"Run, Forest, Run." HA!
During one visit to my mother in law’s house, Jimmy was playing outside in the rain with my sister-in law, Andrea (Auntie Drea). She was sitting on the front steps and Jimmy just…took off. She came inside and told me that he ran up to the corner of the street and then took off running up State Street. At first, I was like “Oh, okay.” Then she said, no, you’ll have to get in your truck to catch up with him. And we did. It was a grueling, nerve racking 5-10 minutes where I had to first find him, then dealt with traffic NOT letting me over to the right hand lane (little road rage surfacing, but understandably so on my part!), and then to pull into the next block up to have Andrea jump out and yell “JIMMY!” He was wet, still running, and said something like “Hi Mommy!” He ran a total of 9 blocks, in the pouring rain, with lots of traffic (State Street in Olean is a busy street: see this map. At least two of those streets had stop lights. The first of many instances in his life so far where luck (and perhaps God) was on our side! Other Olean fun moments:
- Going to the playground on 14th Street and watching him fall backwards down the 8 foot tall slide (I had to cringe at that one). He was hurt, but an hour later he was jumping on Grandma Ruggieri’s couch. “I guess he’ll be okay then.”
- Another fun moment I remember is when he jumped down the front stairs, all five of them. I tried to yell to him to stop, but he did it. He didn’t fall, but when he landed, he had a bit of a wounded look on his face. Cement hurts!
There have been some other stories of Jimmy on the run:
On the first full week after the start of school, I got a frantic call from home: “I can’t find Jimmy!” I told my husband to go look for him at places where he thought he could go and then come home and report in. I got home--no sign of him. I had a couple other places I wanted to look, but told him that if he should call the cops to report him missing. While we were discussing this, my husband and I were walking around in disbelief, not even able to guess what happened and where he was. We had some help from the neighbor behind us (THANK YOU!). So then I went to a few other places, no Jimmy in sight. As I drove up to our house, I saw a police car driving away. They told my husband that they found him on South Bay Road in North Syracuse and that he had almost been hit by about five cars (THANK YOU NORTH SYRACUSE POLICE DEPARTMENT!). South Bay Road in North Syracuse is an incredibly busy road (see this and other roads in this tale on this map) and how, during our frantic searching, we didn’t find him there is amazing. How he didn’t get HIT is amazing. And he did all of this with no shoes on. I quizzed him and quizzed him and the only reason he could give me was that he couldn’t find Daddy. This all took place in 45 minutes, 45 minutes of HELL!!
He’s run out of the house since then a few more times, and once he got to Church Street (a nearby street that is also tremendously busy) butt naked and thankfully I caught him in time. Daddy had left moments before and Jimmy was upset because he wanted to go to the store with Daddy! Thankfully the owner of the house next door came running up to help as well as a nice woman on Church Street who lives across the end of our street.
Another time he got as far as the same location, naked again, but riding his bike, insisting he had to go to the “Red Playground” (Kennedy Park on Grove Street). Again, the only way I could catch him was to jump in my truck and grab him. Both Mom and Dad were there and boy did he fight me. He just couldn’t understand how at 3 years old he couldn’t go to the Red Playground by himself.
The last time was last fall and he got about 25 yards away, at night, before I yelled to him, “Where are you going???!??” Again, he couldn’t find us, so he walked out. Scary. Too, too scary. Next I'll have to tell about the stories about shopping!
