When I started this blog a few weeks ago, I addressed my reasons for walking 500 miles, but I never explained why I chose the Indiana Children’s Wish Fund as the beneficiary of our fund raising efforts.

There’s an ironic twist to this explanation. See, I’m not really into kids. I don’t have any of my own, and it’s a decision I’ve never regretted for even one second, though from time to time it occurs to me that I might see things differently when I near the finish line and am crashing into walls while trying to figure out how to change my adult diapers and wishing I had some offspring off of whom to leach.

Even when I was a kid, I never really had an affinity for kids. I didn’t have what you would call a best friend; the other kids were just something I needed so we would have enough bodies to play ball. Other than that, I kept mostly to myself, which might explain the antisocial tendencies that have stayed with me into my adult years. I can remember sitting in restaurants with my parents as a ten year old and being horrified with the way my peers conducted themselves in public. In retrospect, I was too callow at the time to realize that this was more a reflection on their parents, many of whom had no more business procreating than I had piloting a 747, but it still colored my viewpoint. Most kids my age dreamed of being ballplayers or astronauts, but I had visions of inventing and owning a place where kids weren’t allowed and everybody would have fun. Of course, I was too young then to realize that those places already existed, they were called bars, and that one day I would spend more than my fair share of time in these establishments.

But I digress.

About 20 years ago, Terry Caesar Hudson approached me about helping out with a golf tournament that would benefit the Indiana Children’s Wish Fund. For all of my faults, I’ve always been a believer in giving back and helping with charitable causes, and I signed on. Over the years, Terry has introduced me to any number of Wish Fund children and their families, and I’ve watched in awe as these kids battled horrific disease and all that went with it with grace, dignity, and hope. It wasn’t just impressive, it was inspirational, and more than once I came away from spending time with these kids embarrassed about the way that I handled the relatively mundane crisis that would pop up from time to time in my own life. If I walked 5,000 miles and raised $5 million dollars for these kids, it still wouldn’t be enough to repay them for the lessons they’ve taught me over the years.

And that’s why I chose the Indiana Children’s Wish Fund for this project.

Saturday’s Journey: Colfax to Lebanon

Mileage: 16.0 (only 44.7 miles to go…we’ll actually surpass 500 before we get to Zionsville).

On the iPhone (yes, I found it. Or, to be more accurate, my driver The G Man located it): Kings of Leon’s Only By the Night CD, Meet the Press, and Billy Crystal’s 700 Sundays