The Web Warren

Picture the "Easter Parade" that was once the New York City population strolling to and from church in their Sunday best, but which has now become a display for the some of the most outlandish millinery creations seen outside a Hallowe'en Parade, a Mardi Gras float, or a Vegas spectacular. Now transfer that (pardon the pun!) to a T-shirt design contest for people of peripatetic pancreases and put it on a planked walkway peripheral to the plage (beach), and you have the Seaside Heights JDRF walk.

I remember a time when fundraising walks and rides meant pledging per mile traveled, where walker/rider numbers and checkpoints were carefully guarded and distances verified. Next to that, the current walk is a circus of confusion.I suspect the changes had a lot to do with the change from "pledge per mile" to "pledge overall". Nowadays, you can show up for the JDRF walk, hand in your envelope (money in hand, thank you), and then take off for the day. Unless your team has entered the Team T-Shirt contest, or you want a team photograph. (Then you have to rely on the schedule.)

The truth is, there is no reason to actually walk the JDRF walk -- just show up, see whatever vendor/sponsor booths are there, grab some food, and chat with other people touched by someone's Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus. Yet many of us actually do walk some, or all, of the route. It's not just for the exercise -- many of us could cover the distance in less time, in a less crowded venue, closer to home, without the temptations of bagels, cakes, and other carb overload -- and it's not just for the camaraderie. Just like the Easter Parade, the value of the JDRF walk is as much to be seen as it is to raise funds for diabetes research, as much to honor those people -- living and dead -- who have lived with "the Sugar Monster" as it is to hope that no future generation will require daily injections or have to worry about their kidneys shutting down in the primes of their lives, as much to say we are here, and we are not going away as it is to tell some engineer somewhere to go invent a bionic pancreas and an artificial immune system.

That all being said, it is something and something again to be caught up in the colors and sounds of thousands of people, dozens of teams, in colorful T-shirts advertising "Taryn's Trotters" or "Brendan's Buccaneers", "Jack's Team" or (less happily) "Team Jeneen 6/11/73 - 12/11/98" -- or even a T-shirt with one or more of those iconic half-laced children's sneakers, taking over the boardwalk in an attidude of we belong.