A dad and his disabled son

[attributed to Rick Reilly, Sports Illustrated. I found it on some other website and cleaned up the text to make it more readable.]

I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots.

But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.

Eighty-five times he's pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars--all in the same day.

Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

And what has Rick done for his father? Not much--except save his life.

This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

"He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life;'' Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. ``Put him in an Institution.''

But the Hoyts weren't buying it. They noticed the way Rick's eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the Engineering Department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. ``No way,'' Dick says he was told. ``There's nothing going on in his brain.''

"Tell him a joke,'' Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain. Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? ``Go Bruins!'' And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, ``Dad, I want to do that.''

Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described ``porker'' who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. ``Then it was me who was handicapped,'' Dick says. ``I was sore for two weeks.''

That day changed Rick's life. ``Dad,'' he typed, ``When we were running, it felt like I wasn't disabled anymore!''

And that sentence changed Dick's life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly dhape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.

``No way,'' Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren't quite a single runner, and they weren't quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway. Then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.

Then somebody said, ``Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?''

How's a guy who never learned to swim and hadn't ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried.

Now they've done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii . It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don't you think?

Hey, Dick, why not see how you'd do on your own? ``No way,'' he says. Dick does it purely for ``the awesome feeling'' he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.

This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992--only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don't keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.

``No question about it,'' Rick types. ``My dad is the Father of the Century.''

And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries Was 95% clogged. ``If you hadn't been in such great shape,'' One doctor told him, ``you probably would've died 15 years ago.'' So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other's life.

Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father's Day.

That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy.

``The thing I'd most like,'' Rick types, ``is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once.''

Food Safety

from ParentCenter.com

Which foods are most likely to contain high levels of pesticide residues? Are any foods safe?

Consumers Union, an independent, nonprofit testing and information organization based in New York, has rated various foods based on the frequency of pesticide detection on a crop, the levels of residues, and the relative toxicity of the residues. By rating them on a scale on which a score of over 100 is considered grounds for concern, they've provided consumers with a meaningful way to choose safer foods for their children.

According to their analysis, the foods with the highest pesticide residue scores are:

• Fresh peaches (U.S.)
• Winter squash (U.S., fresh and frozen)
• Strawberries
• Grapes (from anywhere but Mexico)
• Spinach (fresh and canned)
• Apples
• Green beans (fresh U.S.; canned and frozen from anywhere)
• Pears
• Cantaloupe
• Tomatoes
• Potatoes

The foods that got the lowest pesticide residue scores are:

• Milk
• Corn (canned and frozen)
• Broccoli (from the U.S.)
• Winter squash (from Honduras or Mexico)
• Orange juice
• Bananas
• Canned peaches
• Peas
• Grapes (from Mexico)
• Fresh green beans (from Mexico)
• Single-serving pears (from Chile)
• Apple juice
• Grape juice

Why do fresh peaches get a caution if canned peaches get a green light? Processing a food (making it into juice and/or canning it, for example) sometimes makes it a lot safer to eat. That's because foods grown for processing don't need to be cosmetically appealing, so they normally aren't sprayed as much just before harvest. This gives more time for the residues that do remain to break down into safer components before the product reaches the market. Also, when foods are processed, they're often peeled, washed, or heated, which removes a lot of the pesticide residues.

Embarrassing Stories

I'm trying to work, but the servers at work are being really slow today. So, instead, it's time for an embarrassing story. (Just to see if she's reading, Rachel, I owe you $5 for something you did recently.) We were recently talking at lunch about embarrassing stuff our children had done. Instead of telling about something Rachel recently did, I'll share something that my co-worker Chris' child did.

The child had a habit of running around in just his underwear. He'd take off his pants and just run around in a shirt and his underwear. That was fine when they didn't have guests in the house, but he wouldn't make the distinction.

They sat him down one day and had a talk with him and explained that guests to their home shouldn't see his underwear. The very next day, they had some friends over and the kids had been playing upstairs. After awhile, the child came down the stairs. He was wearing a shirt, but nothing on the lower half of his body. Embarrassed, they took him back upstairs and asked what he was thinking. He reminded them that he had been wearing only his underwear that morning. But he needed to ask his mom something and he knew they had company, so he took off his underwear so that their guests wouldn't see his underwear.

Ms. Abortion

Ms. Magazine published the names over 1,000 women who had signed a petition on their website saying that they had abortions and supported the right of women to have abortions. They said they had over 5,000 people sign their petition and that the rest of the names would be on their website. At first I was shocked and horrified, and then I thought that 5,000 was a small number, and then that it probably wasn't that representative, that there would be lots who would never sign a petition like that, but who elected to terminate the life or potential or whatever.

But what got me, what I can't get out of my head, was one woman quoted in an MSNBC.com article who was 42, had a 5-year-old daughter and then murdered their next child because the child had downs syndrome. Words fail me. Well, one word comes to mind, but I'm hoping Rachel will eventually read this blog and see it as a work of love for her and not as a place where I come and post four-letter curse words. That wouldn't be a very good example.

This woman and her husband are trying again, but I think what they did was incredibly selfish and horrible. I hope that their attempts to have another child are all unsuccessful and that they are never able to conceive. I hope that they spend large sums of money in a fruitless pursuit of another child that all ends in failure. That God would say "I gave you a second child to care for and love and you snuffed out his little life before he even had a chance."