Riding Western
Sam competed for the first time in Western style horseback riding at the North Central Texas College stock show last weekend in Gainesville. He competes with “able-bodied” riders from time to time to challenge himself. This was great practice for next weekend. The regional equestrian Special Olympics are being hosted by the stables where he rides, Born 2 Be, in Aubrey.
His coaches have been encouraging Sam to ride Western for a while. Sometimes it takes Sam a little bit to warm up to an idea. He put jeans on for the first time in about 20 years when he tried on a new pair of Wranglers at Weldon’s Saddle Shop last week. (Like his great-grandfather, whom he was named for, Sam’s a khakis man.) Kippie helped him look good, although it’s a mystery where those most excellent chaps came from. Sam says they were, like lots of gear, donated to the stables.
Enjoy.
Other lessons stated out loud
“Our children are not us … and yet we are our children; the reality of being a parent never leaves those who have braved the metamorphosis.” – Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree.
There are so many lessons from life with a child with autism, it seems important to share at least some of them.
I have two other children who make it into these pages in ancillary ways, but that is not an accurate reflection – at all – of their presence in our family.
Many things that happen in our lives are examined in thoughtful ways, but not everything that happens to our family gets lived out loud. I want my children to have their own lives.
For this little essay, I’m making an exception. Two years ago around Halloween, something happened to Michael that needs to be lived out loud.
He took a date to a costume party, and he’s alive today because technically he and the girl weren’t “dating.”
(Confession: I don’t understand kids and dating these days.)
He had graduated college earlier that year. His date was in her senior year, so the party they attended was full of college-aged kids.
As they were about to leave, someone handed his date a glass of champagne. She wasn’t a fan, so they shared it.
His date lived about 30 minutes out of town. A family friend happened to be at the party, so she rode home with him.
Michael hopped in his car and drove the 5-minute trip back to his apartment.
A minute or two after he got home, he knew he was in trouble. He stumbled to his room, vomited, passed out on his bed, and woke up at noon, although he was groggy and out of sorts all day.
His date, by the way, passed out on the way home. The family friend had to carry her to the house.
Michael didn’t tell me what had happened to them until weeks later.
The glass they shared, as near as he can guess, was laced with something meant to knock her out.
(Confession: I asked him the classic victim-blaming question, don’t you all know not to accept a drink like that, along with a thousand other questions that had few satisfying answers. It wasn’t hard to imagine a drastically different outcome had he driven his date home.)
This was not the first time something horrible happened to Michael and I was not to find out until hours after the real danger had passed.
That is how it is when you send your children out into the world.
It is not a good feeling.
Some of us parented our kids to know that life is not a stage and all the men and women in it merely players.
Clearly, some parents did not.
Catching
Sam has a certain smile that really sings.
He’s such a deep thinker that we don’t get to see this smile very much. Like the smile-for-the-camera smile most of us have, his face looks posed in photographs, only more so. But when a happy moment comes — like that moment when sunlight makes it through the clouds and trees all the way down to the ground to light a patch of wildflowers — Sam’s smile just sparkles.
He lit up that way yesterday when I showed him the rain barrel I brought home from a workshop. “We’re bringing the farm,” he said.
Well, almost. This is the barrel.
This was the farm’s.
We are growing vegetables in beds on the other side of the fence. That 50-gallon barrel should go a long way toward keeping things watered.
I’ll be writing about the rainwater catchment class and the barrel for Monday’s paper.
We have settled into the new place here in town pretty well. We enjoy the many and varied offerings that come with city life. We’ve all got bicycles and ride them around town more and more. But it’s not the same as life on the farm.
We made a very intentional choice to look around at what was missing and bring it in. The rain barrels, and living life closer to the rhythm of the seasons is part of that.
When you see blue-eyed grass covering our front lawn in the spring, you’ll know we finally got it as close as we could.
Cake in a jar
The first time I ever had cake in a jar was in Tokyo. The people who would become my friends and colleagues were kind enough to stock my apartment refrigerator when I first moved in. They filled it with things they thought a Westerner would like to eat. At the time, I had no idea what half the stuff was, but it was all delicious.
The first little cake in a jar was a revelation. It was so moist and flavorful, I didn’t miss the icing at all. I hunted in the fridge for a second jar and was thrilled to find it.
After I moved back home, I spent many years trying to replicate other delicious dishes I had there — shabu shabu, yakitori, tonkatsu, sushi — at home. (Honestly, the hunt has never ended.) It wasn’t until nearly a decade later, when a friend handed out little cakes in a jar as Christmas gifts, that I remembered those little cakes from my first days in Japan. She shared her recipes, which came from the Cookbook Cupboard in Austin.
Paige helped me make a pile of little cakes last weekend so I could bring them to work to help us get through election night. (She asked whether it was possible to make up your own mixes and skip the boxes. Yes, I had done that in the past and it does improve the recipe. But more on that later.) The original recipe calls for the cakes to be baked in pint jars, but if you want to do a single serving, put them in half-pint jars. The amaretto cakes will cook up a little faster, but the kahlua cakes still take nearly an hour.
Amaretto Cake
1 box of classic white cake mix
1 small box of vanilla pudding
1 cup of canola oil
4 eggs
1/2 cup water
3/4 cup amaretto
Kahlua Cake
1 box of classic yellow cake mix
1 small box of chocolate pudding
1 cup of canola oil
4 eggs
1/2 cup water
3/4 cup kahlua
Directions for both:
Whisk cake and pudding mix in a large bowl, add remaining ingredients and beat well for several minutes. Fill greased jars about 2/3 and bake at 325 F. for about 45 minutes.
