Two weeks before the 2014 Kentucky Derby, Rosalie, my youngest granddaughter turned seven. Since her wish involved horses our family decided to celebrate her birthday at Keeneland. A sunny spring Saturday with a record throng of 35,000. The dress code was decidedly eclectic: yuppie sportcoats and button-down shirts, jeans and t-shirts, high heels, flip-flops, and too many overdone girly hats.

In my group were two daughters, a son-in-law, two granddaughters, one grandson, my buddy grandpa with wife, and even my second ex-wife, grandma to the little ones. (Time grudgingly heals all wounds.)

At our gathering point just off the parade ring, I casually asked Rosie if she wanted to place a bet. I explained the rules and we scanned the program together with the intensity of a last-chance loser playing with rent money. She picked Bellarmine, because its colors, orange, matched my shirt. We braved the long lines and, on my urging, bet $2 across the board. Our deal: grandpa fronts the bet, Rosie keeps any winnings. Happy birthday.

We re-gathered with the clan and watched in shock as Bellarmine won going away. When Rosie looked at her ticket she suddenly realized it was money. The payoff: $12.20.

On Race 5, Rosie decided to bet again. This time, following another careful examination of the racing form, she picked Canny Nanny because its colors, yellow, matched her sandals. Another trip through the line, Rosie in my arms, and at the window she watched intently as I relayed our bet to the cashier. My ticket immediately passed into Rosie’s grimy little paws. Her ticket.

On the way back to our group I explained what gambling meant, what odds were, and why losing was far more likely than winning, especially given the predominant influence of color on our betting strategy. Then, with our eyes glued to the Teletron, we all watched in awe as Canny Nanny found the outside to win by a length. Paid $20.20.

We were dumbfounded at Rosie’s maiden luck.

Orange and yellow. We decided to leave after the seventh race to beat the crowd, but Rosie tugged on my sleeve and asked to bet one last time. I made the obligatory wise grandfather speech about not getting greedy, to leave a winner. But no dice. So her mom obligingly read down the list on the racing form and as soon as she hit “Ageless” Rosie and I both shouted “that’s it.” Said it reminded her of me, and when I told her the stable colors — gray — she just pointed to my hair.

Despite the long odds, our horse was fate. One last trip through the line, and this time at the window, with my prompting, she announced the bet herself: “Race 7, $2 across, number 11.”

Back at the gathering place we all watched the Teletron as the fillies broke from the gate and Ageless made it clear she had forgotten her namesake. Last one out, maybe even a stumble, and the poor gal hopelessly trailed the field. With the outcome decided I explained to Rosie how to be a good loser. Then in the final turn, almost as if Ageless heard my admission of defeat, the beast exploded, as if shot out of a cannon, and closed on the field, one by one. Grandpa and Rosie lost control as Ageless came from dead last and won by a nose.

I don’t know what I was screaming, but I’m sure it wasn’t PG. We all were caught up in a rush of drama that couldn’t have been scripted in Hollywood. Same ticket window, same cashier, same bettor with his granddaughter, and the cashier beamed as he processed the winning ticket: $33.60.

Once the excitement subsided, Rosie realized that I had fronted the bet money and insisted that I take $5 for bankrolling her, and pocked $61. On the way back to our gathering point, Rosie clutched her greenbacks, fanning them like a shameless rookie at Vegas. It had been an exciting, tiring day, and as we waded through the crowd she laid her head on my shoulder.

And I thought: sometimes life brings us unexpected pleasures and unpredictable, unforgettable moments.

February 2008 was freezing in Kentucky. It was also a time when I rediscovered some moldy scraps of feelings that had been lying dormant for years, held in check by those pesky everyday realities of ambition, stress, and anxiety…those things that appear to be important in our journey, but really aren’t. I rediscovered how great it feels to do something to help others who will never know what I did.

One of my daughters, in addition to being a newly minted college graduate and veterinary technician, was also a bartender-waiter-manager at Mellow Mushroom. She and some of her friends there, being carefree, adventurous, and possessing the “careless abandon of youth”, had decided to participate in the Polar Bear Plunge to help raise money for Special Olympics.

Naturally I cautioned her about the foolishness of plunging into an icy pool in the middle of winter, although secretly I was proud of her commitment and her willingness to be bold. Then two days before the event, several teammates got cold feet and, for some totally illogical reason…I offered to plunge with them.

Their costume theme was Alice in Wonderland, and I did possess a floppy rabbit-ear hat from a previous Easter skit at church. So I became was the Rabbit. A 60-year old rabbit.

To help raise a little money I turned to my large email address book at work in a desperate attempt to beg for pledges. Surely one plaintive plea for money, sent to 300 recipients would exponentially increase the chances of getting a few token contributions from sympathetic friends and associates. Then the surprise came.

Within 24 hours, by plunge day, our team had accumulated over $1,800 in checks, cash, and pledges. Most of the 11th hour contributors were old friends and business associates I had not seen in a few years, and they all were intrigued at the image of a grown man jumping into an icy pool with rabbit ears. Many responded with some cute comment, most insisted on pictures, and all opened up their wallets to the Special Olympics.

I learned a valuable lesson. If you ask people for something you get one result, but when you get people emotionally invested in the same goal, you get something entirely different. I became involved by plunging, and they became involved by contributing.

