The Olympics: Badminton Matters

The other night my husband, daughter, and I stumbled upon an ESPN special about Tanya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, and the attack on Kerrigan before the 1994 (Lillehammer) Olympic Games. My daughter was fascinated--she'd never heard any part of the story before. At one point, a news reporter in a clip from 1994 suggested that, whether guilty or innocent, Harding should bow out of the Games out of a sense of justice.

I laughed pretty hard at that. Not because I doubt Harding has a sense of justice (though I do), but because it was clear to me that the news reporter had no idea what the Olympics mean to those who compete in them. Almost no one who'd made a team would step down. They worked so long to get there. They rose so far. They weren't going to stop on their own.

[Actually, in yesterday's Sports Illustrated, I did read about one athlete who stepped down this week--but it was to give her slot to her twin sister, who'd had an uncharacteristic mistake in the trials.]

It is so hard to make the Olympic Games. It is, for us mortals, nearly unfathomably hard. My little sport, eventing, is one of the 3 Olympic equestrian sports. For eventers, and for everyone who competes in a small sport, which is all of the winter games and most of the summer ones, the Olympics are a very big deal. They drive a lot of the excellence--where would badminton be, for example, without a gold medal to strive for?

I hear you. You're saying, who cares? You're thinking that a world where badminton was only a way to pass a few hours at a summer barbeque--beer in one hand, racket in the other--is pretty much the same world you live in right now. International badminton isn't exactly on your radar.

I went to badminton at the London Olympics. I picked badminton in the ticket lottery because I figured I had a decent shot of getting a ticket to it, and also because I find badminton more comprehensible than, say, Greco-Roman wrestling. I joined a big crowd at Wembley Arena, which is a small indoor venue next to Britain's historic Wembley Stadium, and I watched people play a game that was as far from backyard badminton as I am from the surface of the moon. I barely had the eye coordination to watch Olympic badminton. The players hit 30 or 40 volleys per point, in less than a minute each. Whapwhapwhapwhapwhapwhapwhap. It was impossible. It was amazing.

Somewhere in the world are people born with this kind of skill, who are willing to hone it by relentless work. I was mesmerized watching them-not just badminton, but archery, diving, fencing, and, of course, my beloved eventing--going to watch the Olympics, in person, I realized just how much some humans can achieve. It was wonderful, in all ways.

My husband's favorite movie, Chariots Of Fire, tells the story of a few of Britain's runners going to the 1924 games. One of them, Eric Lidell, planned to become a missionary in China, and his sister was dismayed that he was delaying that for the Olympics, which she saw as silly. He explains to her, "God also made me fast. And when I run, I feel his glory."

Sometimes we need to see where the limits aren't. That's all.

More Blatherings about the Poor

I'll get off this anti-poverty kick in a few days, I'm sure. For one thing, I'm about to spend a couple of weeks in Ocala with my horse, which is pretty damn far away from helping the poor. Also, the Olympics are coming, and I'm planning a whole week of posts ramping up to the Olympics. I LOVE the Olympics. Warning: you'll find out why.

But. Yesterday I did haul my whining self to FIA. Good thing, too, because on a normal day we're staffed by the executive director, the program director, and 6 volunteers. Yesterday 2 of the volunteers didn't make it in, and another, who was just out of the hospital and should have known better than to even try to come in, bless her, had to go home partway through. All the clients with appointments showed up, and also quite a few more, and the phones never. stopped. ringing. We were flying.

About halfway through the day I paused long enough to post on Facebook, "Attention Bristolians: Bristol Faith in Action needs your cold hard cash." I'm always an advocate for BFIA, but I rarely solicit directly like that. Only, yesterday has become typical for us, in terms of need. At the start of 2014 we upped the number of interviews we do (for financial assistance, as opposed to commodities like diapers) from 10-12 per day to 12-15. We're still booked solid until next Friday. Not tomorrow--the week after that. And since people typically call us within a few days of being in real trouble (such as having their lights cut off) this sort of lead time means that some people won't even bother to make appointments. We're bracing ourselves for next month, when the electricity bills associated with this round of cold weather come in.

