“There Are More Openly LGBTQ+ Olympians At Tokyo 2020 Than All Other Games Combined…
BIG NUMBER: 182. That’s at least how many openly LGBTQ+ athletes there are competing at the Tokyo 2020 Games, according to Outsports. In Rio, there were 56. In London, 23.”
Openly gay Raven Saunders of Charleston, South Carolina celebrates after winning Silver Medal in shot put competition. (Reuters, Dylan Martinez photo)
This afternoon Raven returns home to Charleston but will not be greeted by her number one fan and sacrificing supporter, her mother, who died on August 03rd. in Orlando, Florida where she and Raven’s younger sister Tanzania were attending a watch party for Athletes of Team USA. For Raven the loss of her mother is one that causes her “heart and soul to cry out” as she posted on social media earlier this week. Any daughter, LGBTQ+ or straight, can understand the pain we feel when the woman who gave us life is no longer with us. Pretty and I send prayers for comfort to the family of Clarissa Saunders during these difficult days.
Our family also extends our gratitude to Raven Saunders and the remainder of the out LGBTQ+ athletes competing in the Tokyo Olympics. Whether you won a medal in your sport or didn’t, you are all winners to us every time you have the courage to proudly proclaim who you are in your own back yard or on an international Olympic stage.
Onward.
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Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.
The Haiku is a Japanese poetic form dating back to the 17th. century; as we near the end of the Games of the XXXII Olympiad in Tokyo, and since I can’t speak Japanese, the least I can do is attempt their artistic expressions. The Haiku structure is for three lines: five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second line, and five syllables again in the third line. There’s probably much more to think about, but I’ll leave it to that with my apologies to the true Haiku poets.
Haiku #2
The athletes go home
to face practice, to wait for
twenty twenty-four.
Finally, the Haiku is supposed to be written for what is going on today. In addition to the close of the Olympics, Pretty and I had a frightening day with our granddaughter. We had a picnic with Pretty’s father at a park near her Little Mountain antique mall. Papa had brought a box of mountain tomatoes which we consider a delicacy. Although rain was not in the morning forecast, the grey clouds mixed with precipitation began on our drive up the road with intermittent downpours.
Our granddaughter Ella wasn’t bothered by the rain. We ate lunch at a covered picnic table in the park. While the adults visited, Ella was busy, going thither and yon with the fervor of a twenty-two month old child determined to explore.
Skies cleared just long enough for group swings, as in Ella was in a playground swing with no basket, Pretty pushed her in the swing while Papa and I circled the wagons around them to prevent any unexpected dismount.
A good time was had by all for more than hour when Papa had to leave for his home in the upstate, but Ella was not ready to go home yet. She walked a short distance to the baseball field where she had walked around a few minutes before with Papa and Pretty.
Unfortunately for our little girl, she wandered into a dugout that had a nest of angry flying insects. She started wailing as they stung her repeatedly which caused Pretty to spring into high gear and run as fast as she could to rescue Ella. I watched in horror as Pretty shouted It’s bees. And I just got stung twice, too.
OMG, I thought and from the look on Papa’s face, I knew he felt the same. Y’all go on, he said. I’ll clear the table.
We took off to look for a doctor but had no luck until seeing a CVS Minute Clinic after what seemed to me to be an eternity of driving. Rural medicine in full display. Pretty raced in to the CVS but returned with the news that the pharmacists were afraid to prescribe Benadryl for a child younger than four. Our heroine Pretty did purchase Children’s Tylenol which Ella’s mother made sure we administered when she talked to Pretty on the phone. Ella slept the next half hour as Pretty drove me home.
Haiku #3
Cries of pain linger
from stings of mad hornets. Too
young to understand.
So here’s to the weekend – good luck to the Olympians who will be putting the final touches on the games for everyone to enjoy, to the winners who will celebrate on the journey home and to those others who won’t have medals to angst over as they make the flights to their families and friends. Oh no. Both winners and losers will angst over whether those planned flights will fly.
And here’s to our brave granddaughter who scoffs at not only the regular bumps and bruises but also the stings of a heretofore unknown enemy.
A special “here’s to” for Pretty who was wounded as she defended our Ella in the midst of a crisis. She moved swiftly to save the day.
