Ruby Bridges

Tuesday's whining post came courtesy of some sort of virus, but, as usual, it took me most of the day to realize I was sick. I typically run through a gamut of self-castigation--unproductive, lazy, whingeing, etc.--before I understand that I'm actually not feeling well, not because of any personal failures, but because I am sick.

I spent most all of yesterday on the couch, attempting to sleep despite workman landing jumbo jets in the bedroom above my head. (That's what it sounded like. I've no idea what they were actually doing.) The one time I did drift off, the phone rang: it was a man informing me that, "The government has randomly selected you to win a grant of eight thousand dollars--"

"Oh, bull--" I said, and slammed down the phone.

Today is the 13th anniversary of 9/11. My Super Secret Special Project, now defunct, didn't directly concern terrorism, but it had some indirect links. One thing I'd pointed out to my ex-collaborator is that no high school student in America today can clearly remember the attacks of that day. My daughter, a junior in high school now, was a 3-year-old in preschool--we managed to keep her pretty much oblivious of the whole thing. My son, now a college sophomore, was in first grade--he caught on to a lot of the story, and the fear and tension upset him for awhile, but I don't know now how much he actually remembers from his own experience, and how much he remembers from hearing stories of the day retold. (When I was a little girl, I was astonished to learn that President Kennedy had been shot before I was born. I'd heard so much about that day that it seemed I could remember it.) My point being, to the upcoming generation 9/11/01 is history, not current events.

Yesterday was the 60th birthday of Ruby Bridges, who, on November 14, 1960, entered a formerly all-white public school in New Orleans under the guard of four federal marshals.  When you look at photos of that day you can't believe how small she was, how vulnerable, how beautiful. She's wearing a pretty dress and white ankle socks and little patent-leather shoes. I imagine her Momma carefully dressing her, arranging her hair, thinking that nobody was going to say her little girl was dirty or trashy or unkempt. Ruby's mother accompanied her to school the first few days, but after that Ruby and her marshals went alone. She was the only first-grader at the school--all her white classmates had been withdrawn.

Every day a vicious crowd protested outside the school. They shouted insults. One held up a black doll inside a coffin.

Little Ruby's response was to pray for them. Her mother had told her to remember that if she was worried she could always pray, that God would always hear her, and Ruby also remembered that Jesus had prayed for people who hated him. So she prayed for her protesters.

The following year the school opened without protests to integrated classrooms. Ruby Bridges grew up, married, raised four children, and eventually volunteered in the very school she helped to integrate.

Ruby's story reminds me that, though we still have a long way to go, our society can change for the better. We can live less out of fear and more out of love for each other. If Ruby Bridges could pray for her enemies at the age of six, maybe the rest of us can, too.

One of Those Days

Today my to-do list is kicking my rear.

First of all, my darling 4-year-old nephew Huey is in the hospital with respiratory problems (Huey has asthma like me). Please pray for him, if you do that kind of thing, or send some kind secular thoughts his way.

I'm exhausted, and I'm not sure why. I went to bed late, as I had been getting Facebook message from my sister-in-law about Huey, but I slept okay. But after my daughter left for school all I wanted to do was nap, and I would have except that we're having carpet ripped out and wood floors put down in a few bedrooms upstairs, and that makes more noise than you'd think. If it were a regular sort of noise I could probably sleep through it, but first they pound for awhile, then the generator starts up, then the nail guns, then back to pounding.

I've been waiting a year for these guys to rip out the carpets, so I can hardly shoo them away because I want to sleep. But I'd like to.

Also the phone keeps ringing. My boarder called to tell me that we'd caught another skunk. (For "we" please read "the professional company we hired because while I could probably set a trap for a skunk I'd have no idea what to do if I got one.") I'm not sure how many skunks we've caught so far, but it's not enough, there's still more.

One of the items on my to-do list reads "skunk sh*t." It means "clean up all the skunk excrement in the odd corners of the barn." Of course, this item can't be accomplished until the skunks stop sh*tting.

