who was she?

Well, it has certainly been quiet around here!

Sorry for that; I really enjoyed writing the previous post, and I have had a lot of things that I would like to talk about, however... I just have not had the energy to write. Writing is a bit of a catharsis to me, and I put a lot of energy into it.

So I went for a run today in Waterloo, Iowa. My goal was roughly a 5K in 30 minutes. Not a bad time; That is the pace that I want to be able to hold for long distances. I have only run a single 5K under 30, though, and that was the FLW 5K last year; that was 28: and change, which is still my personal best.

So I knocked out today in 30:34, and it was a smidge longer than 5K. I feel good about that. I am running the Thanksgiving Turkey Trot the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and I am going to shoot for about that time. I felt great after my run today.

But that is not what I am writing about, not really.

While I was running along the river, I jogged past a girl. She was sitting on the rocks uphill (barely) from me, wrapped in a stained jacket, gloves on, knit hat on; just sitting. She looked up as I went by, and her eyes were sunk into her head, giving her a bit of a haunted look. Dark circles around her eyes, and she had dark hair.

Why was she there?

There are numerous explanations, of course, but by the state of her jacket I would presume she is basically homeless, or at least on the verge; the jacket was pretty unkempt, and not something most people would wear if they had access to another jacket; plus, it had warmed up a bit, I would think almost anyone would have at least shed the jacket and enjoyed sitting in the sunshine.

Then my mind continued....

Somewhere along the lines, she was a little girl. Did she have a family growing up? Was she abandoned? Mom, for sure, but dad? brothers? sisters? Somewhere are there pictures of her in a school yearbook, or pictures of her and friend. Do they know what happened to the girl they grew up with? Very few people grow up in essentially a vacuum, so it is likely she had some kind of childhood. How had she arrived at this state of affairs? Did she do this to herself (ruin your own life through addiction and bad decisions,) or did she make most of the right decisions and life would just not throw her a break?

Weird moment as I write this in my hotel room-- my room looks Southwest, across a busy interstate. I had just looked up, taking a short pause to think a bit more about what I wanted to write, and two car carriers went by, both with a Lamborghini (one orange, one red) on it's bed.

Here I am writing about a girl who has by some measure had some type of misfortune (or fortune... fate is mysterious, but I would guess not in this case,) and I see a pair of examples on what great wealth can produce. I am not knocking expensive cars; People with money buy them, drive them. The employ builders, designers, workers, mechanics... and entire small network devoted to producing, selling, marketing, and maintaining those cars... I would hope that they buy more, and there are more to buy and more people to buy them!

But the comparison would be interesting; if this girl I ran past grew up here in ALO, and there is a good chance that that is so, then those two cars were probably worth more money than she has ever seen in her life. And money is certainly not everything, but let's face it... being poor sucks.

Sometimes you wonder.