Don’t Let the Gift Stop Here

Across Texas, but never alone.

uthor’s note: In 2011, at the age of 23, Ientered

the world of ultrarunning. It was not in arace or competition but rather at an invisible border marking my passage from New Mexico into the goliath state of Texas. I was on a trip running across the country, and on one side of the line stood everything I had known and experienced so far: California, Arizona, New Mexico, the Southwest, support in the form of rotating family members, steady, 25-mile days. On the other side of that line stood Texas, not a place so muchas a beckoning force, an unknown land where anything could happen and, a month later, everything had.

Eo * *

Imet Tommy Burrus by the side of a dirt road several feet from the invisible border where New Mexico became Texas. The only tangible evidence marking the passage was a rusted, eroded sign welcoming us to Texas and the disarming jump from Mountain Time into Central

A Running across the United States to raise money for the Boys & Girls Club of America— everything I’d need for the next four months packed in the stroller. | had no idea if I’d make it to the East Coast, but | couldn’t wait to try.

Time. Neither Tommy nor I was supposed to be outside, or at least that’s the first

© Alexander Kreher

simply by stepping from one side of the road to the other. So naturally, I thought I knew better than he and insisted I would run on.

My parents were alongside me, barely holding it together after two weeks of being with me, because in two hours they would leave my side, drive to El Paso, and fly back east, and then I would be utterly and completely alone until I did or did not reach the shores of South Carolina. The anxiety of our imminent separation clouded over a much more pressing matter, which each of us in our own way had naively, optimistically dismissed.

We were in the middle of a Texas dust storm.

Forty-five-mile-an-hour gusts of winds hurtled in unobstructed from across the desert to the south, sweeping north until they pressed against our plot of land just below the Panhandle. We had been giggling and rejoicing in the poetic, electric risk of the environment and patting ourselves on the back for being so brave. But even in my obstinacy, I could tell that we were beginning to tread dangerous waters. It was not the dust and debris in my eyes nor the precarious sense that the wind might simply carry us up and away and deposit us in the middle of the desert that concerned me. Those were just inconveniences.

It was the tumbleweed.

If, when you hear the word “tumbleweed,” you’re thinking of gentle, feathery balls of sticks, whimsically gracing their way across the desert, please disabuse yourself of that notion right now. Texas tumbleweed in a Texas windstorm is Texassized, thorny, and unapologetic, and it careens across the topography in haphazard paths of destruction. It will dent your car on contact, shatter your windshield.

Fortunately, I did not get a chance to see what it might do to my body, because up until that point my timing had been lucky, and as soon as I saw Tommy he immediately set about talking some sense into me. The wind and dust were a predecessor to the more dangerous tumbleweed, but the tumbleweed was a predecessor to the most dangerous of all: wildfires slinking across the prairie. Tommy told us they had already sprouted in the fields some miles south and were slowly advancing. Whether the flames reached us in Plains would be a matter of whether they were able to jump roads along the way—and how many.

Five minutes later, my mom, dad and I were sitting around a broad oak table eating roast beef sandwiches farmed from Tommy’s ranch cattle, the distant smell of charred grain fields floating in despite the closed windows. It was the first time I had eaten meat in the past three years; it would not be the last. I had been a vegetarian since college, but Texas would soon untether me from that inclination. At one end of the table sat Tommy, red faced, white haired, and huge, as tall as he was wide, and at the other sat his lanky, Midwestern wife, Sarah Kay, a pixied brunette.

In moments I realized that I recognized their names. They had been on a list of potential hosts, graciously forwarded to me by three guys who had run across

the United States along a similar route three years before. Incredibly, I had emailed Sarah yesterday asking if she might care to host me for a night. I had not expected an answer and hadn’t gotten one. But here she was, in real flesh, skinny and tall as a beanpole, serving me cornbread and sweet tea. I had found her by some rare collision of minutes and miles, a combination that would carry more weight than e-mail in the days to come.

From our conversation at lunch that afternoon, things thrust forward with incredible speed—except for when they didn’t. In some of the days that followed, time would come to resemble an egg white negotiating its freedom from a cracked shell, unsure of its inertia forward or its tendency to nestle comfortably back in. But at that oak table with empty plates in front of us, Tommy and Sarah begin to quickly facilitate my way across the country in ways and with implications I could not even have conceived of then. After breaking bread with my parents, who were now further terrified at having to leave me after the news of impending prairie fires and the reality of conditions in Texas, Tommy and Sarah—who had children of their own in faraway places—stood from the table and got to work.

