Saturday, January 21, 2006

Since you asked


Since you asked:
I was watching a 5-year-old kid ski race in Gran Targhee, Wyoming. It was great. These brave little kids flew down the hill and through the gates with absolutely no regard for their little bodies.

Suddenly I heard thunderous cheering and applause rolling down the mountain, like an avalanche, for a particularly kind-of-slower moving cute little girl with blonde pig tails flying from her helmet. Why so much cheering for her? It turns out there was a reason she was going a little slower than the other kids: she had to have her blind skier guide yell for her when to turn.

Wasn’t a damn dry eye on the mountain, is what there wasn’t.

So I tell my then six-year-old daughter, Ann Caroline, that story and I end it with saying that it shows just how grateful we should be for what we have.

Ann Caroline was so moved she wrote the story in a school paper that I saw posted on her classroom wall. However, her conclusion was a little different. She wrote;

“And my Dad said blind people should be grateful for what they have because they could also be deaf.”