Running for Your Life: Caught One!

It happened around 12:40 p.m. (Nov. 29).

I was hoping to get out for a long run, say, an hour. But time got away from me. You see, I’m paper-chasing the documents, photos and legal signer I need in order to renew my Canadian passport, something I’ve been meaning to do for months.

(Well, since a year ago November, when a certain someone was elected president of the United States.) I renew my passport, and, well, that gives our family escape “claws.”

Busy work like that always takes longer than you think it will – AND I took it upon myself to try to improve our home music situation, which is a jury-rigged array of playing devices that root in a “system” I bought in the mid-1980s while I was employed as the assistant night news editor of the Windsor Star.

I had a sudden hankering to hear tunes from Sean McConnell’s “Sean McConnell,” especially “Queen of St. Mary’s” and “Beautiful Rose.”

All of which reduced that long run to a half-hour scamper up and into the park: 12:30 p.m. to 1 p.m.

It takes me 10 minutes running to a park access route near what is known as the Litchfield Villa. Up I went on the path, leaves falling in front of me on this mild day of intermittent breezes. Hands out as I run along, off-road trailing in the way I like to do it, and then, just as I veered south, a darting leaf appeared to my right, just above my head, and with a swipe I managed to snatch it by its “lower body.”

It didn’t hit the ground before I grabbed it – my first caught leaf while running in I don’t know how long.

It was a red oak leaf. From the same type of tree as the magnificent one that for 25 years was a glory to behold in our backyard before advanced disease forced us to cut it down earlier this year.

Next: Running for Your Life: Discovering Jon McGregor 

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