Dedicated to Alex, Alexander, Joey, Dave, Chantry, Frank, anyone else part of creating "I'll Run" and, of course, Brock.

This excerpt of my memoir is inspired by The Cab, particularly their beautiful song Endlessly. Love and thank you to everyone who reads this. I hope that how I've been pushed to run inspires all of you to run and reach for everything that lies just beyond your sight of reality.

Send me any comments on twitter @GWDetermination. Anyone who follows me will receive Ch 1. Determination and love!

The book may soon be part of @adream2believe. Check it out and stay tuned.


I'll Run...Endlessly

There’s a grocery store down the street from the gym that I go to weekly with my parents. While Dad, true to form, is chatting away as he writes his check, I walk down the front of the store feeling the change in my pocket as I pass the gumball machines.

They’re a quarter a piece…I shake my head. Just get it. I drop the quarter in the slot and turn the dial.

The gears clink, the dispensed quarter dings with the click of my prize landing in the slot. It’s always a surprise with these things, you never know what you’re going to get, but this is absolutely what I wanted. It’s perfect. I couldn’t pick one I wanted more.

Digging into my pocket, I pull out my only other quarter just to get one more to have for later. I have just enough time to look at it and see that it’s the perfect pairing to my first piece. Dad’s coming up behind me now, so I push them both into my pocket so he doesn’t tease me like he always loves to do anytime he catches me acting like I’m still in elementary school.

Walking into my bedroom at home, I sit down to turn on my computer. Waiting for it to boot up, I walk to my bookshelf next to my dresser and pick up the almost untouched box Ava gave me for Christmas.

Still laughing aloud at the “Motivational Speakers Make Better Lovers” white boxers that she custom printed for me, picking up the remaining wrapped Nutella wooden spreaders, I pull out the two remaining items and place them next to the mousepad on my desk.

I’ve been so good on my diet since meeting Ava, but she told me I have to eat the Big Hunk bar she got me. I mean, it says low fat in yellow-outlined red text. I guess I can splurge today. Pealing it as cleanly as I can to remove the white nougat-peanut concoction inside, the wrapper remains intact in one piece. I put it back in the Christmas box, protected under the boxers.

Turning around to sit back down, I stare directly at the delicately enclosed Mickey and Minnie mouse glass-ornament illuminating under the light from my blue Crayola crayon lamp.  Picking up the thin jewel case still sitting next to the now half-devoured Big Hunk bar, I open the last, and most precious, object from Ava’s Christmas present to me.

As track 1 begins to play, I remember the first time we watched Aladdin together.  She didn’t even expect it, because she knows how horrible I know I am, but I began singing along with Al as A Whole New World began.  Little did Ava know the frantic text I sent to Mama and the resulting huff and glare directed at me from my sister as I barely shooed them out of the dining room in time before the song began.  I already loved her, but I fell even deeper as we gazed at each other for that entire duet.

“It all started with a little Disney…”  That’s what reads next to the number 1 inside the jewel case.  Ava made me a 17-track mix CD and, instead of giving me track titles, she wrote phrases explaining how each track relates solely to us and what we have.

“3. The song stuck in my head Sunday morning.”  A day after our first date and Ava already couldn’t stop listening to Love Story, yet I was too frazzled trying to decide if I could kiss her at the end of that first date that I didn’t even think about how obvious it was…when she decided that we were going to walk back frozen to Rosslyn to get the metro…when the Court House stop was right outside the Court House Plaza 8 movie theatre.  Yeah…you know exactly how dumb I felt when I made the connection walking up to the movie theatre from Rosslyn.

Leaving dinner after the movie, Ava was shivering the moment we turned to walk down Wilson Blvd, but I did take my glove off and hold her hand to keep her warm on our ¾ mile walk back to Rosslyn.  But when we got there waiting for her train, she kept talking about her dad.  How could I have kissed her when she was talking about her dad?

Track 7 – well, that’s my love’s “happy pessimism”.  I make her happy.  You should see the smile on my face.  Track 4 may be my favorite though.  “…we’re not getting jerseys. Don’t ask.”  I’m still going to make them though, even if she’s out of my league.  After all she did title the CD “Must Have Done Something Right”.

Ava goes back to school next weekend.  We had barely been together for two weeks officially when Ava handed me her list of 43 Things she wants to do with me.  Listening straight through all 17 tracks, I know we’ve barely been together for a month, but there’s no question in my mind about making my first mix CD.  I’m going to replicate it so she has something she can wear out as much as I have.

And I match it down to the last detail.  When she put her “other favorite song, aptly named ‘Run’” to end the CD, I knew that I just had to include one of my favorite new songs “I’ll Run” that I found by complete accident, kind of like how we found each other.  And like Ava, this song is perfect.

I’ve never made a mix CD for a girlfriend before, but with more than 17 phrases to already share with Ava, every minute spent having to edit, to perfect my CD to—no not just to—but for my love convinces me I am doing exactly the right thing.  Giving it to her the day before she’s driving back to JMU for her spring semester, my hands are trembling as she lightly unfolds the tissue paper inside the bag.

And as she moves to put the bag down, as she leans in to kiss me while Bella Notte begins playing over her car speakers, I whisper in her ear to check the bag again…and that it’s not what she thinks, so don’t worry.  That gentle smile breaks across her face as she starts searching again.

She looks at me confused as she pulls out the box.  Leaving my high school ring loose on my bedroom table, I had swapped the original packaging for the once dust-covered black felt box.  Mama told me I’d stop wearing that ring, but it’s okay.  This is worth it.

Opening up the box, her gasped expression followed by that infectious giggle that drives me to text her good morning every day fills her entire car.  Fitting perfectly—you couldn’t ask for a more perfect setting—Ava’s growing smile beams even brighter than the light reflecting off of the band of hearts wrapped endlessly around her ring finger.

I know that it’s cheap, but for the quarter a piece that it cost me, it’s not too bad for a grocery store gumball machine that dispenses plastic rings.

Quite the contrary actually, I know just from looking at Ava that I don’t need to worry—she’s going to wear it.


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