Sarah brought in a creased map of Texas and spread it across the table, and from a well-worn address book she began calling acquaintances in towns along my route: cattle ranchers, pastors, family friends. In minutes they had arranged for me an underground railroad of sorts, a network of lodging stretching halfway across the state.

That evening, after I had said good-bye to my parents, Sarah Kay was on and off the phone with ranchers south of us, tracking the fire. Tommy and I sat nearby, reclined in upholstered reading chairs, eating from a bowl of pistachios. As I thanked him for such hospitality and grace, he smiled, shrugged it off, and told me, “Don’t let the gift stop here.”

Later still, once we had been reassured we were out of harm’s way with the fire, Tommy played me the song from which his earlier words had originated—a hopeful country-western song about strangers looking out for each other; about one gift that turns into another and another. In the days that followed, I would think back on that song and its premise, on tall Tommy and skinny Sarah and how we all came together at an invisible but significant passage in my four-month-long quest. As the days would fill up to weeks and then a whole month, I would come to find evidence of Tommy’s song in nearly all of my encounters.

ES Eo * The morning I left Tommy and Sarah, I ran 34 miles—the farthest I had ever run in my life—and that evening I stayed with their friends, a couple who ran a bedand-breakfast, grew wine grapes in the same brusque, no-nonsense way they had previously farmed peanuts (and before that, cotton), and didn’t drink a drop of their own wine—or any—despite their vineyard being one of the biggest in Texas. After a steak dinner, they set up three lawn chairs in the front lawn, wheeled out

A Braving the wind in my first days alone in East Texas, enjoying the unique surprises each day brought.

a mammoth telescope, and together we crouched late into the night looking at stars and constellations whose names and histories Janice and her husband knew intimately. The sky was such that I had never seen it before, not before that night and not ever again after leaving the plains of Texas—gaping, deep, seeping with utter darkness but unable to withhold the sharp pricks of starlight bursting forth. It was at once the darkest and brightest sky I had ever seen, packed so densely with stars that I didn’t think it possible and the spaces in between poured thick with heady darkness. I didn’t know in which aspect of it I should lose myself.

The next day was 30 miles, then 32, then 36, and finally I stopped counting. As I ran, viscous oil gurgled in fields alongside me, entire underground caverns of liquid made evident only by the noxious odor lacing the winds and the constant creak of the drills. The land stretched flat and yellow in the exact depths and tones I had envisioned for Texas. Acres of cattle ranches gave way to peanut fields and then to repeating rows of cotton, some fertile and splitting open, a cloudscape spattered upon the ground. More oil fields, cattle guards, roadkill, discarded plastic bags.

The winds briefly slowed after my entry to the state but did not relent. In Lubbock, the gusts grew louder still, throwing about debris that had suddenly turned cosmopolitan and served to welcome me to the metropolis that housed Texas Tech. Construction signs blew about in the streets, cigarette butts and beer cans, fliers for football games, and discarded 5-hour Energy cartons. There, my hosts invited me to their teenage daughter’s beauty pageant and even lent me a pair of heels and one of her miniskirts to squeeze into, for pageant night was not

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a moment to underdress nor do anything else that might signify a lack of respect for one of the state’s most prized traditions.

ES Eo * A few days southeast of Lubbock, the land dropped drastically and opened up onto hills, craggy buttes, sudden deep greens and warm browns, silvery grays. They call this phenomenon dropping off the caprock because one moment you’re on flat, even land, with no hills or mountains or complexity in sight, and the next moment you’re hurtling 400 feet down a hill, clutching your stroller for dear life lest it scoot loose and escape down a hill into a ravine. Without warning the land becomes a far more complex course to be tackled. The change in landscape is not necessarily unique—certainly the plains had to end at some point—but what’s so peculiar here is that the change does not rise up from the land that sprang it but instead cracks open below the land preceding it. It’s as if someone took a chisel and hammer, cracked open the top of the fields, and discovered that they were actually hiding an entire subterranean terrain, with diverse depths of hills and rocks and vegetation.