Then Mack, who mows for me (which means "mows and weedwhacks all 52 acres on a regular basis, except the stand of pines, which he ignores") called to tell me that he's burning the brush pile today. Today. He's been threatening to burn the brush pile since last October. I'll report back on this one. If he actually does it it will be a miracle, since the brush pile, as it turns out, can't be mowed.

I'd like to write (meaning "my novel" not "this unfortunate blog post") but my brain feels like oatmeal. I've tried coffee. It didn't help.

There are 42 items on my to-do list. All of them are medium-term stuff--nothing short term like "dinner tonight," but also nothing long-term like "get the floors redone" or "burn the brush pile." Some of them are problematic. "Ironing" for example. Seems straightforward, but there's a freezer blocking my ironing board. (It's one of those pull-down ones attached to the laundry room wall. I don't have a regular ironing board anymore. I was always catching my fingers in it and my husband deemed it dangerous.) The freezer needs to go into the basement. The guys putting in the new floors have agreed to move it--I've known them forever, they built my house--but first they need to remember to bring a doily.

"Clippers." That means "find someone who can repair the electrical cord on my $300 horse body clippers that my daughter's idiot horse stepped on and severed when I was trying to clip him last year."

"New curtains." "Wash, iron (oh, no!) and hang the curtains you bought at the Highlands Festival flea market in the guest room, replacing those awful floral things." Well, aside from needing access to the ironing board, this requires that the workmen finish in the guest room. They're mostly finished, except for some trim pieces that they need to remember to bring with them.

"Pony club new member." A technology puzzle. I opened her email on my phone, and for some reason it's not on the email on my computer. However, I need to get her attachments onto my computer to print them. I'm not awake enough for this one.

Scratch that. I tried, and now I can't even find the original email. I'll sort this out, I'm sure. As soon as I get a little sleep.

It's Monday and I'm Going To Brag

Last night I sat down with the pre-publication copy (commonly known as an ARC, for Advanced Reading Copy) of my upcoming novel, The War That Saved My Life. ARCs look quite a lot like paperback versions of the novel, complete with the cover art, but they're not quite finished--good thing, because we caught a timeline mistake on page sixteen.

I read parts of the book, including the last hundred pages, because now that the Super Secret Special Project has disappeared I'm back to working on the sequel to TWTSML. (Teens who love John Green's novel The Fault In Our Stars--that is to say, all teens--refer to it as Tif-ee-os, from TFIOS. There's no way to pronounce TWTSML. I've tried.) I've never written a sequel before--the closest I've come is my second book, which was a companion book to my first and also the worst book I've had published--but TWTSML cries out for one in all respects. In fact, my current editor, coming into the project when my previous editor cruelly abandoned me in favor of caring for her newborn son, wrote me early on: What are we supposed to think about the ending of this book? It's happily-ever-after even though their house just got blown up? What about Ada's foot? What if Mam returns? (Okay, Sarah, sorry. I guess there are some spoilers.)

To which I replied: "sequel." And that made her happy.

Then she wanted to know what Tough Issue I was going to tackle in the sequel. I gave her a one-word reply there, too, which made her say "oooooooh," but I'm not going to spoil that surprise.

