An older neighbor used to run by our house almost every day — his name is Rupert, and he is extremely pleasant. For the last several months, I’ve noticed that Rupert hasn’t been running by anymore, and honestly, I worried that something bad may have happened. He’d invited me over for beer and chess many times, but I’d always let the busyness of life get in the way — today I was out walking Zach, and decided to stop by.

Well, I needn’t have worried. He was working on his house, as usual, and when I asked him why I hadn’t seen him running in awhile, he said, “Well, David, I accomplished my goal, and so I took some time off from running to get some house projects done.” (see, Rupert also has a habit of always having about 9 different projects in varying states of completion — his wife or children have had to deal with that!).

“So,” I asked, “what goal did you accomplish?”

Rupert responded, “I ran around Earth. I set a goal to run 24,902 miles before I died, so that I could say I ran around our planet. I did it. So, I’m taking a break.”

We talked for awhile longer, and he introduced me to his wife, son, and neighbor — what an interesting fellow. Sort of the Forrest Gump of Capitol Hill in Seattle 🙂

As an aside, we bought some grape plants from his wife at their yard sale last summer (Rupert was at a school reunion in Austria, where he grew up, when we stopped for that), and they’re doing wonderfully — another great story there, in that the seeds for the plants came in Rupert’s pockets when he emigrated from Austria to the United States. So, they’ve traveled quite a ways as well.