Many years ago, there were two grey Arabians that gave carriage rides through the streets of downtown Dallas. Their names were Boukie and Louie, and my girlfriend Joanne was their driver. Yes, others drove Boukie and Louie, but we all knew they were really Joanne’s horses. I always thought they were really cool. I always wanted to drive them, but never got out of driving a single. And that was OK. Read the rest of this entry »
I got to spend a wonderful day with one of my best girlfriends recently. She was taking a carriage driving lesson, so I tagged along and played the part of a pretty useless helper. Well, I wasn’t totally useless… at least I’m not directionally challenged and got us to where the lessons were being held.
Volunteering is good. It’s good for the soul. It’s good for whoever you are helping.
I volunteered recently. Granted it wasn’t for a charity, but it was for community. The carriage driving community.
Events of any kind need volunteers. If there are no volunteers, then events can’t and won’t happen. Doesn’t matter what the event is, they need help and lots of it. Some organizations have deep pockets and can pay their help; but more times than not, there is no budget for all the help necessary to make an event successful.
I have always felt strongly that you must give back to whatever community you participate in. You can’t be a participant all of the time. You can’t just take and take and take. You have to give back or you may not have a place to play later. It’s the only way to keep your community vital. My chosen community, for now, is the horse and carriage driving community. I could not participate this year, so I volunteered. I had a BLAST!
I worked alongside my parents, one of their friends, and two people I had not met before. We had a great time. We monitored an obstacle that drivers had to negotiate. I call it monitoring because contrary to the common term that you are a judge, you’re not really judging. You have sheet to guide you and what you are supposed to look for. For example, if the driver puts his whip down, he gets penalty points against his overall score. If the driver goes the wrong route through the obstacle, they can accrue more penalty points. So you’re really more like a monitor than a judge. When I recruit people and tell them they’ll be a judge, they get worried. So I tell them they will be monitoring the obstacle and then it isn’t such a big deal. This year there were 29 participants, including five pairs drivers. It was a lot of fun to watch and cheer the drivers on as they made their way through the maze of gates.
I also got involved with Sabre Airline Solutions® Give Time Together community project. It’s a wonderful projet where employees work together on community projects volunteering their time and resources for the good of the charity of their choosing. It’s pretty darn cool, really. And the event takes place all around the world. Talk about community!
What have you done lately to help your community?
Not every day is it all about me. Today was one such day. I felt the recent loss of my best non-human friend and carriage driving companion, Pharoah. It really sucks to lose an animal you’ve had for what seems like forever. Isn’t 20 years nearly forever? I’ve never been faced with the passing of a horse. Even though I have had quite a few of them, and quickly became attached, I resigned myself to the fact that horses will come and go in my life and I never owned one long enough to feel the pain of their passing. Not until now.
Pharoah, who will eventually have a page here, and may even end up having his own blog, came into my life at the end of the summer in 1989. He was all of 13 months old and a very scrawny, gangly legged, under-developed Arabian horse. He had this personality that was simply the best; he was a very happy animal and just wanted to please. My husband literally scooped him up and put him in the horse trailer and brought him home. The rest as they say, is history.
I’m not going to go through his entire life here; that’s a project for somewhere else. I’ll just suffice it to say, that I don’t feel like it’s all about me right now; it’s all about him and how much I miss him. Crap, I guess that does make it about me. Well, no it isn’t about me. It’s about him and I didn’t want him suffering, so it was with compassion that I humanely laid him down one last time. It was clearly all about him. Pharoah, I miss you.
I recently spent time with my best girlfriends and a few new girlfriends (I hope they become new best girlfriends, too). I had a blast. I say “I” and not “we” because I don’t know if they had fun or not, but it’s all about me and not them. Right? We did the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo parade. Our entry, the North Texas Whip won the highly coveted Chairman’s Award! How great is that? OK. I concede. That definitely was not all about me, but if I hadn’t been there, things just might have turned out differently. Pam, you know what I mean 😉 So technically, it was all about me.
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