Anyhow, let me tell you about Amazon reviews, or most other internet reviews you might read. (Goodreads are slightly more reliable than Amazon; regular blog reviews are pretty reliable, but check the background of the blogger for hidden agendas.) Amazon reviews fall into several categories:
1) Those written by the author's friends and family. These are usually very favorable.
2) Those written by sixth-graders who were forced to read the book and post on Amazon for school. Some of these are favorable, others very, very unfavorable. You'll know them by their brevity and misspellings.
3) Those written by people who aren't actually reviewing the book. Many unfavorable reviews fall into this category. For example, I saw someone give Neil Gaiman's exquisite Coraline one star because, "I didn't know this was a children's book." It's not really cricket to blame the author for your own ignorance. Ditto giving the author one star because you bought it from a used bookseller and didn't like the condition of the copy you received.
4) Those written by people with An Agenda. All my one-star reviews for Jefferson's Sons come from a small group of people who really passionately do not want to believe that Thomas Jefferson had sex with a black woman. They don't care about my book; they mostly haven't read it, because the very idea of it pisses them off. One suggests snarkily that the book "should be filed under fiction." (It is.)
5) Everyone else. You can probably believe these reviews, so long as you can distinguish them from categories 1-4. If the author in question has friends and family who are quite talented this may be difficult.

So you'll have to take Amazon reviews lightly. I know I do. But let me quote you a review I got for TWTSML:

"Not all wars are fought by nations; some are fought in small rooms, but for the same issues: justice, opportunity, respect. In Ada's small war lies our large hope that love cannot, will not, be overcome. I read this novel in two big gulps."

It's not on Amazon. It's on the back of the ARC. It was written by Gary D. Schmidt, who wrote Okay For Now and Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy , and I swear I'm going to have that blurb embroidered on a pillow and sleep on it at night, because every time I read it I think I've finally done something right. 

My Super Secret Special Project Has Crashed and Burned

This is not the blog post I was expecting to write today. Sometimes things happen.

I had a Super Secret Special Project well underway. I couldn't officially talk about it yet, and now I'll never get to, because I just had a call from the editor involved and the person in charge is cancelling it.

A few of you have heard from me personally what the Super Secret Special Project entailed, and were excited on my behalf. I was excited, too. I am sorry that it has come to an end.

On the other hand, I notice that I'm not crushed.

It was going to be a collaborative book between me and an author who usually writes for adults. He's more famous than me; both our names would have been on the collaborative book, but his would have been the one people noticed. His name would have gotten the book into airport bookstores and Wal-Marts and such; mine so far only gets me into regular bookstores and libraries and Amazon.

The problem is that with the best will in the world, and with nothing but respect for each other, we still aren't very similar. I write for children; I understand the genre very well, and I think I have a knack for expressing complicated stuff in simple terms. He writes for adults in a complex way that doesn't translate easily to a younger age group. We couldn't really compromise by writing a young adult novel because then both of us would have been at sea (and for other reasons), which meant this book would be very different from all his other books, which was problematic. Both of us write about settings--people, place, and time--that are important to us, and that we understand well. In the first weeks of writing, I was shocked by how much I didn't know about his normal setting, which would have been the book's setting, despite some pretty serious research. I think we were also both surprised by the number of things we couldn't really say because of the restrictions writing for children does put on the expression of adult themes. "We'll have to leave that out of the book," was something we said to each other several times.

"I know I can do this," I said to my husband, back at the beginning of the idea. My husband had reservations: he pointed out that this was not a book I would have thought to write on my own. And that's the real issue. Neither my collaborator nor I would have written this book on our own. I still think we could have written it together, but my collaborator came to believe otherwise, and I respect that.

It probably helps my general attitude toward this that before receiving the phone call I got a three-page email detailing the publicity plan for my novel that's coming out in January (it had been March, it's been moved up). The War That Saved My Life is the book of my heart, something I pulled out of nowhere and everywhere and spun using the best words I had. I'm thrilled that people are excited about it. The War That Saved My Life is mine. The Super Secret Special Project was never really going to be mine. It would have been ours, which was good enough for me, and yet, maybe not really. I find that I can let it go.

This Sort of Thing Only Happens in College

My son had an interesting night last week, and with his permission I'm sharing the story.

So, midweek, my son's roommate and three other friends decided to drive from Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana, to Detroit, Michigan, to watch a night Tigers game. My son, on campus, went to sleep around midnight.

