My first daughter was telling me of my first granddaughter’s track and field endeavors. While we were on the phone, Lisa sent me an attachment showing 15-year-old Imani’s place in the lineup of a recent event. “Shot, Disc, Jav – Imani.” My granddaughter is flinging the shot, whipping the discus, and hurling the javelin.
In high school, the “shot” that athletes must “put” weighs 8.8-pounds for female athletes. Lisa sent me a picture of Imani in the classic pose of preparation to put the shot. When she told me that my granddaughter was throwing the discus, I had sent her a picture of an (ahem: naked) ancient discus thrower. At the time that we spoke, Imani was still recovering from an ankle injury and could not participate in running events.
Imani imagines what she wants and goes out to achieve it. When she was younger, she participated in gymnastics. After watching her older brother play basketball, Imani decided to play, also. She plays the saxophone in her school’s orchestra and jazz band and volleyball on the school’s team. Enamored of Korean popular (K-Pop) bands, she decided to teach herself to speak Korean; she also wrote an independent study program that was approved by her school and sponsored by one of her teachers. When she was young, her parents would often find that she had “adopted” homeless snakes, frogs, and turtles. She took to my interest in birding with enthusiasm, and one of my favorite pictures of her shows her carrying my camera and writing in the bird journal I gave her. She would call me and whisper about the bird outside her window. While walking in the wooded area behind her house, we two came upon a fawn curled up in the deep grasses. In a moment reminiscent of the poem “A Blessing” by James Wright, Imani held still with me until a doe came out of the woods. We watched in silent joy as the fawn gathered its legs beneath it and mother and baby moved deeper into the woods.
When my daughter told me of Imani’s track and field participation, I thought of Wilma Rudolph, who had polio as a child, and walked with a leg brace until she was 12 years old, then went on to become a world record-holding sprinter. She was the first woman to win three gold medals in one Olympics, winning for her performance in the 100- and 200-meter events and the 4 x 100-meter relay. My granddaughter has that same kind of determination and refuses to accede to society’s insistence that she cannot, nor may not. When her brother took up the trombone in school, Imani chose the saxophone, sometimes playing the baritone sax, which was taller than she was. (No more: She is 5’ 8” now.)
Lisa told me that her daughter was going to a “Sweet Sixteen” dance and sent me a picture of Imani in her dress. I did the “grandfather grumble,” since Imani is not sixteen, but my daughter sighed in my ear. When the time is convenient for both, my niece Kelli Daniels, a 25-year veteran of the U.S. Army, is going to take Imani to one of the countries where Kelli had been stationed: Korea. Imani will put her knowledge of the Korean language (she sang “Happy birthday” to me in Korean) to good use and plans to immerse herself in Korean culture. Imani actualizes her thoughts and dreams and sees no limitations on either her physical or emotional possibilities. In that regard, I’ve got this to say about my granddaughter:
Look out world; Imani’s got “next.”
cjon3acd@att.net