Oh, this was terrible. “Thank you for volunteering to coach soccer…” the letter began.   Coach? Soccer? Me? That was crazy. My knowledge of the sport began and ended with you-can’t-use-your-hands.

I have just graduated from high school. There was a summer holiday long enough to do something unusual, Father advised me to pick up a part-time job in our community, like teaching kids to swim or helping them with their subjects. “You’ll learn a lot,” he said. So, when Community Sports asked for volunteers, I signed up for data entry, which, I thought was helping to put data into a computer. Keyboards, I knew. Coaching? Impossible!

Realizing there must be something wrong, I quickly called the head coach about the misunderstanding. It did not go well. He had been away from home and would not be coaching at all. Panicked, I called the other assistant coach. He said, “It isn’t difficult to teach a bunch of first graders about soccer. Be confident.”

“Are you kidding me?” I hang up the phone, smiling bitterly.

I phoned a Community Sports officer about our dilemma. “I am sorry,” he said. “Not enough people are willing to volunteer. If you cannot coach, we will call your team and let them know they will not be playing this season.” Seriously, that was his solution? I hang up the phone, saying I would call back to let him know my choice.

That afternoon, when Father came back, I told everything to him, complaining how careless and ridiculous the community workers were. They should have suggested my “pretending” to be a coach.

Father stared at me, “Hey, listen! I remember you like watching soccer games.”

“Watching is one thing but coaching is another,” I protested.

“Why not learn the game with the kids? To those first graders, it’s just a game. Just make it fun. Besides, you’ll gain more than them.” I couldn’t imagine the kids’ disappointed faces when they were told their team wouldn’t play because they couldn’t find them a coach.

The next morning, I called back.

Then came the day when I would meet those kids for the first time.

Jenny always admired powerful and attractive marathon runners and dreamed that one day she could also run a marathon.

To make it, one day, she began to seriously prepare. At first, she only set the small goal of running one kilometer each morning. However, she still found it tiring and soon gave up running. As days went on, her weight gradually increased. Upset about her health, she finally decided to lose weight by doing exercise. She began running again.

As usual, in the following days, her big problem with exercising was always how to stay motivated. She tried to find guidance from running experts and books. And everything she read indicated that she’d better pair up with a running partner. She followed the advice, but human exercise companions always let her down. Her last exercise companion quit with excuses like, “It’s my turn to do the dishes” at six o’clock in the morning! She hated to admit it, but she had made similar excuses to others and disappointed them in similar ways.

Then Brucie appeared in Jenny’s life, a birthday gift from her husband, John. John couldn’t work out with Jenny because he had a bad back. So that job was left to Brucie, a yellow dog. Brucie was quite energetic, which made him destined(注定的) to be a running partner.

In the beginning, Brucie and Jenny ran only fifty paces at a time, each set mixed with one hundred paces of walking. “I don’t look foolish starting this way,” thought Jenny, “because Brucie’s bones are too young to make him run much harder.” She was right, and Brucie’s early limitations gave her time to start slowly without feeling awkward.

After about nine months, though, Brucie was old enough to run several miles a day and Jenny was fit enough to keep up. From spring to autumn, they logged the miles together every day. However, as winter approached and the weather got colder, maintaining a daily running routine required lots of dedication and determination. And Jenny started to think the dog would be like her previous human partners and that she couldn’t count on the little dog for help with motivation.

What happened later proved that Jenny was wrong.

One spring morning, Jenny started her first marathon, accompanied by Brucie.

Julia always enjoyed running through The Dark Walk towards the light at the end of it. It was a dark, damp tunnel (隧道) made of smooth branches. This year she had the extra joy of showing it to her small brother, Stephen, and terrifying him as well as herself.

One day they found a hole on one side of the walk. Inside there was water, in which they perceived a panting trout (喘息的鳟鱼). They were both so excited that they were no longer afraid of the darkness as they bent down and peered at the fish panting in his tiny prison, his silver stomach going up and down like an engine; otherwise he was motionless. Julia wondered what he ate and thought of his hunger. She found him a worm. He ignored the food, and just went on panting. Bending over him, she thought how he had been in there. All the winter, in the dark tunnel, all day, all night, floating around alone.

Nobody knew how the fish got there. Her mother suggested that a bird had carried the egg. Her father thought that in the winter a small stream might have carried it down there as a baby, and it has been safe until summer came and the water began to dry up. Before they went to bed, Stephen asked his mummy the whole story of the trout, not really interested in the actual trout, but in the story which his mum began to make up for him, and Julia, in her bed, presented her back to them and read her book. But she kept one ear cocked. “And so, in the end, this naughty fish got bigger and bigger, and the water got smaller and smaller...” Passionately, she turned around and cried, “Mummy, don’t make it a horrible old moral story. Her mom even brought in a fairy (仙子), who had made it rain and filled the hole, so that the trout could float away down to the river below. Staring at the moon she knew there was no such thing as a fairy and that trout, down in the tunnel, was panting for his life.

She sat up in the silent night and Stephen was sound asleep.

Julia poured the trout out of the pot into the river.