Sometimes I feel a bit like President Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize before he really had an opportunity to do anything on the global stage.
No, there is no Nobel Prize coming my way any time soon. I’d like a MacArthur–but that seems pretty unlikely as well.
But last night was just plain strange–and I don’t feel we have done anything substantial enough to merit the kind of attention we got last night at Fenway Park.
About three weeks ago, I received an invitation from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Jimmy Fund to go to a Red Sox game in appreciation for the work Walking with Jane has done over the last year. They offered me tickets for a couple other people from the group as well, so I took Jane’s sister and one of Jane’s closest friends along. I love baseball, and the Red Sox in particular, so I was not about to say no.
Those tickets were no big deal. My alma mater invites me to dinner once a year or so because, while I don’t make huge donations, I have been a regular contributor for the last 20 years or so and fill out a table well. I looked at last night the same way. Walking with Jane’s contributions, in terms of money, are not huge–but we all make contributions of our time to various cancer projects and work diligently to help out any way we can.
Yes, we have a Relay for Life team. Yes, we have a website. Yes, I did the Marathon Walk in September. But it isn’t like we have raised millions–or even hundreds of thousands–for the cause. It’s not like we have a thousand people a day visiting the website. Those are goals–but we have not reached them yet.
Before the game, there was a pizza buffet in the Players Club. The three of us went in and started for an empty table. My two dining companions got there without incident, but before I got halfway there one of the people from the development office stopped me. She said the woman I usually talk to was not going to be there that night but that she–the woman who had stopped me–had been to the website and been impressed by it. We chatted for a couple of minutes about the Cure Crawl–something I have barely mentioned to anyone, but which she knew about–and she moved on to the next person she needed to see.
Before I got ten feet, the woman playing host for the event stopped me to talk about Walking with Jane and how wonderful we were doing and how much they appreciated the work we are doing on NET.
Ten minutes later, she brought the chief of staff for Dana-Farber to our table. He knows about Walking with Jane and has been to the website and been very impressed with it and what Matt Kulke has told him about what we are doing.
This went on all through the dinner portion of the evening–and all I could think to myself was, “But folks, we really haven’t done anything near what we have planned yet. We’ve just been laying the groundwork.”
But now that I have had a chance to think about it, we really have done a lot in the last year. And while it seems like very little to me in the context of what we have to do, as Jane’s sister said to me last night, “The journey of ten thousand miles begins with a single step.” Many people never take that first step despite the best of intentions.
We have taken several steps toward the goals we have set–and we have taken them rapidly. My thanks to you all for making those steps–and the attention they have brought us–possible.
