Few Moods More Worthy
I have written in previous posts about volunteering for the Pan-Mass Challenge, the 192-mile bike ride which terminates at the very tip of Cape Cod, a place Thoreau referred to in his essays as “the bare and bended arm of Massachusetts.”
It’s Monday morning after this year’s event during which a virtual river of souls, streaming south from Sturbridge to Provincetown, passed through parts of forty six cities and towns in our Commonwealth. Hundreds of volunteers supported the thousands of riders who this year will have raised over sixty million dollars for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The ride has happened every August since 1980 and has during that time given over half a billion dollars to find some answers for this scourge of humanity, the scourge that took my father from us when I was only five and which has, somehow, affected directly or indirectly nearly everyone I can think of.
There is always a lot of inspirational “fight cancer” swag in evidence, whether on riders, volunteers or spectators, like “Do epic shit,” “Kick cancer’s ass,” and “Commit. You’ll figure it out.”
A simple hat or a T-shirt can tell you so much about another person, something you would never know otherwise, about the greatness that is among us which we never even know about, the people with whom we might have so much in common if we only had an entree into their lives. It often seems like it takes so much work to get down to what’s important between people and by the simple wearing of a hat, a bond can be made.
I am mostly through the once-unexpressed grief I lived with for decades with respect to the death of my dad and its long shadow. Cancer was the only disease I really knew about at that age and for years I thought that was how I would die, too. I have met other adults who lost parents to cancer at a young age and that has been their experience as well. One lesson from working on the PMC for eighteen volunteer years us that a cancer diagnosis is not necessarily a death sentence any more, no sword of Damocles.
I am grateful for the enormity of the work and intention by so many people that has made the Pan-Mass Challenge what it now is. We do indeed stand on a great many shoulders. It feels good to be part of something big like this, taking up ground, helping however we can.
I remain grateful for the chance to give at the PMC, a place to stand, another community to be part of, the beauty of the cape, friends to break bread with, a sunny hot weekend. Grateful also that I saw no democrats or republicans, no young and old, no race except human, only people united in one cause. What a blessed relief to see people truly under one big tent, even if only for a weekend
In his classic work about Cape Cod, The Outermost House, Henry Beston wrote, “All my life it has given me pleasure to see beautiful human beings. To see beautiful young men and women gives one a kind of reverence for humanity (Alas, of how few experiences may this be said), and surely there are few moods of the spirit more worthy of our care than those in which we reverence, even for a moment, our tragic and bewildered kind.”
