There’s an old upbeat country/bluegrass song called “My Walkin’ Shoes Don’t Fit Me Anymore.” Well, that song has new meaning for me this morning, because yesterday I and a few thousand other people completed the Washington, DC 2007 Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. That’s 26.3 miles on Saturday, and 13.2 miles Sunday morning. That’s more than 39 miles we walked, and by Walker consensus, those were the somewhat longer form of the mile—the “Avon mile” as opposed to the ordinary everyday average standard kind.
My walkin’ shoes do still fit, I think, but I won’t know for sure until the swelling in my little puppies goes all the way down. And that’s to say nothing of the pain in my nearly 56-year old knees, and in other parts of my wracked anatomy best not detailed in print.
You can read about the Walk on the front page of the May 7, 2007 “Metro” section in the Washington Post. You’ll see all the basics there: about some 3,400 walkers who raised $7.4 million to help the sick and fund the research that will find a cure. You’ll learn that the Washington Walk was the first of eight this season in the United States, these eight to be joined by fifty more walks overseas. And you’ll read about the people who came out to support us on our way in every part of the metropolitan area we trekked through.
What you won’t read about is the fact that males, too, did the deed. The Post article makes it seem as though the Walk was a gender-segregated event. It wasn’t. True enough, the ratio of men-to-women Walkers couldn’t have been more than 1/40. And most of the men were walking with wives, sisters, cousins or friends. Guys like me, walking alone for reasons of our own, were fairly rare, but hardly non-existent. My tent-mate Jason walked in memory of a dear friend of his, Barbara Marcus, who died at the age of 30 from breast cancer.
I was walking in honor and memory of my mother, whose birth centenary falls on November 11 this year. She died just short of her 53rd birthday, in October 1960, when I, her only child, was 9. She had suffered through first one and then a second major mastectomy before the cancer spread to her brain and she succumbed. I have a wife, a daughter, and if I’m lucky maybe one day a grand-daughter or two. So you see why I had to do this.
You’ll also learn from the Washington Post article that every walker had to raise a minimum of $1,800 to qualify to suffer…I mean, to walk. Well, thanks to the generosity of family, friends and colleagues, I raised around $6,000. I was surprised, I admit, by how generous so many people were. But that only made me realize how many people the scourge of breast cancer has touched. It seems like everybody knows somebody who has died, or who has survived a terrible ordeal, or who has been close to someone suffering with breast cancer.
And the beating goes on. In the United States alone, an average of one woman is told every three minutes: “You have breast cancer.” More than 2,000 women still die every year from this disease in the DC area alone. Add the toll from just the New York City area and that’s more than the equivalent of a 9/11, this year, last year, next year, every year until we find a cure.
And we can find that cure. In the late 1950s, when my mother fell ill, there wasn’t much doctors could do except to relieve pain and try radical surgery that usually didn’t work for long. Today the survival rate is vastly increased thanks to better early detection diagnostics and advanced treatment options. There is much new and promising research being done, too. We will get there.
So while I am sitting here with my aching feet and chaffed you-know-what, I want to thank everyone who supported me, and everyone who supported any and all of us Walkers—and everyone who has supported any of the fine organizations that raise money to fund oncology research here and abroad.
But here is the really good news: If you didn’t help out this year with a donation—if you didn’t hear about it until now, or if you forgot, or if tax day just put you in a scrooge-ish mood—it’s still not too late. All you have to do is click here. Then select the Washington walk of May 5-6, locate me, Adam Garfinkle (or anyone else you know who walked), and do your fully tax-deductible share. And if you already supported me before the walk, heck: Nothing is stopping you from giving more now that I’ve gone and done it. This is one problem, at least, for which “throwing money at” is a good thing.
If country/bluegrass is not your thing, remember that old Temptations number, “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”? Well I’m not too proud to beg: Cough it up, please. The life you help save could be that of your own daughter or grand-daughter. You just never know.
It’s also not too late for you to register for the 2007 Walk that will take place in Boston, Chicago, New York, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Charlotte—if you live around any of those cities. And hey: It’s not too soon to register for the 2008 Walk in Washington.
You can do it today and take 11 months to get in shape for it.
I dare you.