The Saturday plunge turned out to be fun. At zero hour, temperatures were in the mid-20’s, sky overcast, wind blowing…perfect conditions for hypothermia. 20 large blocks of ice stacked imposingly next to the above-ground pool at Applebee’s Park made us rethink the sensibility of the cause. But just before the plunge, standing in line next to Beetlejuice, Superman, and other year-around Halloween fans, I was proud of us all. And I treasured the time I got to spend with my daughter, doing something goofy, irresponsible, and memorable.

We got TV and newspaper coverage, but the real victory was in the event and the reasons for it, to raise money for Special Olympians, and the way we all, plungers and payers, did our respective parts. I told my contributors that even though the Special Olympians would never know who the money came from, they would. It’s gratifying what we can accomplish when we don’t worry about who gets the credit.

Eventually our team raised almost $2,500 for the Kids. It’s all over now, and I go back to being a non-rabbit. I didn’t perish in the ice water. I didn’t even catch a cold as my 90-year-old Mom promised.

But the spirit of the Special Olympics emphasized to all of us “normal” sports fans what competition is really all about. The object is to participate. And winning, while a natural and worthwhile objective, is not the only one. There is a quote on the Special Olympics Kentucky website:  “Let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.”

So I’m guessing this is why my teammates and the other 275 plungers did what we did. We wanted to participate in this short event called life. We didn’t care about the humiliation. We didn’t care about winning. We didn’t require any compensation. And we would not have traded the opportunity for anything.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Last March, while visiting friends in Florida, I dropped in on an over-sized yard party disguised as a car race.

Held every year since 1953, the “12-Hours-of-Sebring” is technically America’s oldest sports car endurance race. In reality, it’s an exhaust-flavored Woodstock without the hippies. Lots of blue-collar buds and gals, hanging out for three days with their favorite adult beverages, grilling and chilling, while brightly-colored, corporate-sponsored, turbocharged, fuel-guzzling death machines, engines wound tighter that Pamela Anderson’s bikini, speed around a track at 130 mph.

Don’t mistake it for anything NASCAR, though. Instead of a symmetrical oval, the course is a drunkenly-inspired, 3.7 mile track snaking its way through 17 hairpin turns. But the point here is that it wasn’t so much about the cars, or even who won the race, but the underlying subplot, an ultra-casual block party, stuffed wall-to-wall with several-thousand RV’s, three times that many tents, hundreds of grilles and smokers, plus a cast of some 107,000 happy souls, all satisfied to lay back and cruise on their own tiny tract of scrub for three days, with no responsibilities but to eat, drink, play music, sling BS, and generally just take a breather from life.

This is something I have trouble doing. It defies my sense of order, my need to justify how much I accomplish during each hour of my spare time, something I call “casual productivity”. But this weekend, I was determined to abandon my orderly lifestyle and “waste” a weekend.  So off I went with my friends, who over the years had already learned to successfully navigate the road of sloth.

We quickly stumbled onto one party of typical die-hard Sebring-ites.  One RV, 5 tents, assorted canopies, four LP-cooking units, and enough supplies to fill three shopping carts at Publix.  Oh, and numerous characters.  Steve, the cook, held court in his tank top and Mardi gras beads.  He was engaging and eager to offer samples of his venison steak filets.  When I gushed about his efforts, he slipped me some of his “secret stash” of special-battered shrimp.  Catching on quickly, the more I bragged, the more he shared.  Before the weekend was over he and his buddy, Dallas, a former butcher, insisted that I try some of their venison jerky. And the coupe-duh-grass:  Dallas’s homemade venison-garlic-onion sausages, grilled on a warm bun, flavored ever-so-slightly with the essence of diesel fumes.

Dallas turned out to be a character in his own right.  A certified fire-inspector in Georgia, Dallas also answers to his professional name:  Dilly-Dally the Clown, a proud member of the Georgia Firefighters’ Clown Society, specializing in balloon animals and magic.  And, like me, more interested in how cold the beer was than in the race.

Later during a random walk through RV city, beverage in hand, I encountered others worth remembering.  The three “liquidly-enhanced” amigos in Chick-fil-a Cow costumes; one burly fellow lumbering through the 80-degree day in Viking horns and hides; a chap riding a motorized beer cooler.  I observed dozens of the obligatory cornhole games, two pole-dancing stands (G-rated), hundreds of lawn chair lawyers, at least two professional BBQ cooking teams with sophisticated grille rigs with sinks, one generator-powered 96” TV, and a life-sized female inflatable doll, swimming with her “date” in a kiddy pool.  But no troublemakers.  Just a lot of “individuals” making a good case for relaxation.

Oh, and there were those pesky cars, zipping around the track, fans parked in lawn chairs at strategic dangerous turns hoping a driver that might down-shift too slowly and lose some minor accessories, like, oh, say tires, or transmissions.  The constant decibel level at these track-side viewing areas was intense, something I liken to a high-pitched chain saw revving full throttle a foot from my ear.

But when the weekend was finally over Saturday evening, and the hundreds of thousands began to pack up and orderly stream out, I realized that even though I had not actually “accomplished” anything, I did have a surprising sense of mental well being.  My stress level was abnormally low.  And in retrospect I recognized that Steve, Dallas, the Cow Boys, and even the professional racers and pit crew, all had one thing in common.  They had all taken a break and taken part in something that filled some unnamed void, whether it registered on the value meter or not.

Not sure if I will make another Sebring, but I made some new friends and gathered some new memories and maybe learned how to slow down a little bit, even if no goals were met.  Maybe between now and next year I can learn to do balloon animals.  That would make Dilly-Dally proud.