Today was the 33rd annual running of the Bolder Boulder the largeest 10k race in this country and the 5th largest 10k race in the world. This Memorial Day 56,000 people (the population of Loveland, CO.) descended on Boulder, Colorado to run, jog, walk, hobble or even race their wheelchairs through the streets of Boulder and into the University of Colorado’s Folsom Field to show they can complete a six mile course in whatever ability they have.

Folsom Field - Bolder Boulder Finish Line.

I guess that is what I think is so special about the Bolder Boulder. It’s not about racing or your time, although you can make it about that and there is a professional race that is associated with it. It’s really about getting out there and showing yourself that you can do it. That no matter what ability or inability you have, you can complete a 10k race and be proud of your accomplishment.

This week the local newspaper was filled with stories about people who were going to participate in the race. One family was planning a family reunion and part of the festivities would be the whole family being in the race. Some participants have done the race for the entire 33 years and would be coming back to do it once again. Grandparents walking with their grandchildren, people in a wide variety of costumes (King Kong made an appearance as well as Superman and Batgirl) and all along the route there was entertainment to make you forget that your legs felt like bricks. Elvis serenaded the crowds, belly dancers shimmied and shaked, garden hoses doused the sweaty participants and even a slip and slide was set up for those that wanted to really cool themselves off.

But above and beyond all the hoopla, the most important part of this event is to complete it. To keep going, keep trying, push yourself a little and get up off of your butt. Along the route people shouted encouragement, offered free hugs and high-fives, provided you with cups of water or gatorade and even told you that you only had one kilometer left to go and not to stop now. The streets were packed with people of all ages, sizes, skills and abilities and all with a common purpose – to show themselves that they could complete this race.

The person who runs the race, Cliff Bosley, told me once that his father started the race to get his children interested in physical activity. And he soon found out that he had no olympic calibre athletes in the Bosely household. So in order not to discourage them he structured the race so that the prize was completing not competing. He even offered trophies for the top 13 finishers. Why the top 13? Because inevitably a Bosely child would be near the top and it almost always was in 13th place. And the philosophy of the importance of completing underscores this race to this very day.

So on this day that we celebrate our men and women in the Armed Forces, it was so incredible to see 56,000 of your closest friends all cheering you on and celebrating your desire to improve yourself and to try. This is the second year that I participated in this race and I intend to keep on participating in it. I like what it stands for and I like that it provides me with the impetus to keep pushing myself to be better emotionally, mentally and physically. Congrats to all that completed the race – you definitely should be proud of yourself today! And thank you Bolder Boulder – you certainly know what is important and how to do it up right!

By now, a lot of my friends know that at 8:17 a.m on this day sixty years ago Janice Marie Drabik was born to Edward and Euphrasia Drabik at Holy Cross Hospital on the South Side of Chicago. Sixty years ago, a whole century ago, a whole lifetime ago, and in many ways only just yesterday.

It wasn’t that long ago that I was twenty, it felt like just a blink of an eye. Then I turned around and I was forty-five. Now I’ve sneezed and I am sixty. Am I old – I don’t know. When do you become old, is there an exact moment in time?  Is it the first time you get up out bed in the morning and your bones are creaky? Is it the first time someone calls you m’am? Is it the first time you’re given a senior discount on your food bill when you never asked for it? Is it the first time someone says you look just like a friend’s grandmother?  If these are specific moments that define being old then I am old because they have all happened to me.

Over the past few months I have been thinking a lot about turning sixty. To me, that number just sounded old. In the past I’ve never been one to focus on my chronological number but this year I was borderline obsessed by it. I have always prided myself in trying to keep myself in the forefront of whatever I was doing. I can be extremely competitive and always want to make sure that I am part of the fray, making a contribution, being a contender. (can you hear the music from Rocky building right now?).  But there is one thing that you cannot control and that is the march of time. And to quote a line from the play Steel Magnolias – “time marches on until one day you see that it has marched all over your face.” No one is immune, it happens to us all. And unfortunately we are a society that is obsessed by youth, looking young, feeling young. Want to feel younger – try lifestyle lift and get rid of that sagging skin under your chin. Want to feel younger – get Botox injections and get rid of those bags under and around your eyes. Want to feel younger – go to a fat farm and lose those unwanted pounds. And it can go on and on.

