Last night I attended a performance of Come Fly Away at the Lexington Opera House. Fantastic by the way! A
couple I recognized sat down beside me. I immediately introduced myself to Sam
Dick and his wife Noelle. Sam is co-anchor of WKYT’s evening newscasts. I don’t
normally introduce myself to local TV personalities, but Sam was different. We
have a connection. Running. He owns Swim/Bike/Run of Kentucky, a training and
outfitting home for runners. He's also sponsoring a race team to participate in Run the Bluegrass Half-Marathon to support awareness of prostate cancer, a disease
he personally experienced and shared with his viewing audience. We talked about
Danny Abshire and how a running expert can improve your performance.
This morning as I was thinking about my conversation with Sam and
Noelle, I was reminded that once again my life circle (friendships/relationships)
is expanding. This has happened several times in my life and when it does, it’s
like an explosion. Two becomes four, four becomes eight, and well, you get the
picture.
The first explosion occurred when I was a young mother involved in
La Leche League. The organization gave me an entrée into a young mother’s group
when I moved to Kansas in the late 1970s. The friendships that grew during
those meetings created a loving community for a homesick young mother from
Kentucky.
Later, when I went to work as a paralegal, my circle extended into
the Central Kentucky legal community—friendships that are still alive and well
after thirty years.
In the mid-1990s, I became involved on the local level in America's Junior Miss, now Distinguished Young Woman. Through Junior Miss, I meet people all over Kentucky.
Eventually, I started judging state programs that took me to Texas and Missouri
and Wisconsin and Virginia—an ever-growing circle of friends.
But the largest explosion came when I joined Romance Writers of America. That association opened up the world of romance writing, and the
connections have been phenomenal. I
would not have gotten this far in my writing career without doors opening
though that ever-broadening environment.
I’ll never forget my trek west, following the Oregon Trail in
1998. My daughter decided to spend her spring vacation traveling with me
for part of the trip. We were driving through Wyoming and she said, “Except for
the telephone poles, this looks like Mongolia.”
Mongolia? I was venturing west for the first time in my life, and
my daughter had ridden horses with a tribe in Mongolia. At an early age, her
world had expanded far beyond mine, but I’m catching up, if only on the
Internet.
Over the last fourteen years, I’ve had conversations with people
all around the world from a radiocarbon dating expert in New Zealand, a gun
expert in Germany, a Bach expert in South America, and all sorts of people in
between, including the head of the Miami-Dade County Venom Response Program. Granted it’s not as exciting as riding horses
in Mongolia or rappelling down the Great Wall of China, but that’s okay. I have
plenty of excitement in my life, and if I get bored, I’ll give my characters
something to do that will send me off on another research trail.
What about your circles? When was the last time you added a new
one? And have friends from an outer circle moved closer to the center? I hope I never stop adding new circles. On March 31, at Run the Bluegrass Half-Marathon there will
be almost 2000 runners from twenty-nine states and three countries. This will be another opportunity to make new friends, and I can’t wait.
Happy writing and running, and GO CATS! Kathy
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