STOP. Just run slowly in place. Whatever you do, do not stop moving.”

If you stop, even momentarily, in a marathon, your brain catches up to you. At that point, you realize there is no earthly good reason to continue running.

So I listened to Mom, and I did not stop. Even during our pee breaks, I tried to keep my toes wriggling. On and on we ran, slower and slower with each now tortuous mile. Mom stayed with me, giving up any hope of fame and glory for herself. She could have gone faster, but refused my pleas that she go on, and I would catch up later.
Some five to ten years later
. Something more important than the marathon itself was tugging at her heart now. She refused to go on, unless I was with her. She would not go faster than I could go.

Marathoners, even trained ones, look to Mile 23 with dread. It is at Mile 23 that all glycogen reserves, essential to life, are completely depleted. No matter how well you have prepared, many runners “hit the wall” at Mile 23. This means that they simply cannot go on. Their legs refuse to march one step further, muscles become jelly, and they slither to the floor like slugs. Mile 23 is where
real
runners are separated from …the dead people.

At Mile 23, I stopped. I bent over, gasping for air. Sweat dripped from my nose to my knees, as I gripped my thighs, doubled over, sucking ragged breaths.

“Just go,” I implored, “Leave me here to die.”

“No,” said my mother, “I am not finishing this race without you. We are almost there! You can do it. Just walk. We will walk till you can run. Just one block. Do just the next block.”

“I just don’t think I can. I want to, really, this is such a pleasant way to die. I just can’t.

“One block,” she cajoled.

“And if I do one block will you stop bugging me?”

She smiled, knowingly, her grey eyes glittering.

And so painfully and unwillingly, I walked with my mother.We tortuously completed the block.

“Just two blocks now,” she said.

“I thought you said just one!” I groaned.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
We slogged two more blocks.

“Just three blocks now!” she said.

“I can’t do three blocks!”
“Yes you can, don’t stop.”
We managed to somehow finish three blocks.
“
Just three miles
,” she told me, “You can do
just three miles
. If you can do three blocks you can do three miles.”

Miraculously, a short time later, I started to jog slowly. Dad cheered in the distance. The marker for Mile 24 shimmered in my peripheral vision. I was gulping air and conserving every last ounce of energy. I kept my eyes focused straight ahead.

“Just two miles to go,” urged Mom. My feet began to move faster. Somehow, we stumbled on. “One mile more,” said my mother, “We’re almost there. You can do it!”

In the distance I saw a finish line- a white tape stretched across the road. A huge banner overhead said, “Syracuse Milk Run- Finish Line.” Crowds were lined on both sides of the road, screaming and yelling encouragements, though we were still well back from the finish line. Their enthusiasm pulled us forward, a moonbeam of good wishes on the tide of our fatigue.

The announcer called out my mother’s name- “Bess Ceccherelli, the first one in the 50-60 age group to cross the line…. And we don’t know who is with her. I am not sure she is registered.”

We held hands as we stumbled across the line in victory.

“Who are you?” the announcer asked me, his microphone down at his side, as we headed towards my dad.

“I’m nobody,” I said, “I just came to give support to my mother.” (the irony of that statement doesn’t escape me now.)

“Did you run the whole thing?”
“Yes,” I said.

“What’s your name?”
“Vicky.”
The announcer held his microphone up, “And her daughter, Vicky, who ran the whole way with her mom.” The race organizers gave me a ribbon, even though I was not registered for the race. That was a lot to go through for a little piece of cloth.

But my mother got a trophy! Since this was a nationally sanctioned event, the moment that my mother crossed the finish line, she was the reigning National champion in her age group. A qualifying race for the Boston Marathon was being held in some other part of the country, and the best runners were at that event. Thus, my mom captured a National title, despite having to nurse her daughter through the last excruciating and slow five miles of the race.

I was limping, and could barely walk. In fact the pain became so severe over the next two weeks, that I ended up limping to a podiatrist. X-rays determined that I was missing a metatarsal bone. I think I had that metatarsal bone
before
the marathon, but it had been pulverized to nothingness in that grueling race.

I should have died, and really
could
have died doing this very foolish thing. But of all the memories of God empowering me to do something I was really unable to do, this is among my fondest.

I am now around the age my mom was when she ran the marathon. I still run, but never more than five miles. I cannot imagine running much further than that. Mom no longer runs, except perhaps in her dreams. She is entering a different kind of marathon now.

I, too, have been in many marathons of a different type- those marathon trials and struggles that life inevitably forces upon all of us. The encouraging words of my mother return to me: “Don’t stop, keep your feet moving… I will not finish this race without you. If you can run three blocks, you can run three miles.” I hear her words, and I see God, beckoning me to finish well, step by sometimes excruciating step: “Just one more mile, you’re almost there. You can do it.”

Chapter Ten

The Taxi Driver

Proverbs 3:5-6

⁵
Trust in the LORD with all your heart
   and lean not on your own understanding;
⁶
in all your ways submit to him,
   and he will make your paths straight.

I was young and naïve and my sense of immunity to horrible things happening to me personally was well developed. Like many people in their twenties, I gave little thought to safety or the possibility of senseless harm directed towards me, and so the warning bells that should have been clanging against my ear drums were not audible. At least, I did not hear them when I
first
stepped in the taxi.

Perhaps I was distracted; that was my excuse. I had a major test in the final leg of my advanced certification in Occupational Therapy the next day. I also had a major case of poison ivy, right on my gluteus maximus. Every time I would sit down, a new explosion of impossibly unendurable itching would erupt. As I sidled across the tattered Naugahide seat of the old taxi and pulled out the address of my hotel, the itching flared like ants swarming on an offending foot in the anthill. There was little I could do but suffer in silence.

Had I been more aware, the condition of the taxi would have warned me to wait for a different ride. It was old and rusty, the picture of the driver taped to the windshield was yellowed and cracked, and I could barely read the identifying information assuring me he was safe. The inside smelled somewhat badly and the driver was unkempt.

I had my Bible with me, though I did not yet believe in the God it portrayed. I was fascinated with the Bible as a piece of incomparable literature, and I was reading it, hoping to counter my incessantly nagging cousin about the reasons I should believe in God. I clutched it now as I began to feel a sense of disquiet. The taxi driver opened the door for me. When I got in, he closed the door, and grunted in a staccato of four sharp sounds. Somewhat disconcerted, I startled, and leaned back against the creaking seat. He sat down in the driver seat and I considered bolting.

“Please wait just a moment,” he said. He hopped out of his cab, and clutched his phone to his ear. I sat watching him, as he waved his hands wildly, and then jerked his head to the side in short quick spasms.

Why I remained in that cab is proof that the neurons that connect to the frontal lobe of the brain where the center control of judgment resides, had not yet matured. I had learned that it was not until the late twenties that those nerves are fully functional, therefore the notorious lack of wisdom in young adults has a neurological basis. In fact, that would be on the test I would be taking the next day. With a groan, I thought of all the cramming I would need to do that evening, and then how I would have to find a way to sit through the three hour exam without ripping the wildly itching skin from my poor bottom.

As the cab driver continued to talk on his phone, I wriggled in discomfort. Poison Ivy is never fun, but this was particularly inconvenient timing and place to be so afflicted. I was a runner with a bladder the size of a small pea (pun intended). I always mapped out my running routes to include densely forested areas where I could duck into nature’s latrine as needed. That very week, I had bragged to a friend that I had never gotten poison ivy when she reacted with some horror to this practice of mine. I was being punished now for my arrogance, perhaps by the God I did not believe in, I thought wryly.