Tag: rodeo

How far we’ve come

I saw the light
I’ve been baptized
By the fire in your touch
And the flame in your eyes
I’m born to love again
I’m a brand new man

As these words rang out across the stadium – quite clearly, surprisingly, seeing as where we were – my lips were already moving in synch, silently matching every word since the initial “I”… and tears welled in my eyes, beginning almost immediately to overflow.

I was attending the Brooks and Dunn concert at the rodeo tonight in Houston, kind of as a celebration of my life, for my birthday – something for me, on my own.

I’d asked my mom to stick around with me, but she was ready to head home, so I was okay hanging on my own for the musicians and their music.

When I was about eight years old, I attended the Brooks and Dunn performance at the Astrodome, also for the rodeo.

During their performance, when walking around on the dirt, they pulled two ladies out from the audience to dance with them.

I remember distinctly being upset and embarrassed as the one lady proved, after two quick but failed attempts, that she could not do any sort of partner dancing, let alone the by of two-stepping one of them wanted to do with her.

Rather than rejecting the lady, reading her out for a better model – that’s actually how my brain analyzed it at the time – he just grabbed her around her waist/hips area, and swung her around in a circle or few.

My frustration at this lady for having been unprepared for such a monumental opportunity – dancing with Brooks and Dunn – was not only projected blindly, but had me consider how I would have done, if I’d been the one pulled out onto the floor…

I was rather confident that I would have been able to manage it.

However, I fully acknowledged that I was not certain.

And so I made it my business immediately after this event to make certain that I knew how to two-step and could do it with just about anybody on demand.

Fast-forward a couple decades, and see me at the concert tonight… I found it almost ironic that, though I never anticipated to be pulled out to dance with Brooks and Dunn, here I was, two decades later, likely one of the best country western dancers in the entire stadium, knowledge, ability, and a world title to prove it.

Isn’t that at least a little bit totally crazy?(!!!)?

Anyway, so I can dance, and extremely well, but that’s only part of my mentioning all of this.

When the guys began playing and singing tonight, I was in instant and somewhat constant tears (even throughout the whole show!), right?

Right.

And it occurred quickly to me, This is the power of music.

I was somehow transported to my life when I listed probably daily to Brooks and Dunn music, as I simultaneously saw all that had happened between them and now, how what felt like a lifetime and ten different people ago had somehow led me to today, to who I am today.

There was a lot of good and a decent amount of bad in there, especially early on, and it was a very, very full time all throughout.

And, somehow, here I am, experiencing it all again, while feeling empowered by the open bliss and joy for life I felt back then, reminded of the sadness of what I went through off and on, and encouraged by the fact that I have made it to here so far, and I’ve plenty more wonderful expansion and beautiful growth yet to come for myself in my life.

All of this from music, specific songs and notes and voices and instruments all put together in a certain way, as though, almost, specifically and intentionally with me in mind.

It was of the best kind of medicine.

And this reminds me of how my high school band director always used to tell us that music is a language… tonight, their music spoke directly to me, throughout every place within me.

Post-a-day 2019

Horses and Shooting

Today, I watched some mounted shooting.  At this rodeo, anyway, mounted shooting means that an individual rides his or her horse across the arena, following a sort of zig-zagged pattern, and then back in a straight line, all while shooting, in a specific order, ten balloons that are placed around the arena.  The average speed for doing this was 12-14 seconds.  I’m not sure I could even have sprinted from one end of the arena to the other in that time, or even made all ten shots successfully while standing still in that time, and these people were riding all around it and back, knocking out balloons with their pistols along the way.  Somehow, things like this make perfect sense to me, and I love watching them.  It made me, even more than ever, want to ride horses every week in my life.

Though, I’m more of a Robinhood type, and so I would want to do mounted bow-and-arrow shooting, myself.

Post-a-day 2018

Maybe a cowboy

Tonight at the rodeo, during the invocation, I had a thought that surprised me.  First off, I enjoyed the fact that a stadium full of people was taking a moment for prayer before beginning events of the evening…, even though it was not a religious event, or even religiously-officiated event.  Second, I noticed how much I enjoyed the praying part myself as an individual and as part of the community.  And thirdly, the thought which then occurred to me and surprised me most, I wondered if I might not want to be somehow involved in this kind of thing.  Perhaps I really would love to be involved in cowboy-related stuff, country and ranch stuff.  A visually beautiful place, filled with happy, animal-loving people, and where God is a happy place (as opposed to a sensitive or nonexistent one)…, now that would be nice.  I, of course, do not at all know that I would enjoy such a setting.  I think I fall under the common category of individuals who would be considered to be ‘liberal’, and that might not roll so well for me in the cowboy world.  However, there’s a niche for everything, and it is certainly possible that I could slide in perfectly well in the ranching and rodeo world.  Who knows, aside from God, anyway?