So I woke up this morning, and I have to admit that I was feeling a little down. I don’t want to be sixty but there is nothing that I can do about it. Or can I? Just as I was starting to wallow in a heavy dose of self pity, I picked up my iPhone and noticed that I had a message on Facebook. The message was from a former student of mine a lovely young woman, now thirty, who recently went through a huge medical issue that for quite some time left her virtually completely paralyzed. Before that happened, she had been in the teaching profession for about 10 years and in her message shared with me how shocked and amazed she was at the outpouring of love she received during her illness not only from friends and family but especially from her students, some of which she knew for years but others for only a few weeks or months. She said she knew she had touched these students in many ways but realized there were so many other ways she had had an influence on them and never realized until this unfortunate incident happened.

She then told me that she felt our lives as teachers were similar in many ways. She proceeded to thank me for my influence on her life and that, based on her recent experience, could not fathom the breadth of influence she felt I must have had on many lives given the years and various work experiences that I had. She ended by saying, “to quote my sister Shelly, we are so happy that you were born. Happy Birthday to you with all my love.”  And at that moment it finally dawned on me that I had totally been obsessing about the wrong thing over these past few months. The worth of your life has nothing to do with the number you are, your physical beauty or your physical ability. The worth of your life is really about who you love and who loves you. To have love in your life, to give love and to receive love is all that matters. Everything else will be what it will be.

So on my sixtieth birthday, I want to especially thank my former student Sandy Jarosz Kozloswki for being my personal Cher who so brilliantly in the movie Moonstruck slapped Nicholas Cage in the face and said “snap out of it.” Taking the time to write that beautiful and poignant message was, more than you will ever know, exactly what I needed to hear and exactly when I needed to hear it.

And to all my old friends from Chicago, my new friends from Colorado and my fabulous co-workers at Crate and Barrel, thank you so much for the messages you sent me today on Facebook. Your kind thoughts mean the world to me. And now, it’s time to roll up my sleeves and keep training for the Bolder Boulder! Here’s to the next sixty!

There is a never ending struggle between men and women to understand what makes the other tick. A few days ago I had a friend tell me that he thought all women were crazy, and he truly meant it. After hearing why he felt that way I could understand why he might think like that. But if women are crazy, what’s up with men, especially men of power?

By now we all know about the escapades of Arnold. And we hear about it all the time – men with power and prestige thinking that society’s basic mores do not apply to them. Osama Bin Laden’s hideaway was found to be a treasure trove of porn, not to mention the fact that he had several wives. Tiger Woods thought it was ok to dip his wick with a porn star while a married man with two children. Gary Hart and Donna Rice, John Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski  – and Arnold, well isn’t he just the icing on the cake. Not only does he lie to his family but he lies to the entire state of California. He conveniently waits to come clean until he is no longer in office, leaving with a dismal approval rating in the low 20’s and with no chance of ever being taken seriously as a politician again. That was really big of him. And what was the point of coming clean now – to humiliate Maria and his children? Or maybe it was because his housekeeper/sex partner was finding it harder and harder to keep her mouth shut. You have to wonder.

I just don’t get it. Why does this happen over and over again with men of power? Don’t get me wrong, I love men – always have. When I was younger I felt more comfortable around men than women. Some of my best friends are men. In my estimation it would be a pretty boring life without men. But men have one serious issue that can plague them beginning with puberty and lasting through the rest of their lives –  and that is the dangerous cocktail of testosterone and their appendage. Most men learn to manage that perfect storm very well, but others, and it seems like over and over again especially men with power, feel it is their God given right to do what they want to do, when they want to do it and with whomever they want to do it with. Will the ever learn that they are not above it all? I somehow doubt it.

