Another Conversation with my Nephew

When my nephew Huey (no, that is not his real name.  Of course.) was 2 1/2, he worked himself into a bit of a state about his upcoming trip to my farm.  Huey lives 10 hours away and couldn't remember Aunt Kim's farm, but he knew that there would be ponies there.  Ponies made Huey nervous.  They were the only animals at his zoo that weren't safely behind bars, and once, when he ventured close to one, it made a very loud noise.  So several times before his visit, Huey got on the phone with me to say, "Aunt Kim--no ponies in the house."  I assured him repeatedly, no ponies in the house.  Finally I went a little farther.  "Huey," I said, "The ponies will stay at the barn.  You do not have to go to the barn.  You do not have to ride the ponies, and you do not have to touch the ponies.  But you might like to feed them a carrot."

For some reason this turned the tide.  "Oh," he said, "OHOHOHOHOH--I will FEED the ponies!"

And he did.  At arms' length, with his eyes half-closed, brandishing the carrot like a sword.  But then he noticed something odd.  Hot Wheels was my son's pony.  Gully was my pony.  Mickey was my daughter's pony.  And Shakespeare?  Shakespeare was not my husband's pony.  ("Is Uncle Bart going to get a pony?"  "Probably not.")  Shakespeare was my daughter's OTHER pony.

Now that, to Huey, was just crazy, particularly after my daughter admitted that she didn't ride Shakespeare any more, because she was too big.  Clearly Shakespeare needed to belong to Huey.  So, from that day, he did.  There was nothing more adorable in the world than my tiny red-headed nephew blithely informing his friends, "I have a pony named Shakespeare.  He lives in Bristoltennessee."

Huey, now 3 1/2 takes the responsibilities of pony ownership seriously.  When he visits, he brushes Shakespeare.  He rides him.  Once, when he was angry with his parents, he told them he was going to come live in my barn, with his pony.  I told him in that case, he would be responsible for cleaning Shakespeare's stall.  Huey replied, "Oh--I'll wear gloves."

Yesterday Huey had a cold, so stayed at my mom's house instead of going to preschool.  When I called my mom with the excellent news that we were not going to have to put Shakespeare down that day, Huey overheard enough of the conversation that he started asking questions.  So my Mom put us all on speakerphone.

"What's wrong with Shakespeare?" 
"He had a rotten tooth.  It was making him sick."
"Why did he have a rotten tooth?"
"I don't know.  He just did."
"How did you fix it?"
"We pulled it out."
"You pulled it out?"
"The vet pulled it out.  A vet is a doctor and dentist for animals."
"Where did he pull it?"
"At his office."
Will the tooth grow back?  What made it rotten?  Why won't it grow back?  Does he need that tooth?  Can I still ride him?  Does he feel better?  How did you get to the office?  Why did you use the horse trailer?  Did Shakespeare mind the horse trailer?  What if it was raining?  Can you use the horse trailer in the rain?

"Huey," I said, "You have used up all your questions for today.  You can't ask any more questions until tomorrow."

Slight pause.  Then, "Okay.  Bye, Aunt Kim.  I love you."
"Bye, Huey.  I love you, too."

Shakespeare Lives

Awhile back I noticed that my sweet picture book The Perfect Pony had received a one-star review from a very disgruntled Amazon customer.  The reviewer found the book disgusting since its plot involved "buying a very expensive animal" for a small girl.  It made me laugh, for a couple of reasons, the primary one being that the pony the story is based on, my daughter's beloved Shakespeare, didn't cost us a dime.

When we moved to our farm my daughter was four, and by no conceivable definition of the word could she have been said to "need" a pony.  We already had a pony, my son's, a sweetheart named Hot Wheels, and my daughter was allowed to ride him.  Also, she was four.  But my daughter persisted, telling the workmen who were building the stable to hang the bucket hooks in the first stall low, "because my pony is small."  She talked relentlessly about, and to, her pony, who may have been imaginary but seemed very real to her.  "Hurry, pony," she said.

