Number One

Today was a special day for me. Annelien opened our mail this morning and discovered a pretty gold and blue ribbon. It said: 1^st Place! TDC (that’s my office nickname) is the fastest woman! Well, uhm, it all depends of course on the group that’s running with you. I am not exactly the fastest woman on earth. Only the fastest woman of a bunch of …snails on the Big Sur Marathon. Actually, we did the out-and-back 5 mile track. It was incredibly hot and steep and beautiful. In my age category – I am not exactly the youngest of the pack anymore – I finished first! Annelien was running in her own age category with a gang of bio-dynamic Bollywood aerobics teachers.

My performance was entirely – or at least in a very large part – due to my streamlined sunglasses. Originally, when I bought them a hundred years ago, they were intended as ski sunglasses. They make me look like a big human bumble-bee and they make me run superfast. I never achieved similar successes in my short lived ski career though. But as Frank L Wright said (I just heard it on the radio, while I was typing away): “The older you get, the more beautiful life becomes.”

After the run, we washed up in the creek and drove to a bar with a deck stuck on the hill and had an amazing view of the ocean. Annelien and bumble-bee finally took some rest. We had to stay alert though, because the waiter warned us: “Watch out for the birds, because they will take your food immediately!”