But, I think Pete the Greek had the answer to solving this dilemma. Pete the Greek was a drinking buddy of my husband’s. You could always count on Pete the Greek to be sitting at the bar of our local tavern holding court and spouting pearls of wisdom regarding just about any subject imaginable. One day, after the Gary Hart sex scandal broke Pete was sitting drinking a beer and bemoaning the demise of another powerful man. Out of nowhere he said to my husband, “You know Nick. Men are born with a deadly curse, their dicks. It is the source of all of their troubles throughout their lives. I was just thinking, maybe instead of circumcising us at birth they should just cut it off. It would save us and a lot of other people we know from a whole lot of agony and grief. And think about it.  We could go on with the rest of our lives, just drinking beer and watching sports. We would be a lot happier and our lives would be a hell of a lot less complicated.”  Socrates could not have said it better.

We are such creatures of habit. We can create such structure in our lives without even knowing how we got there. Think about it. When was the last time you deviated from your established route to work? Or better yet, when was the last time you were going somewhere other than work but on your work route and all of a sudden you found yourself unwittingly going to work versus your actual destination?  We’ve all done it. Most often when that happens to me I’ll say something to myself like, “if I had a brain, I could be dangerous.”

So, the other day I was on my usual route to the grocery store. After I passed one of the landmarks it suddenly occurred to me that something had changed. The landmark was a vacant field where prairie dogs had established a colony. That colony has existed since I moved here ten years ago. It is right off of a busy intersection and has been thriving for quite some time.

Prairie dog - Teller Farm Trail

In recent months a for sale sign had been put up on the property. I remember thinking at the time that I could not imagine who would actually buy a piece of property with an active prairie dog colony on it. The expense of mitigation added to the expense of the property itself would be enormous. But then again, maybe not. As I drove passed the property the other day it dawned on me that something was very different. Then I noticed that the field had been completely plowed over. The day before active burrows, today only tilled soil. And all of sudden I started to feel sick to my stomach.

People who know me know that I love animals, animals of all kinds. And people who know me also know of the challenges I faced related to prairie dog mitigation when I worked for local government. Prairie dogs are a source of heated public debate in this neck of the woods. They are considered a cornerstone species, a link to attracting the fabulous raptors you see here and also a key ingredient in land management. Before man inhabited this area, prairie dogs were nature’s own rototiller. They would build their burrows (and if you have ever tried to plant anything here without some type of soil amendment you would quickly find out that the high concentration of clay makes the soil like a brick without some sort treatment), aerate and denude the land and move on. Then the land is ready to be revitalized with the first step of the process being aptly performed by the prairie dog.

Now that man had developed the area, prairie dogs have become to many merely a nuisance. And since they are technically of the rodent family they are considered to be rats by those that would advocate for their demise. There is no easy answer to the prairie dog situation. At what point do we protect life and at what point do we not? I certainly don’t know the answer to that.

I do know that I am not a PETA advocate. There are times that organization is too radical for my tastes.  But I would match my love for animals with anyone. To me it is a simple question of how we value life. Do we have the right as human beings to simply go in one day plow up a field and bury alive a colony of prairie dogs? Something about that just doesn’t seem right to me. Relocation is expensive and tends not to be successful, capturing them and donating them to a recovering raptor program is also expensive. Any way you look at it, it is costly to manage an unwanted prairie dog colony. But burying them alive?

I’m not sure what the answer is. I understand a person wanting to sell their property. I understand this person patiently allowed prairie dogs to inhabit the space for ten years, maybe hoping the colony would be hit by plague and naturally die off. But since that didn’t happen there has to be a better way, even if it is more expensive. From my standpoint it is a question of do we or don’t we value life. If we do, then we need to think very carefully about our rationale and methods for taking life. Anyone who has ever been faced with euthanizing a pet knows the agony of making that decisions. Should prairie dogs be treated any differently simply because they are not our pets?

