White Bird
We fuel ourselves with ambitions. That's what's great about pageant beauties who want to heal the sick, raise the dead and so on. If they can do so smiling nonstop, performing interpretive dance to "The Munsters" theme while wearing spike heels and sequins, so much the better. We fool ourselves with ambitions too. Take the sweaty pageant we call a road race, in which runners' goals range from doable to deranged:

* I WILL smash world records and make my name immortal.

* I WILL beat the guy ahead of me wearing the rutabaga costume.

I used to write goals in a journal, a la Gatsby. Instead of his "Save $5 (crossed out) $3 per week," I'd scrawl something equally fictional, such as "Run 12 x 400 meters in 1:25 with 1:00 recovery" and "No quitting after three repeats due to Weltschmerz like the last time" -- in hope this would lead to the green light and orgiastic future of a sub-18-minute 5K. Gatsby lived fast, died young and left Robert Redford's corpse, if you saw the movie. My decline has been more a fizzle -- a grudging-but- steady acquiescence to reality -- if my journal is any clue.

For instance, this entry: "Bring home Sponge Bob and Easter Bunny." Seems my daughter Flannery, 3, received both rubber figurines in her Easter basket and had clung to them like a pink-bottomed pit bull since. The only exception was at preschool, when she'd become so absorbed pasting Cheerios to construction-paper dinosaurs she'd lose track of her rubber talismans, leave them behind when I picked her up, then burst into histrionics that would make Tammy Faye Bakker jealous.

The last time that happened, with a Pooping Pig (don't ask), I was forced to spend two hours combing dollar stores for a substitute, settling for a rubber man's head that, squeezed, spewed day-glow green fluid from its nostrils, a father-to-daughter gift I was proud to give. It's amazing what people cling to and what the written word can accomplish. With help from my journal I reached my goal, bringing home Sponge Bob and the Easter Bunny, but Flannery had lost interest. She had taken an alarming turn toward poetry instead. Seems earlier that day she had glimpsed a fellow with a white cockatoo on his shoulder. Suddenly, Snot Heads, Pooping Pigs, Sponge Bob and a rubber hare somehow linked to the Resurrection were not enough: she wanted to possess that which could take wing.

I appeased her with TV on arriving home, allowing me time to get dressed for running.

"Want to ride in the jogger?" I asked. "No." Her heart had again been stolen, this time by an animated hamster. We gave the Japanese Hiro-shima, they gave us "Hamtaro."

Call it even.

"Let's go for a run," I commanded /cajoled. "OK." Turned out she wanted to "run" beside me, not ride in the jogger, taking plenty of time to not only smell the flowers but every grass blade, pebble and discarded candy wrapper we found at roadside. At this pace, we'd be lucky to run a sub-18-hour 5K. Not one to be outwitted by a three-year-old, I said, "Flannery, if you ride in the jogger, I'll take you to see some birds."

This appeared to work. She climbed in the jogger and I lit out expecting to placate my daughter with robin and sparrow sightings ... but oh no. She wanted a white bird to land on her shoulder and ride along while she fed it imaginary carrots. When this didn't happen, she started screaming. This occurred within earshot of a parentally-correct woman who asked, "Is there something wrong?" when I knew she meant, "Why are you torturing this child to indulge your sick, running-addict pleasure?" I considered explaining the fault wasn't mine, it belonged to the white bird that wouldn't land on my daughter's shoulder; and if she thought running like this was pleasure -- it should be TORTURE for me to derive training value from it -- then who was she to call ME a sicko?

But she held her tongue, so I shrugged and said, "Kids: Whatcha gonna do?" When she gave me one of those "I'm going to call the police" looks, I had the incentive and Weltschmerz needed to wing it home, despite Flannery's yodeling "Daddy's naughty," at tempo pace.

Kids have goals, despite being a parent, that you can't see. "The value of all we cling to," said a wise guy, "is eclipsed by the power achieved when we let it go."

"Loser," I replied. So we beat on -- runners battling the rutabaga and fathers trying to fathom daughters -- borne back while ceaselessly being passed. MR