Young and before I met her, she signed up for a fundraising swimming contest to see who could swim the furthest and longest. She was the only girl. The lifeguard standing in the lane next to her at the beginning asked, “What are you doing in this race?”
A half-dozen hours later the sponsors sent a delegation to find her mother busy at home. They pleaded with her to come to the pool, “Please, we are all very tired and no one can get your daughter to stop.”
I taught her how to play a couple of different ball games. She stunk, just as everyone does trying to learn a new skill, but she kept at it, and at it, and at it, until she could whip me.
In Washington, D.C., after an early dinner with her brother, who was almost as big as me, we were confronted by 3 hoodlums. The one with the gun pressed it against my temple while the other two went through our pockets finding our wallets. But my wife walked on.
The thieves screamed at the “bitch” to give them her purse, but she just kept walking.
It occurred to me, as I heard the sound of the gun being cocked, that yes, the thieves were right, she should give them her purse.
“Please give them your purse!”
She did. She unslung it from her shoulder, twirled it over her head to gain some momentum and then threw it at them as hard as she could.
It bounced off one of the goons to the ground between them. Thankfully it was the gun slinger who bent over to pick it up rather than pulling the trigger.
I can still feel the enormous wave of relief I felt for that millisecond between the moment they began their sprint down an alley and I felt the breeze as my wife dashed past me in hot pursuit.
It took my every muscle twitching at top speed to catch and tackle her.
The marriage didn’t last, but I have often thought back of those long-ago days in admiration, disbelief and OH, SO THANKFUL THAT SUCH A PERSON EXISTS.
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
or
Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016