Then one day our farrier, Tom, came out to shoe my horse.  "You want a pony?" he asked.

I sighed.  "If it's small, elderly, broke to death, kid-friendly, and free."

Tom grinned.  "Yep," he said.

Shakespeare had been a high-dollar A-circuit show pony until a severe bout of laminitis very nearly ended his life.  Tom's radical care saved him but could only partially reduce the damage to the pony's feet:  he would never be sound enough for the show circuit again.  But he was perfectly sound enough to cart around a four-year-old child.  His owners didn't have their own land and were paying expensive board for a pony they could no longer use--besides his injuries, he was now too small for their growing child--and so Tom brokered a deal.  We got Shakespeare, free, on the condition that we care for him for the rest of his life.

He adored my daughter.  She adored him.  When she grew too big for him he became the turnout partner for my friend's gangly thoroughbred.  My nephews brush him; he gives them pony rides.

Shakespeare is thirty now.  On Saturday his face started to swell, and by nighttime, when I returned from an out-of-town meeting, he looked awful, one side of his face lopsided and his eyelids swelling shut.  I called my vet, Dr. E., who came out, lanced a horrible abscess on the pony's head, and looked grave, with discussions of sinus tumors and other possible problems, most of which meant saying good-bye.  On Sunday the pony looked better, but I did not feel hopeful, and my daughter, coming home from a friend's house, wept.  But this morning at the vet's, Dr. E extracted a rotten molar, and a great river of pus came with it, and I think, I hope, we may have Shakespeare with us a little longer still.

Am I A "Jesus Feminist"?

Sarah Bessey's new book, Jesus Feminist, came out this week to some pretty heady acclaim--good reviews from her friends in the blog community, as you'd expect, but also good critical reviews from Booklist and Publisher's Weekly (Kirkus hasn't reviewed it.).

I haven't read Jesus Feminist, but I've read a lot about it, and it got me thinking--am I a 'Jesus Feminist'?

Can I be?  I'm Catholic.  I love being Catholic, I don't want to be anything else.  But 'Catholic feminist' sounds like an oxymoron.  I'm also a graduate of a fantastic women's liberal arts college, so I know full well that I'm not nearly as much a feminist as those who prefer the spelling 'womyn' (doesn't contain "men").  Can you be against abortion and still a feminist?

Now there are plenty of people who view the Catholic Church as intensely patriarchal, and, in many respects, they're right.  The rules are all made by men who don't want to share their power.  They like having power.  I bet some priests might disagree with me--but I've never met a priest, even those I've been close to, who didn't insist on being called Father Joe, Father Fred, Father whatever, even in close conversation on my living room couch, while at the same time, from the first instance of knowing me, calling me from the start of our aquaintence only by my first name.  No Mrs. Bradley until I suggest otherwise.  Not even the perfectly polite Southern honorific Miss Kim.  It's a subtle thing, but it's a power thing, and it does get under my skin.

(Pope Francis seems to be shedding the trappings of papal power as fast as he can:  no red shoes, no living in the luxurious papal apartments, washing the feet of non-Christian women.  It'll be interesting to see where he goes.)

But--and this is a big but, at least for me--the center of the Catholic liturgy is the Eucharist, not the priest.  The Eucharist, holy and all-encompassing, male and female both.  So while I did feel slighted in the sixth grade, when my church wouldn't let me be an altar server (most churches now open this to girls), I don't feel slighted that I'm not a priest.

On the other hand, I don't understand why Catholics limit priesthood to men.  I've never heard a single argument that made sense to me.  One of my best friends on earth is a cloistered Episcopalian nun who is also an ordained Episcopalian priest.  I've worshiped in the pew beside Sarah countless times, but I also participated in her ordination.  I've received Eucharist she consecrated, and knelt to receive her blessing, and neither the Eucharist nor the blessing felt less valid for passing through the hands of a human who had ovaries instead of testicles.

