By Katie Blackburn
@katiemblackburn

On an ordinary, gray and rainy Tuesday, I meet my hero. 

Well, I don’t exactly meet him, as one may imagine, with handshakes and photo ops and such. By “meet my hero” I mean that I see him, from a distance, while I am driving at 35 miles per hour. 

I don’t know his name yet, though I plan to acquire that information at the next available moment by engineering whatever Nascar-like move it takes to get my 12-passenger van stopped in a moderately safe spot so I can jump out of the car door and run over to my hero like the wild fangirl I obviously am. What’s your name? I love you! I think you’re amazing! I can already picture the scene unfolding in my mind.

And this gentleman will maybe smile, perhaps he’ll be frightened. But I think most certainly he will wonder what on earth all my fuss is about. After all, he’s just out for a jog, how could I possibly make a hero out of him?

He must be in his eighties, maybe nineties, and he runs. His back is hunched over. His steps are slow and measured, shuffles really. It’s cold, the rain is coming down. And still, he runs. He has on gloves and a hat, and he runs. He makes his body take the next step no matter how much his knees must be throbbing. He knows the work is worth it, that it’s the right thing to move his body to the best of his ability. He knows challenge comes before change, and those two things are what make us come alive. Because if we are never challenged, how on earth would we change? How would we know how empowering it is to overcome, how much belief a person builds up when they make it? This man knows. He must feel that satisfaction at the end of every run. So he keeps moving. That’s why he’s my hero. 

Two hours later on my way home, as I make the left turn into our neighborhood, he’s still running. He’s still doing the hard thing, and that makes me think I can, too. 

***

I’m loading the kids up in the van on a Friday morning to head to school. It’s cold and crisp outside, but the sun is shining, and mid-March sun after a long winter always puts extra energy in my step. I buckle the baby in first, and like I always do, give his neck a little tickle so he moves his shoulder to his cheek and smiles in reaction, then I go back in the house for the toddlers. The two and 3-year-olds insist on buckling themselves these days, and if we have more than three minutes before we need to be on the road, I usually let them. Today, we do, so I step down from the car door and watch their little fingers work hard at the buckles.

I hear footsteps and a dog’s panting from behind me, and turn around to smile and nod at the neighbor walking by. The big black lab is getting more excited the closer he gets to our house, and I’m thinking he must just love kids and want them to come pet him. 

“No food here today, Hank, keep moving,” the man says to the dog as he pulls the leash a little tighter. Hank pulls back the other way, and keeps sniffing the ground around our driveway.

My eyes meet my neighbor’s, and he must have known from the curious smile on my face that I am wondering about his comment. He responds before I can ask. “We usually find lots of Cheerios and popcorn on this driveway, so Hank gets excited when we walk by your house.” 

I lean my head back and start laughing, half embarrassed, half hilariously enlightened. With a van too big to park in the garage and, I’ll be honest, a very low bar for the cleanliness of it, I usually do a quick sweep of the van’s floor with my hands, in between loading and unloading six children, for anything moderately small and biodegradable (like, say, Cheerios and popcorn) and simply throw them behind me. I cannot explain my thought process other than go with God, old snacks, I have a lot of little people I need to get safely in or out of this car right now and you are not a priority.

For a long time, I thought birds, wind, rain, the natural elements were cleaning my driveway for me because mostly the crumbs are gone by the next day, and I don’t give them another thought.

But all this time, it’s been Hank, an old black lab with a penchant for Cheerios and white cheddar popcorn.

I walk over to the big lab with a smile, rub behind both his ears and tell him, “Hank, you’ve been saving me from a Homeowner’s Association letter for months, haven’t you? I didn’t know. I owe you, buddy.” 

***

It’s a gorgeous Saturday morning, and I’m pushing the stroller down the sidewalk to the new coffee shop in town. Just over a mile from our house, the space is gorgeously bright and airy, with a loft upstairs for extra seating and floor to ceiling windows with a view of the river. And the coffee, the coffee is amazing. 

A few back-to-back years of pregnancy and nursing curbed my ability to handle caffeine but not my taste for coffee, so I have had to settle for lackluster decaf for nearly three years. Until now. My new coffee shop roasts its own coffee in house, and the decaf is delicious, indiscernible from the regular coffee. Smooth, bold, and no heart-racing anxiety for me after.

I park the stroller in front of the door and carry the baby inside to order my coffee. It’s my third, maybe fourth time in the coffee shop, and the barista behind the counter is new to me. I give him my order, gushing incessantly over the decaf. “It’s just the best decaf coffee I’ve ever tasted!” I tell him with loads of enthusiasm and a good amount of emphasis from my one free hand. “No one has decaf coffee like this!” 

He smiles and tells me, “I’m so glad you like it.” His hands are busy juggling the big espresso machines and their multiple functions. 

Unconvinced I am adequately expressing my joy, I go on. “And, would you believe I’ve never found a coffee shop that has decaf cold brew! I mean, this is really remarkable. I’ve been dreaming of decaf cold brew for years!” The baby on my hip is reaching for the container of lids and sugars on the counter next to me, so I step back to make them just out of reach of his little arms. 

The man behind the counter, reserved and quiet as he seems, looks up at Bray and then over at me. “Yeah,” he responds thoughtfully. “You know, I’m glad to hear you say that, because I like to drink coffee all day, but after lunch time I need to cut the caffeine out and I just thought having a decaf cold brew option would be nice for people.” 

“Oh, are you the owner?” I ask him.

“I am.”

“Wellllll,” I say with even more excitement than before, “You’ve done such a good job here. I cannot get enough of this coffee and,” adding the slightest bit of sarcasm to my voice, “I should be mad at you because I’m going to spend too much money here now.”

He smiles again. “Truly, I am so happy that you like it. Thank you for coming in.” 

“You’re welcome,” I tell him, as I grab my coffee with my free hand and head toward the door. I’m pushing it open with my hip when I stop and call back out to the counter, “By the way, what’s your name?”

“I’m Ike.”

“Ike, I’m Katie. Thanks for working hard at something so that we could all enjoy it.” 

He smiles, genuinely smiles, like he was surprised I wanted to know his name.

As I walk back toward home with my stroller in front of me and coffee in the cupholder, I can’t help but think about my week, about the ordinary nature of everything, about my running hero and Hank and decaf coffee. About how we go for jogs, walk our dogs, or ask someone’s name, and how we drive kids to school, throw popcorn out of the van, treat ourselves to something we love. It’s all so simple. And so profoundly important. Everything we do touches someone else.

It’s a gift, isn’t it? To be able to hold the paradox that the world is so big and grand and broken and beautiful, but also small and intricately connected. Every day, in our comings and goings and habits and routines, we aren’t just living our own life, we are actually keeping each other’s, too. 

Photo by Ashlee Gadd.