He woke up at 1:30 because someone was banging on his door. It was a guy from down the hall, who was also roommates with one of the people who'd gone to the baseball game. "Dude," this guy told my son, "You've got to go get everyone. They're in Toledo, Ohio."

For the record, Toledo, Ohio, is actually on the way between Detroit and South Bend. You won't think so unless you checked a map, but it is.

"You've got to be kidding me," my son said.

"Dude, their car broke. It's not fixable. You've got to go get them, you're the only one with a car."

Now my son is not the only person at Notre Dame or in his dorm with a car, but apparently he was the only person among the travelers' roommates and close friends to have a car. And it was true: his buddies were stuck in Toledo, at 1:30 am. They'd holed up in an iHOP, the only place open in Toledo at the time.

Eventually my son realized the other guy wasn't kidding. So my son got dressed, walked the half mile to the parking lot, and set out for Toledo. He couldn't take anyone with him, because he had to haul four guys back, and that was going to be stretching the limits of his Civic as it was.

He got to the iHOP at 3:45. He honked his horn, and the guys came out and stuffed themselves inside. "Dude," one of them said, "some seriously weird people hang out at iHOPs at night."

At 4:30, just as he'd gotten onto the Indiana Tollroad, his rear tire went flat.

"Dude," said one of his friends, "we've killed two cars in one night."

"We haven't killed this one," my son said. "Get out." So, illuminated by the light of five cell phones, they figured out how to change a tire on the side of a highway at night. Then they drove 120 miles at 50 mph, on the spare.

They made it back to campus at 6:45. Walked the half mile from student parking to their dorm. Fell into bed. And then--because he's my son, and he's terrific--my son got up at 8:45. "I went to the student center, bought a 5-hour energy shot, a donut, and some milk," my son said. "And then I went to class."

I know the last part is true, because he called me to tell me the story in the 10-minute interval between his 9:30 class and his 10:50 one. I don't doubt the rest of it is true (Ok, maybe they didn't always say "Dude") because really, it's the sort of thing that happens in college. When my husband acted vaguely disapproving of the whole adventure, I told my son not to worry about it. "I could tell you stories," I said, "Your dad did stuff like this, too."

Skipping The WEG Rocked. Here's Why

I will start by saying that three words which should never, ever be strung together in this order are: "Beginner Novice Trakehner." "Beginner Novice," sure. "Trakehner" if you must. "Beginner Novice Trakehner"--are you kidding me?

With all the love and appreciation that I do have for Brian and Penny Ross, who not only organize the Virginia Starter Trials--much more chaotic than a regular horse trials as so many starters don't have a clue--AND allow Old Dominion Pony Club Region to piggyback their event rally onto the starter trials, AND ALSO organized the stabling so that my mare was as far away from her BFF, my daughter's horse, Mickey, as possible, I have to say that putting a trakehner on beginner novice is too much.

{For the Muggles: a Trakehner is a type of cross-country jump consisting of a log hanging over an open, revetted ditch. Trakehners are scary as hell, to horse and human both; they're inherently difficult no matter what their height.}

As posted yesterday, I skipped attending the World Equestrian Games in favor of watching my daughter and my pony clubbers ride like wildfire at the Old Dominion Regional Event Rally this weekend, and I'm glad I did.

Since there was a Starter Horse Trials, and also schooling on Saturday morning, I decided to bring my darling mare Sarah along. Factoring in that we hadn't competed since her rehab from an injury last winter, that I was less than three weeks back in the saddle from knocking myself unconscious, that I was coaching one of my club's riders, and that I was actually also co-hosting the rally, I decided to drop from novice to beginner novice. The Trakehner didn't bother Sarah, who'd jumped it on the Novice Area 2 Championship course the year before. It didn't bother my daughter, who was going Novice, or her teammate Halie, who was riding a combined test. Nor did it overly bother our darling neophyte, Kiri, because I told the rest of the team that if they gave Kiri the idea that Trakehners weren't your usual and customary beginner novice fence I would personally cause them injury.

