The Resolution Run, 2023, a low-key race that used to climb John Street, on the North Side - which led to a lasting tribute to famed children's author Eric Carle. Credit: Courtesy Syracuse Track Club

I admit it. This is a low-key race I love to run that helps a cause close to my heart, so I am hardly unbiased in making this suggestion:

If you’re a runner looking for something symbolically forward-looking… if not mind-clearing… to do on New Year’s morning, why not give the Syracuse Track Club’s Resolution Run a crack?

It begins at 10 a.m. Thursday at the Press Room Pub on Herald Place, in downtown Syracuse. The cost is $25, which includes a buffet. Race coordinator Don Hughes says you can register online or at the run, in a whatever-works-best way to match the whole spirit of the roughly 4.5-mile deal, which has been rolling every New Year’s Day for more than 40 years.

Organizers also offer a chance to make a donation of however much you choose — $5 or $10 or whatever — to “Light a Candle for Literacy,” the afterschool and summer reading program founded by the great Geneva Hayden, which is where I circle in.

Until last year — when the starting point for the run was moved to the Press Room from the Spaghetti Warehouse, near the Inner Harbor — the course for the Resolution Run used to take participants up the daunting red-brick slope of John Street, on the North Side.

The book that led to an against-all-odds reunion: ‘Friends’ by Eric Carle. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current

I was a regular, and it occurred to me each year that the race went past the house at the heart of a wonderful tale about the late Eric Carle, a Syracuse native and one of the great children’s authors and illustrators, ever. About 12 years ago, Carle — then well into his 80s — released a book called “Friends,” which told the tale of a little girl and a little boy who were best friends, then were separated, and then…

Wait a minute! No spoilers!

The thing is, Carle based the book on a real-life photo that showed him as a tiny child with a little girl in a white dress in 1932. It was taken in Syracuse, though Carle didn’t know exactly where, and while he knew the little girl was his first friend, he was unsure even of the address in the image. He wondered if the two of them might somehow meet again, though he knew the odds were slender after all those years.

I was working then as a columnist for Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard, and I decided to take a crack at finding the girl in the white dress. Through a preposterous set of miraculous and this can’t-really-be-happening pinball game connections, it all actually came together: The girl in the white dress turned out to be Flo Trovato, of Syracuse-to-Brooklyn-to-Florida, whose grandparents at the time owned that house on John Street.

Flo was 85, but imagine this: Her family had not only hung onto their own copy of the original photo but had yet another image of the two kids, together on a John Street stoop.

It was mindblower stuff for all of us, and would eventually lead to an emotional moment of reunion.

While Eric died in 2021, I’m still in touch with Flo’s family. Anyway, after running past the house a few years ago in the Resolution Run, I shared the tale with Hughes and other organizers, and they loved it so much they decided to add the chance to donate to “Light a Candle” — the great reading initiative that was created by Mrs. Hayden in her South Side home — as an annual part of the run. As for the cherry on top, city officials put up a sign in front of the John Street house, commemorating the Carle connection.

The run, at least for now, no longer goes past that address — Hughes says I-81 construction complicates that possibility — but organizers hang onto the same great literacy cause as a tribute to Carle, a children’s literature giant who was born in Syracuse.

Beyond that, it’s a fitting gesture in this city, one of the worldwide capitals of the literacy movement.

So maybe I’ll see you there (in a God-knows-I’ll-never-change-way, I’ll be the guy as always running in pajama pants). The run winds out along the Creekwalk, and it has a big clock but no official timer so you can be as serious or not-serious as you want to be, and there is the allure of that post-race buffet for those who want it.

In 2023, Resolution Run participants go past the John Street house that was once the home of children’s author Eric Carle and inspired the book “Friends.” Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current

“It’s about how you start the New Year, a chance to recollect your thoughts and reconnect with your running buddies,” Hughes said — not to mention a chance to consider how regular running so effectively transforms and shortens the fierce Syracuse winter:

As of New Year’s morning, it’s only two months and six days to the symbolic spring gateway of the Shamrock Run on Tipperary Hill — and from there, less than two months to get in 10-mile shape for the legendary Mountain Goat.

With thoughts of a longshot quest for the “girl in the white dress,” Thursday’s a chance to “Light a Candle,” in more ways than one.

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...