The road drops off the caprock in the place where the Great Plains reach their southern terminus; and although the plains had thus far been gradually, doggedly patient and persistent in their uniformity, there was nothing gradual nor patient about the way in which they suddenly ceased to exist. In mere moments, I fell from a level landscape I had come to depend on, to take for granted even, back into one I had previously preferred but now hardly seemed to remember.

That night I stayed in a town called Spur, with in-laws of the Burrus’s, cattle ranchers with three agriculture degrees from Texas A&M between the two of them. Their 4-year-old son, Henry (whose teensy bed I slept in), made a fool out of me not once but two times, the first time for misnaming the particular type of truck that shuttles cattle and the second time when he told me he and his dad were sleeping outside and I asked if they were tenting out. With a very earnest look, he explained slowly that no, tents are for campers; he was a cowboy and cowboys sleep in tepees.

ES Eo *

The wind and the fires did not stop. Now they simply had more ammunition to burn, more vegetation to eat up. Many days I would arrive at the outskirts of towns whose charred forests were still smoking from yesterday’s fire. Worse were the towns whose land and homes had been ravaged a week or more earlier, where all that remained were gray, ashen suggestions of what had once been. Worst of all were the days I could smell or see a fire up ahead or flanked north or south of me. I never knew what I might be running into; I never knew whether to continue onward or to stop, if I was running away from a fire or toward one. I tried to be optimistic; I made up jokes: Why didn’t the wildfire cross the road? Because it got the wind knocked out of it!

At some point, the actual running in Texas became almost perfunctory, just a way to get from one improbable experience to the next. Police checked on me; people stopped me on the side of the road to make donations and to pray. Once, a ponytailed lady brought me a spaghetti lunch packed into Tupperware. People in Texas got me. They understood what I was doing without my needing to explain it, and when I told them why, they nodded, without any incredulous looks of disbelief or awe. They inexplicably knew exactly what I needed before I did, and they always gave it.

As Iran, Texas developed its own personality, far more intricate than the blank force I had felt it to be on that first day in Plains. There was something about the state and the people who inhabited it, at least the rural parts through which I ran. My hosts lived off the land but not on a small scale or gimmicky way, not like the fantasy I had of tenting out in my backyard woods for a season or two. They made their living—their income, their means to support their families—from the land, from farming, ranching, lumbering; digging for oil, growing grapes for wine. When a drought settled in and refused to leave, as it had that year, and fires quietly raged on, a real, tangible hardship seeped through the region.

In this way nothing was taken for granted and nothing was assumed unconquerable. I could never tell if my hosts were more optimistic or realistic. They ad no delusions, but they accomplished many of the challenges they set out

Heading into the mountains in New Mexico, the last stretch of elevation before | reach the border with Texas on the other side.

to do. They were self-sufficient but always helping one another. People drove an hour for groceries, more for friendly house calls. What had first seemed like unimaginable distances between towns became normal, and whereas I had once assumed the distance reflected a statewide spirit of a people wanting to keep their distance from one another, I soon realized that it was truly just relative. Ten miles in Texas was akin to one in my much smaller home state of Maine. The state was a huge landmass, and people there wanted to explore it. One host explained that some of the smaller outposts—which were closer together but many nearly abandoned—were spaced according to how far a horse-drawn wagon could go in a single day in the era of western exploration.

Ina town called Haskell I stayed three nights with a family whose patriarch, Mark, had founded and now preached at the most popular church in town. I visited the elementary school where his wife, Tammy, taught fifth grade; in a private moment she told me that when they had first married, Mark had been—in his own words— the driver of the party bus. But then, six years ago, he had endured a tragic string of events that had led to a moment of revelation, which would change the course of his life. Later that year he began handing out Bibles in low-income neighborhoods. Tammy didn’t seem to know what to make of it. In a conversation with Mark later on, he would explain how in the span of a single year, his daughter had lost her unborn child, his nephew had drowned during a family outing, and

he himself had been diagnosed with cancer. Utterly defeated, he found himself turning toward God and asking Him for help.

I was sad to leave their warm home after four days together, but fortunately the departure was made less sentimental by the fact that one of the cows had escaped early in the morning, and everyone was out trying to reel her back in.