It was Kiri and her horse Spencer's first riding rally and first event and the third different venue they'd ever schooled cross-country. They schooled brilliantly except for Kiri falling off at the Trakehner. She hopped right back on, pummeled Spencer authoritatively, and jumped it. They were delighted and delightful during the schooling, because they were so willing despite their inexperience, and because Kiri's smile could light small cities most of the time. Spencer accidentally fell off the down bank and said, "Oh, COOL! That's what you want!" and went down it happily every time afterward. He was brave at the water. He barely flicked at ear at anything and he strutted off the course licking his lips, ears forward.

My daughter, meanwhile, put to rest the demons of a difficult week (our old dog died, among other crap). Over one fence Mickey bounced her so loose that I thought her air vest would deploy; she landed on his neck, stirrupless, and disappeared behind a small hill. She reappeared with her butt in the saddle, her feet in the stirrups, her contact reestablished and all her attention focused on her next fence. Her teammates went wild.

As an aside, my friend Michelle also got jumped loose schooling, and her air vest DID deploy. Her young mare Ava took off like a shot, ran loose, and, according to two unrelated eyewitnesses, jumped a parked motorcycle on the way back to the barn. I'm so sorry not to have been the third eyewitness.

So that was Saturday. Then the rally started, with jogs, equipment checks, helmet checks, and formals. Then we walked the courses. Sunday morning my first job was coaching Halie. I'm not much of a coach, more there for moral support, though I did explain to Halie just how and when she was supposed to enter the dressage ring, as it was her first time. I failed to tell her how to exit--as a result, she left not only the dressage arena but also the ring around it, and made her pony Chip climb a small mountain on his way back to me. She put in a lovely test, forward and accurate and happy, and then she went down and coolly cantered her way around the green showjumping course that all the other competitors in her division were nervously trotting. Halie's got her eye on cross country for next time, and I'm thrilled.

When Kiri went into dressage, Spencer ogled at the letter A. "Oh, crap," I said, recognizing a hole in our preparation, "he's never been in a dressage arena before." Caroline McClung, who was coaching my daughter and Kiri, said drily, "Well, that might have been nice to know." But it was a good test--solid, no mistakes.

I couldn't help but be mounted for showjumping when I went to watch my daughter's dressage test--the times were too close--but I did manage to watch her while preventing my horse from ever seeing hers, or hers from seeing mine. (At one point I asked a complete stranger, "Excuse me, could you please pet my horse for a moment? I need her to not notice this bay gelding walking by." The complete stranger obliged.) My daughter has been working very hard to improve her dressage and on Saturday it paid off, with by far their best test ever, which put them in first place in their division, which is not where you typically find us Bradleys after the dressage.

Then I went down and asked when they were going to raise the jumps to BN, only to be told that they were set, which was awesome, and then Sarah and I jumped them and it was REAL RIDING, as opposed to my old technique of point-and-run.

Then Kiri showjumped. On the drive home she said that the course was the best riding she'd ever done, and I wholeheartedly agree. Spencer might have been a little nervous about the grandstand and the bright fences and the atmosphere, but Kiri had courage enough for them both. Then we rode together to cross country. Showjumping had been running behind and they were taking cross-country riders as they got them. We didn't need much warmup. "I'll go first," Kiri said.

I watched her first fences from the startbox--fluid, strong. Then Sarah and I set out. At one point I caught another glimpse of Kiri and Spencer, still cantering so that was good. Sarah found the jumps easy-peasy. I concentrated on balancing her without taking too big a tug--she's gotten so much more responsive that I have to be careful not to pull too much--and it was lovely, lovely, especially when I got to the Beginner Novice Trakehner and Kiri wasn't lying underneat it.

They had one stop, at that wretched Trakehner, but only one. On the second try she got him over. We laughed ourselves silly at the finish line.

