And The Gold Medal Goes To ....

The information came at me in a rush.

In the restaurant at breakfast yesterday, Ginny & I started talking about restaurants we might try someday and I mentioned one I’ve heard about but never been to and she said the place disappointed her when she’d been there and I ask when she’d ever been to that restaurant and she said, “Oh some of us went over there for lunch when the building was evacuated during one of the bomb threats. I had a shrimp salad and …”

“Whoa! Back up there a minute! Bomb Threat! What Bomb Threat? And what do you mean One of the Bomb Threats?” I said calmly – calmly for me, that is.

Now I should explain that while I work out of a home office, each day Ginny drives across town to an office building in a slum where, along with a hundred other people, she helps make sure that several thousand hungry children are fed and cared for.

Every day when she returns from her office, I have coffee waiting for her and we sit to sip coffee and unload to eachother the problems of the day. I tell her about the frustrations of writing; she tells me about encumbrances, contract negotiations, budget analysis, and who’s pregnant this week.

We talk like that every evening.

I don’t understand half of what she does but I do listen.

Never once has she ever mentioned bomb threats until yesterday at breakfast.

“John, it’s no big deal. It’s just one of the obstacles we have to get around to get the job done,” she said.

Yes.

Just one of the obstacles.

That is what she said.

“One of the obstacles?” I said.

I knew that once a guy crashed his car into the side of her building in an apparent suicide attempt and that a few weeks ago a stabbing victim had staggered in off the street. Those things made the evening news.

So yesterday over pancakes, she now also mentioned that in the six months since her office moved to the new building that six times windows have been shot out.

She never mentioned these incidents before because she didn’t want me to worry.

“It’s no big deal,” she said.

“There’s only a small window in my cubicle and it’s high up and I duck my head when I pass it,” she said.

Such things are “just obstacles” to getting the job done, to getting the children fed.

She and her co-workers get past such obstacles every day.

And the administration feels they have to lay off 20 percent of these people who are working to overcome such obstacles. There are budgetary conciderations.

And tonight on tv I see that they hand out Gold Medals to guys who only slide down icy hills on their asses.