Sixty miles later I arrived in the town of Throckmorton to a sign advertising Fresh Frog Legs, Every Friday. | was to stay at a hunting lodge and the owner, Tilly, met me at the premises. Over glasses of sweet tea on the porch, elderly Tilly told me that up until several years ago, blacks were not allowed in her town. After being in Los Angeles during the 1992 riots, she had moved back to Throckmorton where she was born. “There are no blacks here,” she tells me, “and they aren’t encouraged to come here. Not that that’s good . . .” she hesitates, “but they aren’t here.” I squirmed in my seat and did not speak my mind. It was not a proud moment.

Inside the lodge were five bedrooms and 15 twin beds, a latched freezer with bloody frost burn, antlers on wood-paneled walls, and nothing but ketchup and instant coffee in the cabinets. The restaurant serving frog legs wasn’t open, so I bought flour tortillas, peanut butter, and chocolate milk from the gas station and ate my dinner on the lodge’s living room couch, sitting opposite a deer head anging upon the wall. During the night I switched beds three times, unable to

find the magic entryway to sleep, tossing and turning with images of stuffed deer heads looking down upon me, frog legs in my bed, and Tilly’s prejudiced condescension in my head. ES Eo *

The days had begun to pass in some uniformity, the bases of which were the steady persistence through stretches now 33, 34 miles long and the understanding that anything could happen and probably would. I got my first injury since New Mexico—a sore, worrisome Achilles—and walked an entire day. I took a nap in a tornado ditch by the side of the road, nestled in against its concrete. Somewhere around Throckmorton I swatted my first fly in weeks, and in a matter of miles the air changed from the kind of dry that cracked lips and chapped cheeks raw to a sweaty, damp humidity. In the charming golf town aptly named Runaway Bay, I went up in a two-seater airplane and piloted it over my route for the day.

And still, the weather didn’t break. The wind wore on, enraged and resilient, and the rains didn’t come. And every day, somewhere close by, a wildfire broke out. In a small town some 60 miles west of Fort Worth, my hosts begrudged the cosmopolitan choke on their local waters, explaining that Dallas—Fort Worth authorities had control of their water sources, meaning that if deemed necessary for the masses of the metropolis, Dallas—Fort Worth could drain neighboring small-town water supplies and reroute them to the DFW area in times of drought.

Groups of javelinas—wild boars—began sprouting up along my route, though fortunately always at the far end of fields or as fetid, rotting corpses on the side of the pavement. Even they appeared dejected by the fires; with whole fields and yards charred by flames, there was not much to dig up, less mischief to be made, less food to be foraged.

In mid-March I ran into Dallas, and everything exploded in green, exhaust, and a density of human bodies I had forgotten could coexist. The city marked my halfway point across the country, and I took four days off to stay with a family friend, Phil Thorpe, and his three eclectic, charming children. The first night Phil cooked Indian food and read poetry aloud; afterward, the second day we walked grinning and wordless around the Dallas Arboretum, lost in its pungent swarms of flowers; on my final night we all lit off fireworks in the backyard and danced among the sparks, hooting and hollering ’til the neighbors came knocking. When Ileft, Phil sent me off with a new pair of sneakers and a book about South African adventure. He also unburdened me of a 4-pound bag of Bibles another host had given me under good intentions but a misguided expectation that I would hand them out as part of my journey.

ES Eo * After the halfway point, nothing was really the same. Well, some were—the mileage and the hospitality and the uninhibited joy of adventuring across the country. But something inexplicable had happened to tip the balance. The vastness seemed

A Long, flat stretches on Texas state highways. Motorists often stopped to offer help.

somehow less expansive, perhaps partly due to the fact that suddenly everything was green: shockingly, aggressively emerald and jade and pine. Eastern Texas proved itself to be wholly unlike western Texas in landscape and flora. Spring had arrived, was still arriving, and I ran under a lush umbrella of exploding sycamore trees, alongside riverbanks where, for the first time since California, water actually flowed.

I stayed in touch with my previous hosts as I ran, replaying conversations and more fully understanding their insights, insights so often rooted in the places that sprang them. Questions of religion had paused in the week around the Dallas area but reappeared in the form of now-familiar queries. Was I a believer? Did I pray while I ran? Would I mind if a host said a prayer for or with me? At one house I arrived—weak and delirious with dehydration after forgetting that all stores were closed on Sunday and having had only 64 ounces of water over the course of 33 miles—to a host who asked me about religion before I was even inside the doorway. Later, she held my hands in hers, asked me to follow along in prayer, and then congratulated me on now officially being a born-again Christian, as if I had just won a game of bowling. Later still, she took me out to dinner, gave me a beautiful bed to sleep in, and sent me off with a big breakfast and plenty of water.