Once, when I was at Smith, someone asked me how I could support the idea of an all-women's college but not an all-men's college.  I replied, "In the same way I can support an all-black college, but not an all-white one."  Even if your true position is in the center--equality--you might have to shift to the side of oppression just to create enough momentum to swing the scales.

I guess that does make me a Jesus Feminist after all.

This is part of the Jesus Feminist synchroblog.  Read more contributions here.

In Which I Learn To Fly

I have such a story to tell you.

It's about horses, except it isn't really.  It's about learning, and persistence, and hard work, but it's also about a sort of kick-ass freedom that's hard to describe. 

I competed at a horse trial this weekend.  That's what we call our standard (non-international level) competitions in my little quirky sport, eventing.  On the whole it didn't go well.  Our final placing, the results of three separate phases added together, was awful, and the first two phases were, to put it bluntly, utter crap.  I could tell you a very long story about why, but I'll spare you.  Just trust me.  They were a "learning experience," which is code for, "Yikes, I'll have to figure out how to fix that."

But I once heard eventing described as "the only sport in which you can finish 35th and be unable to sleep that night for sheer transcendent joy," and that was how I felt after our third phase, cross country. 

Cross country means galloping a couple of miles, through open fields, jumping things that are big, wide, and don't fall down.  You go across ditches, up and down banks, and through water.  You're supposed to do it at a particular optimum speed, which varies by level:  the bigger the fences, the faster you go.  At the lower levels, however you can get penalized for going too fast as well as too slow, on the grounds that you're supposed to develop control first, then speed.

Historically, I've never had a problem with control.  My beloved Gully was all about control; any time he wasn't sure about a situation, he slowed down.  At our very first event we trotted most of cross country.  We had time faults up the wazoo.  We continued to struggle with time as we moved up the levels, and, despite all I could do to get him fit and try to move him forward, we never did make the time at the third level, which was the highest we ever accomplished. 

"Kim," my trainer Angelica once said, shaking her head, "Go faster."

It just never was that easy.  I know now that it took more than an average amount of effort to steer Gully around a cross country course.  He leaned into my hands; he wanted to go slowly.  I had to hold and kick and work--but he was my only point of reference, the only horse I'd ever evented, so I took him to be normal.   He also had metabolic issues--real, not man-made--and he was astonishingly hard to get or keep fit.  (On the plus side, he tried his heart out for me, jumped whatever I put in front of him, loved me and his job, and kept me from hurting myself when I did some very stupid things.)

So now I've got Sarah.  She's a big mare, with a broad butt and heavy bone courtesy of her draft-horse daddy, and the stamina and desire to run of her thoroughbred mama.  She's naturally balanced, carries herself well, and is a whole heckuva lot easier to ride cross country than Gully.  Sarah's young yet, and for this year--our first real year of competition--I decided to not wear a watch cross country, but to just let her go and work on our pace together.

There are all sorts of things to think about cross country.  When a horse gallops, it carries its weight on its forehand, its front two legs.  To jump, it needs its weight on its back legs--otherwise it can't get a good trajectory and risks hitting the fence.  If a horse hits a cross country fence, it risks flipping over it--which is, needless to say, very bad.  So as a rider you've got to monitor and change the horse's balance; how much you have to do that depends on the terrain and the type of fence you're approaching; how quickly you can do it affects your overall speed.

When I rode Sarah at the same venue two months ago, our course was set at 350 meters per minute.  Sarah got a little tired on the hills, and we made the time, but not by much.  Over the last 2 months I'd worked on her fitness quite a bit, but I couldn't really tell if I was making much of a difference.

