Yesterday morning saw me and three
immediate coworkers (among also three or four dozen (plus kids) out
of our Headquarters staff) walking the 5K-span of the Susan
G. Komen National Race for the Cure right in the center of Washington DC.
Coworker Woodie is especially big on
this – he lost his wife to cancer two or three years ago; he'd brought his
daughter along. Also present with daughter was Peruvian coworker Tica; she
showed her little girl (at eleven, already taller than mom) the headquarters
for the Organization of American States as we passed it;
she'd once worked there. Cool! And rounding out our particular handful of
participating employees was Turkish Gülden (not as round as she was several
months ago) and her infant son (in stroller); his feet are made of the softest
skin God's ever created.
Over the past few years, I've
next-to-never associated with my fellow-workers outside of the office; I think
I keep work and not-work very compartmentalized and separated from each other.
But I did want to get with them for this event (Aurelio bowed out, due to the
need to practice for a fifty-mile (?!) bike race he'll be in next weekend)… and
just for the novelty of spending time in downtown Washington.
This was the first I'd been on the
DC Metro on my own, though I did ride it a couple times with a girlfriend over
fifteen years ago, and also one Friday last month to get to a "workers'
night out" event at a DC improv club (a story in itself), but those
previous times had been with someone who knew their way around.
There was nothing to it, of course;
I'd been able to puzzle out the German
Federal Rail system mostly on my own in 1993 and 1996, so
this was a ride through the park… and I found myself feeling embarrassed once
again for living within a few hours' drive of DC and never going in to the city
to look around. Yesterday I almost whimpered as we walked past the National Air and Space Museum near the end of the
course. No doubt friend Spartacus will wring my neck for not taking advantage
of the opportunity; the world of aircraft has long been one of his greatest
areas of interest. Well, I wasn't there as a tourist, Sparky. (Let's do it next
time, all right?)
And I wanted to participate in
particular for the sake of my older brother Sarge's late wife: Lee passed away
from leptomeningeal cancer
just over two years ago. Also, family-friend Chuckles' mother died when
thirteen-years' -dormant breast cancer returned and took her about four years
ago. Plus nephew JT – sister Mew's son – has been in remission from bone-marrow
cancer most of ten years now.
The runners started out first, and
there must have been several hundred at the least. Then the walkers started –
we held back until Tica and Gülden could find us – and we joined with the other
walkers like a puddle of rainwater emptying into a great river. We did, of
course, stop here and there to take photos – in front of the Washington
Monument, before a couple different random fountains (I was able to splash
Woodie and his daughter), and various crowd shots. And I mean "crowd"!
There were easily tens of thousands; I doubt I have ever seen with my own eyes
that many people moving all at once; carrying signs and chanting at times, this
cause-centric mass recalled to me the marches of the sixties.
A lot of the folks walking carried
banners commemorating loved ones who'd been claimed by this merciless killer;
others had these victims' names written on a placard pinned to (or written
directly on) their shirts – e.g., "In memory of my wife [name]", etc.
One woman's pinned-on sheet noted that she was living with stage-four cancer of her blood, bone marrow, and
liver, if I remember correctly. God bless her and keep her.
You can see one of the walkers
wearing such a sheet here, although the names don't show up. There also
is the tip of the Washington Monument; the building to the left is – I think –
the National Museum of American History. At different points we were also
within easy sight of the White House (I firmly resisted the impulse to wave a
merry half- peace-sign back at its most (in)famous current
occupant), the Capitol Building, other Smithsonian buildings, and the long green expanse of
the National Mall.
Some groups carried flags
of particular countries; early on I saw the German Federal flag twice, the second time followed
by the flag of Bavaria. I pointed another flag out to Tica,
and she hurriedly got her daughter's attention and showed her as it went by:
the Peruvian
flag. There was one family (the Scotts?) with a high banner
supported from two poles that a pair of the family-members were carrying; one
walker under the banner was leading a loud military-style call-and-response
with fellow family members, shouting out (and back) loud, proud statements of
affirmation and survival. We passed a half-dozen folks playing steel drums
loudly and with great talent; elsewhere, a man with a single loud drum; and in
another place a group of twenty-something women enthusiastically cheering us
all on.
There was a group, too, of Muslim
women walking in front of us, carrying a banner much like the
Scotts'; theirs read "Muslims care". Gülden got out her camera
(pushing her baby's stroller with one hand) to get a shot of them. We also saw
several men with long, Indian-/Pakistani-style "kurta" shirts (I really want one!), and,
earlier, a woman in full sari. And there were a couple women whose hair was
just starting to regrow. Good for them!
I felt both bigger – for having been
a part of this veritable tide – and much, much smaller – for walking almost
literally shoulder-to-shoulder with men and women wounded by the death of
someone dear, or/and still fighting the terrible disease themselves. I, too,
have seen two women close to me fight, fade, and die as the cancer claimed
them… and here was a testimony – in far greater, visual, tangible
numbers – of the innocents struck down and torn from our lives, despite
how hard we and they clutch at each other, and how much progress our research
and fighting have made thus far.
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