Later in the afternoon my daughter romped clear over the novice course. She won her division; Halie and Kiri both got ribbons in theirs. In the rally they were first in horse management and second overall. Our stable manager, Caroline, won the region's stable management award and my daughter's horse got best-conditioned.

The ribbons were lovely, but they weren't the point. The point was all that joy. On the way home I commented to my daughter that this plus her placing at Pony Club Championships insured that she was already qualified for next year's championships.  "Hmm," Kiri said. "So if I want to ride at championships, I have to get another qualifying result--like, say, this fall at River Glen?"

Yes ma'am. You bet.

Why I Didn't Go to the World Equestrian Games.

In 2010, I took my young daughter to the World Equestrian Games--the world championships of seven riding disciplines, including my beloved eventing, held every four years opposite the Olympics--in Lexington, Kentucky. We had a wonderful time. Two years later, the two of us made a grand trip to the London Olympics, where we got to watch all four days of eventing. It was the trip of a lifetime. For a long time I planned to go to the 2014 WEG games, which are currently still in progress in Normandie, France. I wouldn't have been able to take my daughter, now a high school junior, but I had several friends going, I have a working knowledge of French, and I love Normandie. I would, I thought, have my own adventure.

As the months went by, however, I began to have doubts. Planning for London was complex but went smoothly; everything about this trip seemed awkward. I didn't get tickets for the dressage phase. Getting to Caen, the hub of the WEG, was easy but the train schedule meant I'd have to spend one whole day going from Caen back to Paris after the eventing was finished, then fly out the next day--hardly a horrible option, but it meant that a trip to see 2 days of competition would take at least 6 days away from home. So I asked my friend, a Very Big Name Eventer, for her opinion: was it worth it?

"Here's what I think," she said. "You're only going to get so many chances to go to something like this in your lifetime. Take them."

That was great advice, but it swayed me the opposite direction. Because the biggest obstacle to my attending the WEG was actually the Old Dominion Region pony club event rally, held in conjunction with the Virginia Starter Trials in Lexington, VA. If I went to the WEG, I'd miss the rally.

I'm 47. My daughter is 16. If I have another hale 35 years, God willing, I will get my chances at 8 more WEGs and 8 more Olympic games. Since my daughter has declared her intention to go to college as far as possible from Tennessee (I'm not offended: I went as far east from Indiana as I could), I very much doubt she'll rally once she's in college. If she does, it won't be over Labor Day weekend. And she loves eventing rally. If I'd gone to the WEG, she still would have gone to rally, but I wouldn't have been there to see it.

Then there's the rest of the team. Some of our club's experienced eventers have family members who also compete, and so they headed to a recognized event instead. That left me, as DC (head of a local pony club), in charge of a fairly inexperienced team. Our stable manager, Caroline, is a bright and competent young woman, but also a D2 who'd never been to a rally before. 13-year-old Halie, doing a combined test, comes from pony hunters and had never done dressage.

And Kiri. Kiri is 18, just starting college. She'd been in pony club four years, owned her horse Spencer for four years, gone as stable manager to several rallies but never once ridden in them. Never evented. Rarely attended local shows. Boards with our joint-DC at a farm with no cross country. Four years ago, at camp, Kiri and Spence could barely trot down a hill--neither had ever encountered hills before. Watching them move up, and learn, and get their C1 and then their C2 over the jumps on my farm has been inspiring to me, and I wanted very much for Kiri to have this one event, this one rally. I once read an article by Denny Emerson that said, "Eventing is the only sport in the world where you can finish 35th and be unable to sleep that night for sheer, transcendent joy."

Kiri had worked so hard. She had done so well. I wanted her to gallop across the cross-country finish line and feel that joy born of effort and hard work, unlike anything else. That feeling would stay with her always.

And finally, my daughter. Some day I'll go to the WEG, maybe even the Olympics, without her. But not yet. This year I went to the pony club rally, while I still had time.

Tomorrow: what happened.