In all of these conversations, at once compassionate and zealous, my internal monologue coursed on, likely trying to land on a clear answer to these inquiries. I was raised a Catholic. Close family friends were abused as small children by their priest. In New England, religion is a private, introverted matter. Asking about

© Alexander Kreher

it is like inquiring after salary or age; we don’t do it. I talk to the weather when I run, to nature. It’s what I depend on in the way that I know I can never truly depend on it. It’s not in a building or in front of an ancient book where I feel like a part of something bigger—it’s outside, under your beautiful vast Texas sky and your loyal, sometimes righteous sun, and in dropping off your enigmatic caprock, spilling into the splendor of color and complexity that is every much as Texan as flat horizon lines and your candor in intimate private thoughts.

It doesn’t matter if we’re on opposite sides of the line on this topic; we’ll meet elsewhere, if not in our spirituality then in our humanity, in your hospitality and my vulnerability, our aspirations and curiosities, in our gratitude. All of these things I thought but never said; and though it frustrated me at times, it turned out I didn’t need to say them, because without talking about it, we did connect over all the other aspects: over dinner conversations about family members and college memories, about the cuts and crowns of physical labor outdoors, about branding cattle and learning to rotate crop fields, about the people who owned the oil fields, who had gone to school for an ag degree and who had learned from their parents. We talked about weather patterns and I found out that I could use those roadside ditches in case of a wildfire as well. We watched American Idol together, shared sleepy coffees, and ran into each other for midnight bathroom breaks. More than one empty-nester mom tried setting me up with their sons.

Thad not expected to encounter such presence of community religion on my run, but it had begun in California, on my third day, in a conversation at a local Boys & Girls Club, and had persisted regularly until eastern Texas. And its presence also provided shelter. In many towns I stayed with church members or leaders, and once, between Dallas and Texarkana, my eastern exodus of the state, I stayed in an old bedroom in an empty church. The pastor lived nearby; he let me in and told me to be aware of locking the doors; the church had been broken into and its collections robbed twice in the last two weeks. In the bedroom, cockroach carcasses littered the floor, smooshed irretrievably into the threadbare carpet.

From the church I covered 72 miles in the next two days to arrive in Texarkana on the first cloudy day since Arizona. Under the low cloak of gray, I listened to seven straight hours of techno by deadmau5, just to see where it might take my brain, and sometime during those seven hours I realized what had changed, what felt so different now. I knew I could do it. The run: I knew I’d finish it. Somewhere in east Texas it had ceased to be a question of if and was now a matter of when. I wondered when that had happened: my first 37-mile day? The hills outside Haskell, where the weight and girth of my stroller suddenly presented a new set of obstacles? The halfway point in Dallas, the way I had surprised myself by getting back to the grind after four days off? At what point had west become east? Maybe it was in the way I had learned to read the wind and the clouds or the way I no longer trembled at the sight of a pack of javelinas.

In fact, I had even started thinking—if only in the briefest, most abstract spasms of curiosity—what I might do when I finished. I both wanted to think about this and didn’t. My moment was now, my purpose and my discoveries, my needs: now, and here, and all very simple and straightforward. There had been no pursuit more single-minded nor basic in its focus than my run across the country. For two months I had thought of little more than the task at hand, the conversation at the dinner table, the amount of water I needed to carry. But somehow, a moment had passed.

This revelation would assert itself more in the days and weeks that followed, but already there in Texarkana, with Texas to one side of my hotel window and Arkansas to the other, I knew it. I put words to it in my journal, and grieving over something that wasn’t even over yet, I cried for the first time since I left my parents that dusty day on the other side of the state.

Eo * * Texas had been an unknown to me. Within the context of a larger challenge it had presented the biggest, clearest obstacle: a gargantuan state with distances I had never previously covered, where I knew nobody and would have no support. But then, those miles had been covered, one way or another. And they had held such depth of experiences and emotions that I had connected with strangers in a most intimate way, in a way that seems best brought about by complete vulnerability,

open-mindedness, and a need to communicate and trust openly. I had learned a new land and the quirks of its weather, just how much the two can give and just how much they can take away.

