Need a Great Last-Minute Holiday Gift Delivered in East Lansing?

If you’re needing a gift delivered in the East Lansing area before Christmas, and you want to “spend locally” to support a local business, we have good news for you!

Donate $50 to our special “Keep ELi Running in 2021” campaign today and, no later than Christmas Eve (Thursday), ELi team members will deliver – to any East Lansing-area address – an autographed copy of Peter Sagal’s memoir The Incomplete Book of Running!

We are also happy to mail a copy to anywhere you indicate in the United States! We will enclose a card saying who has sent it if it is a gift.

This paperback book makes a great gift for anyone who cares about news! Hey, it features NPR’s Peter Sagal, host of Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, and it benefits local news production at East Lansing Info! Of your $50 donation, $35 counts as a tax-deductible contribution to ELi.

It’s also a great gift for runners and wannabe exercisers facing pandemic stress!

Sagal writes in this book about becoming a runner later in life and the ways in which running helped him get through a high-stress divorce. He also writes about the experience of being just about a hundred yards from one of the bombs set off by terrorists at the Boston Marathon in April 2013, as he was guiding a blind runner.

Yet, even though it is rife with such serious subjects, Sagal’s legendary humor comes through. I literally laughed out loud reading his recollections of breaking through an icy stream by accident on one particular run. A little too familiar to this fellow Midwesterner.

As someone who also took up running later in life in response to stress, I found that so much of this book resonated with me. There have been so many moments when I’ve been trying to understand how I might report something for East Lansing in a way that might make things clearer, better, more rational – and in those moments, I’ve often stopped to go for a run along the River Trail or the Northern Tier Trail. There’s something paradoxical about how the beauty of our quiet Michigan woods and fields reminds me of the meaning of community.

Sagal writes, “To talk about running is to talk about change and the promise of change,” a line that made me think not only of my own runs, but about the decision of now-Mayor Pro Tem Jessy Gregg to shift, in 2019, from being an ELi reporter to a candidate for Council. The people I’ve reported on literally running here or running for local office – what moves them is that hope for change.

Want a copy of this book delivered to your East Lansing-area door or the door of someone you love in the East Lansing area? Just click here and donate $50 for each book you would like delivered. If you are asking us to deliver to more than one address, please use a different form for each delivery address.

Any questions? Let me know! Thank you (and thanks to Peter!) for helping us reach towards our 2021 Sustainability Campaign goal of $200,000!