Sunday's course was set at 400 meters per minute.  The optimum time was five minutes exactly--the course was two kilometers long.  We set out from the starting box, and from the first strides it was fabulous.  My best cross country round.  Ever.  Sarah was forward and eager, but came back into balance easily; she listened, she steered.  She was beautifully fit--at the top of the big hill I put my hands down to let her coast and catch her breath, and she accelerated.  It was so much fun.  Honestly, the sort of round to keep me up at night, smiling at the ceiling.

Then I looked the results up on my phone.  I couldn't believe it.  Time faults.  My old bugaboo.  That beautiful round, all the learning and work that went into it, and I had time faults.  "I really thought we were fast enough," I moaned to my daughter.  "I really thought we were going to make time." 

I sloped off to the scoreboard to see my actual time.  Ran my finger down the row of numbers, stopped, stared.

4:24.

I had gotten penalties for going too fast.

Oh, it was six kinds of awesome.  Too fast!  My lovely wonderful beautiful round!  Too fast.  I laughed, I danced, I skipped around the horse park until my daughter made me stop.  I texted Angelica.

She texted back, immediately.  You go, girl!  I am SOOOOO proud of you!

Ridiculous the sort of things that can bring you joy.

 

When Bad Things Happen to People Who Really Deserve It

So of course we're still reeling from the deaths of these high school students.  How could we not be?  And they seemed to be such good kids.

A friend of mine consoled me with a text:  Bad things really do happen to good people.  And I thought, well, yes.  We'd all like it to be different, because then we could stick ourselves and our loved ones firmly on the side of the Good People, and nothing bad would ever happen to us.  If bad things only happened to bad people, that would be awesome.

Except, the more I think on it, the less qualified I feel to decide who is or isn't a bad person.  Have you ever heard of a "bad" six-year-old?  An undisciplined one, sure.  A pain in the neck.  But bad?

A college friend of mine is principal at an elementary school on a Native American Reservation out west.  Poverty and despair are her students' close companions.  Yesterday she had to work with the local sheriff to find somewhere safe for one of her six-year-olds to go--the child's father was long gone, and mom was out getting roaring drunk instead of picking her child up from school. 

What sort of damage is being done to this child?  What will be the result?  In ten years, will people say, "that's a bad kid," instead of "that's a kid who's been through hell?"

Earlier this week I tried to console my daughter with a quote from Winston Churchill:  "when you're going through hell, keep going."  She said, without irony, "Yeah, I've pretty much heard the same thing from a country-western song."

Bad things happen to people.  Oh, how it hurts.

Radical Self-Care and Love

One funeral last night.  One funeral tonight.  One funeral (of a church member) that I'm skipping today, because I can't do two in one day.  And my neighbor had to put her old dog to sleep.

Back when I fell to pieces, several years ago, I made a physical list of self-care strategies to use before the medication and therapy kicked in.  It had to be a physical list--I was in a state where I simply couldn't hold anything in my head.  And at the beginning some of these seemed rather silly.  Hold ice cubes?  (I got that one out of a book.  It seemed ridiculous, but it helped.)  Read romance novels?  (It was not the time for serious literature.) One of my best friends sent me regular care packages of excellent chocolate, whack sci-fi novels, and yarn.

Self-care seems about the only way to get through the next few days.  So:
-hot baths
-lavendar oil
-massages
-comfortable clothes
-books you love and almost know by heart
-books that employ only 10% of your brain
-big glasses of water; small glasses of wine
-dogs
-naps
-soup
-herbal neck wraps you can heat in the microwave, that lay heavy on your neck
-heavy blankets
-chocolate
-mild exercise
-handknit socks
-spinning (yarn, not the exercise class)
-weaving (yarn, not the horse vice)
-friends who don't ask questions
-walks outdoors

Take your pick, and live it up.  It's the only choice we have.

What else works for you? 

Shattered

On Friday afternoon, two boys from my daughter's high school were killed in a single-car crash.

It's actually difficult for me not to write more about it, because writing is how I process emotion, but this is not my story.  All I will say is that our hearts are shattered.  Our little community has two funerals in the next two days.  Please pray for us.