Ms. Ag Fair

   Tonight I got to emcee the Ms. Louisa Agricultural Fair Beauty Pageant for the fifth time in five years.  It's a great pageant with entrants from around the rural county of Louisa.  But allow me to reflect on something very different from last year's pageant.

   As happens pretty often anymore, one of the judges was a former student.  I didn't teach her, but she was very active in extra-curricular activities at both the high school and middle schools in Louisa and later was a substitute I used often when I was an assistant principal at the middle school.

   The funny thing is, this entry isn't even about her, per se.  You see, I read bios of the judges each year, and when I read hers, she had gotten married and was living in Smythe County, Virginia, where my mom grew up.  As I continued reading, I learned that she was teaching at the high school Mom had attended and from which she had graduated.  In that moment, I was transported back to stories Mom had about her time at Marion High School.  

  Mom played basketball (was even a player-coach in college) and wrote in her never-to-be-published memoir My Thorns Have Roses about walking up the hill to the school (she lived with her Great Aunt and Uncle at the foot of a hill just under the high school) and using her little pocket knife to jimmy the lock on the door so she could go inside and practice foul shots in the gym.  As I read that in a beautiful leatherbound book my brother put together shortly after Mom's death, I remember thinking that, nowadays, I'd probably be one of the people after her for breaking and entering and having a knife on school property.  It caused me to reflect on many things.

    Mom was just a kid who wanted to practice free throws.  She wasn't looking to hurt anyone or destroy anything.  Now, if it had been her younger brother...maybe.  But, you've got to treat every kid the same way, right?  Yeah, that's the gist of it.  

   Here's the thing, though.  Remember, not every kid with a pocket knife is looking to make trouble; and, sometimes a kid with a basketball just wants to play basketball.

   This isn't a social commentary (God knows we've had enough of that lately and, as I sit here writing this I realize that's what people think I'm going for - I'm not, so don't make it that way).  It's more of a reminder for me.  It's easy to lose site of the fact that the people affected by rules are just that, people.  Somebody's daughter, son, sister, brother, or parent.  Maybe it's something worth remembering for me and for whomever has the Herculean task of enforcing the rules/laws where they are.

The wagon rolls on.  Thanks for riding shotgun.