[As an aside, down here in the South we mostly heat with heat pumps. They're quite efficient as air conditioners, and pretty good heaters until it gets below 20 degrees, when they really can't keep up. So even people with very energy-efficient homes are going to get some staggering bills next month.]

So. I threw out the bat-signal, and people responded. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I was. The only time I started to cry yesterday was not in front of a client, or when telling our director about a client. It was when my phone beeped and a long-time friend who lives a long way from Bristol emailed to tell me she'd decided to make regular monthly donations to FIA. It was so unexpected, and so loving--though I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, as I've seen evidence of her heart before. Her initials are the same as mine, and we've always called each other by them. So thanks, KBB. You know who you are.

Here's the only client story from yesterday that I'll share. I call a man (substantially younger than me) in from the waiting room, and notice he limps. "Oh no," I say, "did you sprain your ankle?"

"No, ma'am," he says politely. "It's from a few years back. Combat injury."


P.S. Just before I left the house yesterday morning, my sleepy tousled daughter came down the stairs reading my blog post on her phone. "Oh, Mama," she said, "we'll have tea and cookies and watch Downton when you get home." And we did.

I Want Another Snow Day

So here's my Christian activist self, checking the local website to be *sure* our Executive Director didn't close Bristol Faith in Action. Because if it's open, I have to go, and what I'd really rather do is have a repeat of yesterday.

Yesterday it snowed. The first few hours it snowed tiny little ice pellets, and when I nearly wiped out walking across the bottom of the driveway while taking out the dogs, I decided not to risk going out. Our driveway, for what it's worth, is not like most driveways. It's about a quarter mile long, and runs downhill from the house with a long swooping curve. The steepest part is also the curviest part, which may be a design flaw; I'm not the only driver who has come perilously close to taking out a section of our pasture fence when my wheels slid through the turn. So. Yesterday I rescheduled two appointments and stayed home with my daughter. It snowed the entire day. In the morning I wrote and she slept in. In the afternoon we enjoyed tea and cookies and Downton Abbey, while I also worked my way through my mending and darning pile.

It was just about as enjoyable as a day could be.

Now I've got the same daughter with a second snow day. The sun's shining, my husband made tracks up and down the driveway, and I'm pretty sure I can get down it fine. I work at Faith in Action on Wednesdays. I've written about that enough that you know I really love being there. Also, I'm out of mending. But what I really want to do today is make some more cookies and another pot of tea, and enjoy one more snow day with my exquisite nearly-grown-up child.

Googling How to Help the Poor

Let us begin today’s blog entry with prayer:

Dear Jesus,

If it must continue to snow, thank you for inspiring Bristol Tennessee city schools to cancel classes on this, my daughter’s first day with a driver’s license. While I did not wish to take away her glory by driving her myself, neither did I want to pull her out of a ditch. I truly appreciate your divine benevolence and care. Although, honestly, a little spell of decent weather wouldn’t hurt us either.

Amen.

OK. Now down to today’s topic: how do you help the poor? I don’t mean in personally, how do YOU help the poor—although wait, maybe I do. Anybody with good strategies, stuff that works, stuff that helps—I want to know about it. Because I just Googled “how to help the poor,” and I got a lot of really useless information:

            --prayer.  This was way up the list on a lot of posts. I’m not suggesting it doesn’t help, but “prayer without works is dead,” and if we all sit on our hands we won’t do much practical good. I’m all for practical, baby.

            --advocacy. Write your legislatures. Well, okay, maybe. I see two problems with this: one, our politics have become so hopelessly entrenched in stupidity that I think it’s going to take some cataclysmic event for the government to ever become useful again, and two, nobody seems to know which government programs actually work. For example. they've pretty much proven that Head Start is useless, but we keep on pouring money into it, because it sounds like such a good idea.