It’s just a thought I had, but I like the idea of considering it some more.  🙂

 

Post-a-day 2018

Toilets self-proclaiming status

Tonight in the wine garden at the rodeo, we had a unique scene occur.  I was standing in line for the toilets – a very long line that doubled in size just in the time I waited in it.  I found myself wondering how the men’s toilets were.  They were part of the same trailers as the women’s toilets.  There was even a door on the inside that connected the men’s to the women’s toilets within a trailer.  Well, two guys come waltzing out of the men’s toilets in the trailer next to ours, and declare ‘Hey, we’re unisex here; you can use these, ladies.’ A small, but somewhat mad dash ensues by ladies that had been a ways back in our line.

“They say that…” I begin, but end there, for my conflicting thoughts couldn’t agree upon an end to the sentence.  It boiled down to the question of who would be liable for the issue of inappropriate bathroom use by the opposite gender – because I know that it is actually a thing – and the matter of 1) if anyone actually cared, and, if so, 2) who would be the one/s to correct/stop the behavior (aka enforce the gender rule of the toilets).

Sure enough, within moments after my statement, a grounds service person heads calmly up to the men’s bathroom and the line of ladies standing at it, and tells the ladies that they can’t use the men’s bathroom.  By the time I was going into the trailer, – by the way, these are fancy trailers with flushing toilets and hand washing and even paper towels – the man had almost persuaded the likely drunk final three ladies from the men’s toilets.  Though, I’m not sure he managed to get them out before they used the toilets.  We could see straight into the men’s bathroom while the door was being held open, and it cracked me up, because there were two women standing in the walkway-type area of the trailer, next to the stalls, the worked outside the trailer, failing to convince them that it wasn’t okay for them to be in there, and a man’s head and cowboy hat 100% clear above one of the stall doors, while he clearly was using the toilet within the stall, but still chatting with the people outside of his stall, who were standing in the bathroom (i.e. the ladies), plus the man outside the trailer.

The whole thing just cracked me up.

Also, there were only two or three stalls (I think two) in the men’s section, whereas the women’s section had five stalls.  I appreciated that fact.

Post-a-day 2018

Cowboy Church

Just as I was going to bed on Sunday night, I ended up on the phone with my mom.  She was on her way to Cowboy Church, the Church services offered for all the cowboys who are in town to participate in the rodeo (though it is open to all, of course), and so, even though it was long past my bedtime, it being near midnight my time, I asked her to call me back once she had arrived and settled in at the service.

I rushed to finish my bedtime routine, reading and all, and had just finished everything when my phone was buzzing with the FaceTime call from Church.  Therefore, I found myself attending Church for the first time from the comfort of my own bed.  But it gets better.

The passage on which the pastor focused mainly was the one from Luke 10 where Jesus ends up at the home of Martha and Mary, and Mary sits and listens to and dotes on Jesus, while her sister, Martha, is preparing the meal.  (Martha eventually comments to Jesus about the situation, and asks him to tell Mary that she needs to help Martha, and not just sit around, and then Jesus talks about how Mary has actually picked the better and more important of the two options, and all that jazz.)

You know how there’s always the discussion over Shakespeare’s works, whether they are too old-fashioned to be fully understood to people today, and would do best being re-done in a way that people can actually relate to the various situations and circumstances, as people had been able to do in Shakespeare’s time?  Now, typically, we think of the biblical figures as following a certain type of diet, based on historical information on the region, as well as various notes within the Bible itself.  However, seeing as this was Cowboy Church, the pastor definitely took it upon himself to speak to his audience, and to make the story more relatable for his listeners.

How, you ask, did he do that?  Well, Martha wasn’t cooking seeds in the oil, making bread, or anything like that.  She was in the kitchen chopping tomatoes for the salsa, cooking and slicing the meat, heating the tortillas… in short, she was making fajitas for Jesus.

After that image, all I could see was a Jesus eating fajitas next to a jar of Pace Picante, while wearing a tunic, a cowboy hat, and boots; and then riding off on a horse, while swinging a lasso in the air.  Or perhaps I just kept flipping back and forth between a sort of Chuck Norris and a Jesus image.  Not sure – it’s a difficult thing to imagine, Jesus eating tacos and fajitas.

All in all, I had a wonderful time at Cowboy Church, and for various reasons.  i also had several firsts in that attendance.  It was, of course, my first time at Cowboy Church, and I was thrilled to be in attendance.  It was my first time to attend Church while in my bed and PJs.  it was my first time imagining Jesus easting fajitas and salsa.  And, perhaps the oddest of them all, it was my first time spending the entire service using my phone.  It was a way cool sort of bedtime story slash activity.  So glad to have such an awesome mom.  Thanks, Mom!

 

Post-a-day 2017