Joel Kantor

There’s the old saying that a man’s gotta know his limitations. I’m still searching for mine; with the exception of two — height and cold weather. I can pilot my own plane, but I can’t look out a window just three stories high and after getting a minor touch of frost bite while duck hunting years ago, I don’t do well in cold weather. I won’t be climbing Mt. Everest. If I lay on my back and you step on my stomach, I am 5’9″, coming in at 170-180 pounds with 62 years of life under my belt. I spend 10 months a year training for nothing in particular and 2 months a year feeding the tape worm left behind from the previous months. My life is shared with a wife and daughter who demand little of me and enjoy the fact I have no interest in being dragged to the mall. So I work, they shop; we are both good at what we do….well they may be a tad better at their endeavor than I. Based on all this, my health ranges from an out of shape 185+ to a svelte (skinny legged) 170 pound Sherpa. Each year, I find myself on some sort of outback adventure. I come from the city so the term “outback” (for my purposes) has been citified so humor me. Through the years the trips have ranged from a week of camping and canoeing in the Boundary Waters of USA/Canada to backpacking the Wind River Mountain Range, to riding a bike hundreds of miles in a week from Santa Fe to my drive in Tulsa or the like. Coming from the flat lands of Oklahoma I am neither fast on a bike nor do my skinny legs provide much oomph up a hills, especially one rising for miles on end. But as those who have traveled with me know, I am tenacious. Once I begin, there is no quit in me. In golf while we compete against other players, all things being equal, we all press ahead alone, against the elements, those natural challenges Mother Nature puts before us and those we struggle with within each of us. And so it will be for those of us on Team Suicide Prevention