Sitting in Texarkana under a foggy sky, fresh out of a hot hotel shower, I couldn’t imagine how the rest of my trip could possibly keep up with this momentum or present me with such challenge. But if Texas had taught me anything, it was to take nothing for granted; and though in the days that followed I would still feel that something elemental had changed, that some spark of mystery or trepidation had faded, I would continue to be surprised and tested. There would be the Southeast’s deadliest tornado season in decades to endure, unexpected pockets of racism and liberalism, Southern tradition and contradiction, dry counties and college towns, a continuing stream of outstanding hosts with unending generosity and fascinating stories. Perhaps the shift was so hard to put words to because it was nothing more than the subtle feeling that I was no longer venturing forth but already arriving.

The sky opened up the next morning in pockets of full, lush raindrops, glistening on grass and coursing in full streams along Texarkana’s many curbs. The change seemed appropriate. I had arrived in a dry, dusty windstorm and would leave in a puddle of rain.

ES Eo *

In the weeks that followed and in years since, I’ve remained in touch with many of my Texan hosts. The spring and summer following my time in Texas grew to be a season of destruction as the wildfires raged on, insatiable, ravaging the entire state and uprooting whole communities. Many of my hosts were evacuated; some lost their land and homes. Mark, the invincible, courageous force of a man, went into remission with his brain cancer. He passed away in 2013 after months of operations, with Tammy and his daughters alongside him. Phil Thorpe, the exuberant father of three who read me poetry and indulged us in backyard fireworks, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly two years ago. Little Henry, the Cowboy, now has two little sisters.

Tommy and Sarah Kay remain an enigma; for although my parents and I have written them several times, we never hear anything back, though I have no doubt they’re still out at their ranch, braving the elements with black-eyed peas and roast beef sandwiches. Sometimes, when I don’t hear anything back from them, I think back on the conditions of that day and their house tucked away far from the road, invisible behind a cloak of trees, and I wonder if they’re actually real people at all, for my only tenuous connection with them is the fact that they helped me in ways for which I’Il never really be able to thank them.

My time in Texas was bright, and hard, and evocative. It opened up something within me, warming me to a state of which I had previously held unfair stereotypes, provoking my body to uncover new strengths and endurance, pushing my

spirit to consider more thoughtfully what I did and didn’t believe in. It opened doors to a people who gave me much, a people who surprised and at times offended, fed, and hugged me, invited me into their lives, and who shared the same streak of curiosity, independence, and grit that had set my own overland journey in motion. As often as they espoused self-sufficiency, they taught me how to ask for help and to be grateful to those who gave it. In uncountable ways they taught me what it was to explore.

I had not expected any of this, that dusty first day outside Plains. I had expected hard, endless days, nights in a tent pitched on cattle grates, exhaustion and boredom. I had expected to breathe a joyful sigh of relief the day I left the state.

After I left my hotel room in Texarkana, I had not imagined that Texas, a place and people that had taught me so much about living, would also end up teaching me about loss. More than that, though, Texas taught me about transience. My experiences there showed me how whimsical and temporary our circumstances can be, our homes and jobs and relationships and health. Most of the people I had met surely knew this better than I.

Eo * * As arunner, and especially as the ultrarunner that Texas allowed me to become, I try to fold this understanding into a race philosophy. No one part of the race is permanent; both pain and exhilaration are temporary. Over the course of 30 miles, 50 miles, 100 miles, we experience a broad scheme of emotions; to consider them each is nearly overwhelming. The best advice I’ve ever gotten for running is to not lose myself in any one part of a race, neither the highs nor the lows. Indulge too much in the exhilaration, and I’ll go out too fast or too eager; sink too far in the lows, and I might not finish. Perhaps it’s a detached way of looking at life, but apply it to a 100-mile race and it lets us appreciate all the parts for what they are and respect each for how it will get us to a more aware, fuller version of ourselves.

As a human being, I try to take some larger lesson from these experiences and the situations that occurred after I left. Life is short. Better, life is uncertain. Long or short doesn’t matter. Take time to contemplate the stars, to talk, to relate to one another, to remember what makes us human and not what makes us machines. It’s a wonder we’re all actually here at the same time. Endure the hard when you must, and enjoy the good when you’ve got it. And keep the gift going. [) F