( I have strong opinions on two government-based issues:

1. I am against cutting food stamps. Despite the fact that some people will find a way to abuse anything, SNAP and WIC are two of the most non-abused government programs. They give poor people food. That’s about it. We can argue all we want about root causes of poverty, but I don’t think any of us feel that children who are hungry and malnourished are as likely to grow up as well as those who are not.

 2. I support a higher minimum wage. I know this will have some repercussive effects, but I think many of them will be good ones. I see so many people at Faith in Action working 25 hours a week at $7.25 an hour because that’s all the job they can get. I don’t care who you are, you’re not going to thrive on $725/month. Raise the minimum wage to $11, and that same worker gets $1100—which is still very hard, but starts to become possible, especially if there are 2 wage-earners in the household.  

 If people start to earn enough for themselves, they won’t need food stamps. Right now we’re subsidizing our very low minimum wage with other forms of government assistance.)

 OK, back to my first list, “how to help the poor.” Still with me? Here's the least-useful suggestion I found: 

            --as a money-saving tip, "buy your jewelry at discount stores.” I kid you not. Everybody write it down.

            The Gates Foundation, by the way, has a ton of really excellent information about their efforts to fight global poverty.  Their annual newsletter shows how much we’ve gained on a global scale in recent years, and it bears reading if you haven’t seen it. But in our own country it’s a bit harder.

            I’m thinking about all this because the Executive Committee of Bristol Faith in Action was supposed to have met this morning, until the President couldn’t get down her icy driveway. We’re working on hiring a part-time social worker to help transition some of our clients to self-sufficiency. I really want to know how to do that. When I think about the people I was so concerned for last week—the disabled elderly person can’t ever work, but could possibly move into subsidized housing. The couple who are dying could really use a social worker to walk them through their issues. The two women from the abused shelter, who will share an apartment—I’d love to get to know them better, find out how to help them become permanently safe and well.

            I know very well that we can’t help everyone. I see the mentally ill, the addicts, the ones that are just plain mean. But yesterday I read a really moving article on the difference between Pope Francis and Phil Robertson. I’m not going to try to summarize it; you can look it up if you’re curious. Basically, do we see people first, or do we see what we perceive as their faults? Do we love them? Do we try to form relationships with them?

             I’m convinced we can, I’m just trying to figure out how.  Help me, if you can.

An Epoch Moment

The other day I was telling someone with a baby that they should enjoy every minute, because the time would fly by, and the person of course gave me that look exhausted moms everywhere have, the one that says, "I couldn't even get last night to fly by, let alone the next eighteen years." And then my husband told me later that he didn't agree with me, that he thought time passed at a normal speed, we just had a lot more of it in our rear-view mirrors now that we were 46.

Sorry. They're both wrong. Time is flying, baby. Somebody just lately gave that sucker wings.

Today my daughter gets her driver's license.

Do you understand what this means?

Sure, for her it means she's hit a certain level of age, skill (I hope), and maturity. It means she will wear her seatbelt, turn off her phone, never ever ever drive impaired, and with luck not even listen to the radio. She will follow the good example set by her big brother (except that one time--well, never mind) and be a safe, courteous, above all safe, driver.

She will be on her own.

That's part of what it means, but not the whole thing. There's also this: she will be on her own WITHOUT ME.

Since my son was an infant, I've had to drive my children places. To preschool, to the library, to playdates. Eventually to t-ball practice, and soccer, and music lessons. To riding lessons and basketball and tennis and Winterguard and some of this was all on the same day. My husband and I have shared the driving-to-school gig (I do days when he leaves early for surgery, he does days when he doesn't) but pickup has been almost exclusively mine. Last year, when my son had his license and still lived at home, he occasionally took my daughter to her after-school things, but mostly I still did it, because he so often had activities of his own.

Two weeks ago, on a Thursday, I went out in the early afternoon to body-clip my mare. This takes several hours. At 2:15 I left off, went to the high school, and picked up my daughter. Returned and recommenced clipping. Left off to take my daughter to tennis. Returned and recommenced clipping. Finished just in time to go pick my daughter up and take her to guard practice. Came home, showered--and still had to go pick her back up.