Place lids and rims on the hot jars. If storing for more than a day or two, keep refrigerated.
Advanced Arduino fun
For his birthday, I gave Sam two books with advanced Arduino projects after he worked his way through the initial project book over at The Forge, the maker space at Denton’s North Branch Library.
He made a short video of one of his three builds Monday night.
Chisholm Challenge 2016: English Equitation
Sam said he knew when he went into the ring, he was up against some stiff competition this year. He still had a great ride.
Chisholm Challenge 2016: Showmanship
Sam says the last pivot in front of the judge didn’t go well. The horse, Rosalie, had “her own ideas.”
Guest blog: Sam on tackling trail gates
Today, Sam finished Chisholm Challenge, a horse show hosted for the past 13 years by the Fort Worth Stock Show and area stables that serve riders who are veterans or have disabilities.
Sam didn’t want to talk much about how the trail ride went. (Hint: Not every kernel popped, either today or yesterday.) He did have thoughts about tackling the gate at the end of the trail ride. (Another hint: the gate isn’t a real gate, it’s a rope representing a gate.)
Sam had to both open and close the gate while remaining on his horse, Rosalie. (Yet another hint: This is so difficult that riders at lower levels may be required only to “open” the gate.) Many times, a rider drops the rope before completing the task.
The rules allow them to pick up the rope and try again, at least a few more times. But many riders, once they have dropped rope, simply give up and end the ride.
Sam says he has been thinking about the gate for many years. Here is his advice to riders who are thinking about giving up:
Independent riders should consider a few more attempts to close the gate if dropped. All they need to do is walk the horse up to the side of the gate where the rope still hangs down, haul up the rope without taking it off the gate, then bring the horse to the other side with the rope in hand and finally … CLOSE THE GATE!
As you can see from Sam’s ride today, a little planning, determination and positive thinking goes a long way:
Hard Sauce
The holidays are done and with it, for the most part, the obligation to eat all the things that come out only around the holidays. Our neighbors, an older couple, seemed to think our place was a good place to dispatch the rest of a home-baked cake gifted to them that was more than they could hope to eat.
It was a nice little cake. But I took one look at what was left and knew even the entire Wolfe pack wasn’t going to be able to finish it. It had dried fruits and tree nuts. The middle child is allergic to tree nuts. It wasn’t going to keep well either, the way a proper fruitcake would, because it hadn’t been soaked in bourbon, or brandy, or rum.
(This, by the way, is the problem with nearly every commercial fruitcake. Don’t these bakers know the ONLY way to make a proper fruitcake is to bathe it in booze once a week for at least six weeks?)
That meant I was going to have to take it to work. Just for fun, I made a hard sauce to go with. I didn’t want to put out any kind of memo about the sauce — after all, it reeked of bourbon — but I explained over and over how one might want to warm the cake, and then put a dollop on, and then it would come a little closer to a proper fruitcake. Or maybe make the cake a bit more like bread pudding.
Two of us took home the extra hard sauce. One of the editors on the night desk said he added it to hot chocolate and that was pretty good. I took a bit, too, and left it with the chocolate pound cake we made for Aunt Regina and her 94th birthday. It does appear that Hard Sauce goes with everything.
Hard Sauce
1/2 cup butter, left at room temperature for a few hours until very soft
1 cup confectioner’s sugar, sifted
2 T. bourbon
Beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Fold in the bourbon until incorporated. Chill until firm. Put a heaping tablespoon on a warm dessert, and let it melt in.
Sustainability
Earlier this fall, I was able to spend some time with a local biologist studying quail. I learned more in the course of that day than I was able to put in my newspaper story, which often happens.
The biologist has been working with area ranchers on ways to keep the prairie vital both for their cattle and the quail. On the drive back from Clay County, I saw all the ranches in new ways. Some looked like the ranch we had just visited, lush and vibrant. Others looked used up. I smiled to myself about our farm. When we sold it, our place looked like the former, not the latter.
The biologist started telling me a story about how he’d approached one rancher to bring his land into the quail “corridor.” The rancher agreed, but on one condition: it couldn’t cost him any money.
I could tell the biologist planned on telling me this story a certain way. After all, he was trying to build a big research program and do this good thing for the environment. He needed money for his labs and the students helping with the research. They were bringing new and important scientific knowledge where it was badly needed. The reality likely was this: a rancher that needs to make a change after doing things a certain way for years and years probably needs to spend a little money to get it back right.
Before the biologist got to the big finish in his story about the rancher, I blurted out, “so, really, he asked that whatever you proposed for his ranch be truly sustainable. Because for the changes to last, they can’t keep costing him money, right?”
(This is why people don’t invite me to dinner parties. I’m impertinent. I ask questions that stop the conversation.)
The biologist finished his story, telling me that it took awhile to make the changes to help the quail and figure out the true costs, but ultimately, the rancher didn’t lose any money running his cattle that year. The biologist had delighted in the discovery. But, I could tell by the many long and thoughtful pauses that came after I asked my question that he hadn’t thought about the sustainability of his quail program that way.
We didn’t farm our place with some lofty, progressive, green ideal of it being “sustainable.” We just knew we didn’t have any money and that anything we did needed to be harnessing and directing the little energy we, or the land, already had.
Late summer on the farm
When we tried to help Sam learn to talk and become the marvelous person he was to become, we tried not to focus on hoarding resources. We just tried to harness and better direct the energy we, and he, already had. It worked pretty well.
Sustainability. Its a powerful word. We are starting to use it a lot. I’m not going to let it lose its meaning for me.