PJ...I like that

Parker Jean

We were walking along the river on one of those perfect fall evenings. Cool air coming off the water. The light starting to flatten out and turn everything softer. Trees doing that thing they do in October when everything turns gold and rust, and you remember why you live somewhere like this.

Parker bent down and picked up a sweet-gum ball from the edge of the path and held it by the stem. Turned it slowly in the light. Not absentmindedly. Not the way kids sometimes pick things up just to have something in their hands. She studied it. She looked at it the way somebody looks at something they assume is worth noticing. I recognized the moment immediately. Not because of the sweet-gum ball. Because of her.

That’s Parker.

She notices things. Not in a dramatic way and not in a look-what-I-found kind of way. She just pays attention in a way that feels increasingly rare. She’ll stop for something most people step over without ever realizing it was there. A strange shadow across the floor. Light through a window at the right time of day. A sentence in a book that says exactly what it meant to say. She doesn’t seem especially interested in rushing past things, and because of that, she sees more.

She has tried many things throughout her young childhood, and was good at all of them. She started playing the cello because her brother, Trey, played cello, but eventually she realized she didn’t actually love it. Same with piano and dance.

I’ve always admired that about her.

When the kids joined the track team, I honestly didn’t know what to expect. Track wasn’t my thing growing up. I was a baseball, tennis, basketball kid. Running always felt more like something you did between the things I actually wanted to do.

Earlier in the year, Trey joined cross-country and really found something there. He loved seeing himself improve. He loved the challenge of it. So when his coach suggested track, it felt like the next right thing. Parker's joining was the surprise. She’s never really shown much interest in running, but if I’m being fair, I should know better by now than to be surprised by Parker. She has a way of quietly becoming interested in things you never saw coming.

This was Trey's last year at Anthony, and he was determined to squeeze every bit out of it. He kept encouraging Parker to try things. To sign up. To jump in. There’s something about siblings that’s hard to explain if you haven’t watched them up close. They know exactly how to push each other’s buttons and support each other at the same time.

Track practice was hard. Every practice. New workouts. Sprints. Long runs. Arkansas heat and humidity doing their thing, and Parker cried after more practices than I expected. More than once, I was ready to tell her she didn’t have to do this, but she never wanted to quit. She just wanted to keep going.

It finally clicked for me that she wasn’t measuring herself against the other runners. She wasn’t worried about who finished first. She was competing against herself. Could she finish? Could she do something today that she couldn’t do last week? Could she stay with something even when it was uncomfortable?
And every race she finished answered those questions. Smiling all the way around the track.

Those track meets ended up changing how I think about running sports. I thought it was going to be about times and places. Instead, I watched kids learn resilience. I watched them push themselves physically, but also mentally and emotionally. I watched teammates cheering for runners who weren’t even in their heat or on their team. I watched kids celebrate personal records with the same excitement as first place. It felt like a team sport in a way I’ve never really experienced before, and that’s when I realized Parker already understood something I was still learning.

Sometimes winning is just seeing something through.

She doesn’t stay in things out of obligation or because she’s good at it. She gives them a real chance. She shows up fully. And if something doesn’t connect with her in a way she recognizes, she moves on without making a big announcement about it. No drama. No identity crisis. Just honesty.

That feels harder than we make it sound.

She sings beautifully and can play the drums. Music is woven into our family in all the ways you’d expect, but she’s never seemed especially interested in standing in front of it. She’s done school plays and musicals, and what always stands out isn’t volume or trying to steal attention. She disappears into the character. The same way she disappears into books. The same way she disappeared into that sweet-gum ball. You watch and realize she isn’t performing for anyone. She’s inside the thing.

I think back to Trey at her age. With him, it felt like there was a stretch of middle school where things slowly started clicking into place. Seventh grade, especially. Then eighth grade came around, and suddenly you could see all this quiet confidence that had been building for years.

Parker is still in the middle of that becoming. She has years of middle school ahead of her, and I find myself genuinely excited to watch what those years will reveal. Not because I’m waiting for her to find her thing. I’m not. I think she already knows something that takes a lot of us much longer to learn. You don’t always find what matters by moving faster. Sometimes you find it because you stopped and paid attention to what others tend to overlook. Because you picked something up. Because you turned it slowly in the light long enough to see what was actually there.

When the thing that’s hers finally shows itself, she'll stop, pick it up, and turn it slowly in the light, and she'll already know exactly what to do with it.