My childhood friend Vicky, who has always sworn to hate running, has signed up for the San Diego marathon, running for the cause of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. She has a progress page that documents her runs and the amounts of her donations, how close she is to her goal. I put in $100 just now. The site takes care of the donations online, it was really easy.

You guys may have heard me talk about Grace here and there. She was one of my best friends. We met waiting for the school bus an early September morning when we were 14. She swore I gave her a dirty look that morning and that she never would’ve thought then that we’d be friends. Not only did we become friends, but that friendship stretched across great distances as she went to Berkeley for undergrad and I went to UCLA, and when she moved from there to New York to take a job offer with Merrill Lynch Risk Management (consulting, something to do with the stock market). She met Justin while training for Merrill Lynch. He was sent down from the Great Britain branch for training in the New York branch. She caught his attention when she kept dropping the ball during one of their getting-acquainted exercises in which everyone in that group sat in a circle and whomever got the ball had to say something about themselves and throw the ball to someone else. They fell in love and the plan was that she’d move to London after their wedding. “You keep moving farther and farther away,” I’d once told her. But she was so happy, and I was so happy that she was so happy. I was to be one of her bridesmaids. She never made that move to London because leukemia made her move even farther. I donated to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society then and also sponsored her when she did a walk across some bridge event for the Society, and registered as a bone marrow donor, but did little for the cause since.

I’m glad to be doing this for Vicky, and I’m glad that she’s doing this for the Society. And I’m so proud of her for completing her first 8-mile run this past weekend.