Running Wild on the Lawn

Speaking about the driving force behind this latest addition to his journals, Jim Gold says, "When I grew up, my parents bought a farm in Hamden, a small town in upstate New York, where we spent our summers. The farmhouse had a great lawn. When I saw it for the first time, I loved it so much, I rushed my four-year old body out the door and, in joyous abandon, ran wild on its lawn. What joy and ecstasy! "But, as I remember, my mother said, 'Stop! Stop running wild on the lawn!' So I slowed down, then stopped. As the years passed, I never ran wild again on that lawn. Internally, it became my dream to recapture that ecstasy, to run free like that again. But I had also internalized my mother's warning: Freedom (fun, ecstasy) can be dangerous. Remember discipline and self-control. I had internalized the Stop. So I still ran—but not as wild, with the brakes on, slower, slower, or not wild at all. "My mother," he concludes wistfully, "pushed on the side of security. My father leaned toward adventure. I've been trying to balance the two. This book is about my daily struggle to move past the pain and suffering in life and find the joy of running wild again, right here, right now." The result is available for his readers between the covers of this book. Having, in his last three, faced and transcended the enormous challenges posed by Covid-19, he has come to grips in this one with physical ones affecting his tours, folk dance classes, and sense of identity. In some truly gripping ways, readers will hear echoes in these pages of the struggles we all face—and the courage it always takes to overcome them.