This is what this Thursday will look like, should I decide to body-clip another horse: I went out to the barn and body-clipped a horse. Then I walked back inside and showered.

Whoa, baby. This is going to be epic. This is going to be the biggest thing since the halcyon day when I donated our last half-pack of diapers to the food bank.

I'm not sure I'm ready at all.

P.S. In another sign that the earth rotates ever faster, a small boy who told me earnestly back when he was a first-grader that his newborn sister was, "Off the ventilator, Mrs. Bradley, but they're still keeping her in the NICU," which he pronounced "Nick-you," told me at church yesterday (he towers above me now) that he'd been accepted into the Air Force Academy. Way to go! I think that will bring the number of Tennessee High grads currently enrolled in our service academies to five.

Sarah and Angelica Are Friends

Last weekend I went to a riding clinic taught by my trainer Angelica. I last worked with her a year ago, in winter, and frankly it was a bit of a mess. Angelica had some stuff going on; it was surprising she was able to teach me at all (and, indeed, I got some hostile, "She's teaching you?" remarks from people who ride much better than me.  But whatev). She was not very happy, which means she was snarkier than usual; when she met my darling mare Sarah for the first time, her first words were, "That thing should be pulling a cart. Why on earth did you buy it?"

Now, I knew going in that Angelica's view of the horse I should buy and my view were somewhat different, but I was the one riding the horse, so I bought what I wanted, which was something I could hunt first flight right off the bat, that wouldn't kill me cross-country or when I screwed up working by myself for months at a time. Angelica most likely feels I could have bought all that in something weighing less than 1200 pounds that wouldn't make the ground tremble when it galloped on its forehand, but whatev. I wasn't bothered. "Her name's Sarah," I said.

Angelica frowned and said, "There are too many horses named Sarah."

"Here's another," I said.

I might have felt indignant over Angelica's dismissiveness except 1) she had some stuff going on; and 2) Sarah acted like a complete ignorant unbroken fool every time she got within 600 feet of Angelica.  She was awful. For two straight weeks. I'd be working at the neighboring farm with my other trainer, Betty, and Sarah would be all lovely and soft and would be trying really hard, and I'd feel terrifically proud of her, and then we'd ride over to Angelica's and Sarah would go stark raving mad. We spent one lesson galloping in circles with Sarah's nose in the air while she screamed the most annoying horse whinny in the world. For forty-five minutes straight.

So they didn't part friends, Angelica and my sweet mare.

This last weekend, at the start of my group's session, I told Angelica that some of our progress had stalled, because Sarah's full-on enthusiasm in the hunt field wasn't translating well back in the confines of the ring. Angelica pointed out, to the large crowd of auditors (she's good enough that people pay to watch her teach--seriously), how Sarah's back hip conformation makes it markedly harder for her to canter with collection than the horse who was standing beside her (and markedly easier for her to gallop like a fool). She said, "Kim'll make this into a good horse, but it's going to take work. She bought a horse that you could tell was going to struggle with collection."

I said, "I bought a made field hunter."
Angelica said, "That couldn't canter," and we nodded with perfect amity, because this was the non-snarky truth.

When we did canter Angelica said I'd brought her a long way, and I could see how far I had yet to come. It's hard to explain for nonhorsey folks, but by the end of the lesson I knew where I had to go, and how to get there, and why, I just couldn't do it yet. That's an awful lot to get out of a single lesson, so I was pretty thrilled. It's one of the reasons I love Angelica.

The next day was supposed to have been cross-country jumping, but, due to the wretched weather and footing, we stayed indoors. Some of the riders were unhappy; I was jubilant. Sarah and I had a chance to put things together. And we did. At one point Sarah hesitated at the start of a jumping exercise. I got out my whip and whaled her, feeling virtuous: Angelica hollered, "Put that stick away! She's not stopping, she's thinking!" And then we did it again, and it was lovely; later, lovelier still. We finished, the four of us in my group, with a twisty difficult course of a dozen jumps; Sarah couldn't make all the turns at the canter, but I was not to punish her if she took them at the trot. And the last time through, myself the last rider, we went around the final hairpin turn, and held the canter, and cantered the jump, and halted square on the other side.  "Good job, Beautiful," Angelica said, to the horse, not me, while rubbing Sarah's forehead, and Sarah dropped her head and sighed.
 