At this point I see no better solution than trapping and humanely euthanizing them. If the land needs to be sold and the prairie dogs are preventing that, then I would opt for that solution. Yes it is more expensive but do we or do we not value life, any kind of life? To simply view life as something easily discarded or in this instance plowed over dehumanizes us. I would hope that as a species we were more intelligent and caring than that.

There is, although, an upside to this dilemma. Whoever plowed the land did a pretty poor job. If you know anything about prairie dogs, you need to eliminate each and every hole as their underground system is interconnected and leaving just one hole can result in the easy reestablishment of the colony. And that is exactly what happened. As a matter of fact several holes on the perimeter were left unscathed and the very next day the prairie dogs were out in force reestablishing the colony. So it appears most of them survived the trauma to this point. What will happen next is left to be seen. But it still makes me uneasy to think that we as man, the stronger and supposedly smarter species, can have such little concern for life and for taking life. I don’t care if technically they are rodents. The bigger question is are we humane in how we deal with life and do we treat life and death with respect. I was really saddened to see how this was handled and I have to say surprised about how bad I felt for the prairie dogs. They were the bane of my existence when I was working in local government but there is a reason why they exist in the whole scheme of things. And they are living, breathing creatures that have a right to life and a humane death.

I was sitting on my couch last night watching CNN and all of a sudden, breaking news – the President is going to address the country. My first thoughts went to the unrest in Libya and thought to myself, ok – what happened now. Then came the newscasters who certainly know how to pour on the drama. Wolf Blitzer says he was told by a source that you better “go into work”, and that he had a inkling of what the address may be about, but he felt compelled not to say it because it only came from one single source. This went on for about thirty minutes or so, the newscasters repeating again and again how unprecedented this Sunday evening address to the nation was, how they had an idea of what it may be about and that it definitely was not about Libya.

So goes the theatre of the news. Then at a strategic moment before the president revealed what he had to say, the newscasters announced that Osama Bin Laden was dead. They couldn’t let the President be the first to say it, they had to trump him (no pun intended) by sharing what they new probably from the beginning of the “breaking news” segment. But the drama sure kept you tuned in until the President was ready to speak. And of course, the newscasters had to be the first to tell us.

After they announced that the President’s remarks would not be about Libya, I began to wonder what the news could be. I have to say it took me a few minutes, but I remember getting up to get a drink of water and it finally dawned on me – I bet they’ve captured Bin Laden. I never considered that he would be dead, just that we would finally have him. What goes around, comes around.

That has been my favorite saying over the years. I have seen the wisdom in this saying play out in a variety of ways and in my experience it always comes back around. I created an addendum to this saying. My version is: “what goes around, comes around – and I hope I am around when it comes back around”. This is one of those times when I was glad to be around when it came back around.

We all remember where we were on 9/11 when the World Trade Center got struck. Heck, I remember where I was when John F. Kennedy was assassinated! And both times, I remember very clearly how I felt. When Kennedy was killed I was very young and in utter disbelief. It was a sort of coming of age for me as up to that point I firmly believed that bad things did not happen to good people. On 9/11 I was working for the City of Dayton. This was the first time in my lifetime that the United States was attacked on its mainland. The false feeling of security we all felt living here died that day along with the three thousand plus lives that were lost. I remember just wanting to be with my family, to make sure they were safe. I was in shock and utter disbelief that this could happen, a very different sort of coming of age.

Osama Bin Laden was definitely the face of 9/11, but as many today are celebrating, I am left wondering whether his death will make this crazy extreme violence stop. I doubt it. We talk justice, they talk revenge and it goes on and on in a vicious cycle. So although many feel that the death of Bin Laden brings some sort of closure, I think its just another chapter in the “an eye for an eye” saga that we see playing out all over the world. And, if we keep on with this strategy, pretty soon there will be no eyes left, and that is my greatest fear of all.