Further Thoughts on the Book of Job

Yesterday I put up a post about it being a hard day at Faith in Action. It was. Some days are harder than others. I got a lot of comments (most on Facebook), which I really appreciate, but it's difficult for me to accept the ones that say, "You are so fantastic to be helping people!"

I am not fantastic. I know I'm not, and that's part of the reason I work at FIA, part of the reason I need to be in that ministry. It's not self-abdignation; it's reality. I live a life of ridiculous privilege, and yes, I work hard, and so does my husband, and we made a lot of good choices, but, on the other hand, we were born into situations that enabled us to reap the rewards of hard work and good choices. I will tell you now that if I'd been born in the slums of Bangladesh, I would not be typing these words on my laptop.

Sure, you say. Third-world poverty. Obviously, being born in America or Bangladesh or Norway or Ghana is just chance, what one writer calls, "the birth lottery." But, if you're born in America, you've got the same chance as anyone else, right? Isn't this the land of opportunity?

It sounds great, because then we can all take credit for our comfortable middle-class lives. I did work hard; I got good grades. I graduated from high school and got married before I became pregnant, which are two of the big things you can do to avoid poverty. And, as I've alluded to on these pages before, my childhood wasn't all a bed of roses. I had stuff to overcome. But I never in my life went hungry to bed. I never worried about becoming homeless. (There are 300 homeless schoolchildren on the Bristol, VA, side alone.) I was never forced to chose between moving out on my own at age 16 or letting my mother's current hook-up attack me (I read yesterday that children living with a mother and an unrelated man are 90 times more likely to be abused than children living with both parents.) Nobody did drugs in my house. Nobody sold drugs, or passed out on the couch, or ignored whether or not I attended school. My parents were (and are) of above-average intelligence and curiosity, in good health, and not crazy. None of these things are my doing.

Every week, I meet people who have triumphed by completing their GED, or getting a job at McDonald's, or by being able to feed their child and sent it clean and dressed to school. Every week I meet people battling far greater odds than I will likely ever face. I am humbled by their courage.

Every week I meet some batshit crazy mean liars, too. I mean, I want to keep it real. But you'd be surprised, most of you, reading this from your comfortable home, how many people really don't get much of a chance, not even here in America. How few choices some people have.

I'm not doing anything profound. I'm listening. I'm trying. But I fall very short, and I'm not saying this to get anyone to disagree with me. I read a book recently about the genetic origins of human morality. It pointed out that most of us would ruin a pair of expensive leather shoes to wade into a pond and save a child from death by drowning, and yet most of us would not forgo buying those shoes in order to donate the money to save a child from starving. And yet, from a philosophical point of view, the two situations--no shoes, a child saved from death--are equalt.

I have so many pairs of shoes.

I wanted to comment on my friend Mark's comments to yesterday's post. It's always great to think out of the box and I always would love to hear suggestions from anyone. As far as installing solar panels to help with the elderly person's electricity--since they live in an apartment, I don't think it would be possible. For the dying couple, we are trying to make sure that custody for the children is arranged, and we want to start a relationship with whoever will have custody, so that we can keep an eye on the kids (FIA is soon to be hiring a social worker so that we can develop more relational care for some of our clients.) In the meantime, we hired a client who wants more housecleaning work to go clean the house of the dying couple, because the woman is so ashamed of not being able to keep it nice. That's not the sort of thing we usually do, but it felt right to us.

Some clients really do only need a check--if we can pay the light bill the month they have to buy new brakes for their car, that's great. But some need more, and some we might be able to help become self-sufficient. Some, we might be able to give hope. That, believe me, would be worth the shoes.