At this time Ella is at home with a peace offering of vanilla ice cream. I have now reached the altered state I need to take a nap.
Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.
Pretty follows the Olympics as faithfully as I do the tennis majors; therefore, I also follow the Olympics which apparently are being carried on at least a gazillion channels in U-verse land without an adequate GPS to locate your destination. Thank goodness we finished our Downton Abbey re-runs just in the nick of time before the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Torch was lit or we might be waiting breathlessly to meet Lady Mary’s final husband.
And yet, here we are in 2021 with our 2020 Olympics. Nothing’s perfect.
Unfortunately, the first event I watched was women’s beach volleyball. Word to the designer of “uniforms” in this event: shame on you. Good grief. These athletes wore bikinis which left nothing to the imagination while they (barefooted) served, set and spiked a multicolored ball on a court made of sand with temperatures of up to 113 degrees, according to the commentator during the game. Now I’m thinking that’s wrong on so many levels. But let’s start with if female athletes must wear outfits reminiscent of the Emperor Who Wears No Clothes to attract fans while they run around on sand that burns their feet, then maybe it’s time to re-think beach volleyball as an Olympic sport.
Speaking of burning sand, the Tokyo heat is mild compared to the fires in the western states of the USA on the North American continent. Nero was spotted tuning his fiddle as firefighters waged their war against the Bootleg fire in Oregon – the largest of 88 large wildfires currently burning in the U.S. – CBS News reported today. Nearly 1.5 million acres have been scorched during this season. New fires ignite due to the drought conditions and heat waves brought about by guess what? Bazinga if you said climate change.
As drought and unprecedented heat waves spark the loss of lives, homes and complacency in the American west, the floods across the proverbial pond on the European continent cause equal devastation of losses never to be recovered in central European countries like Germany and Belgium. The culprit: evil dastardly climate change which seems much more than imaginary to the families who have lost loved ones in addition to their hopes for the future.
Lordy, Lordy – there’s tropical storms (think big wind and lots of rain) swirling near Japan with a Covid pandemic swirling inside the Olympic Village. So far 14 athletes have tested positive according to the official games stats released yesterday.
Somebody STOP me – the weight of disasters is heavier than my weighted blanket which I still use in the summer time when the living is clearly not easy. We send our love to all our followers in cyberspace who are struggling for whatever personal disaster has struck. From our family to yours, we are with you. We wish we could lessen your burdens…until then…
Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.
Pretty knows I will be grumpy next week because today the two week tennis odyssey known as Wimbledon climaxed with the men’s championship match which pitted 25 year old Italian Matteo Berrettini in his first career slam final against five time Wimbledon champion Novak Djokovic of Serbia. The not unexpected result was a sixth Wimbledon title for Djokovic, but Berrettini tested the champ with his massive serve and forehand that Djokovic called “the hammer” in his post match interview on court.
Novak also played for his place in history today – his victory gave him a total of 20 grand slam titles that tied the record for men on the tour with Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal. At 34 years of age, Djokovic is the youngest of the three (Nadal is 35, Federer will be 40 in August) and thought to be a favorite for a gold medal in the Olympics this summer as well as the front runner in the US Open in New York which begins August 30th. He is now also leading the conversation for the GOAT of men’s tennis; his four set win on the Wimbledon grass courts today support the acclaim.
If anyone is looking for a tennis band wagon to climb on for a ride to the top, Djokovic is your man. Those of us who are Nadal and Federer fans for the past 20 years find Novak’s band wagon a tough one to climb on, but it’s hard to argue with his professionalism, his commitment to the game, and most of all…his success. Well done.
The Wimbledon women’s championship was played yesterday with two newcomers to the final: Ash Barty of Australia, Karolina Pliskova of the Czech Republic. Barty won a thrilling 3 set match which began with a frozen Pliskova who lost her first four games on Centre Court but she thawed in the second set to push Barty, the number 1 player in the world, to a third set. Wow. Big hitting, Vanna. Pow – take this. Pow – you take that.
The unusually emotional Barty paid tribute to fellow Indigenous Australian Evonne Goolagong Cawley who won her first Wimbledon singles title in 1971 fifty years ago. Barty not only made Cawley proud but also the entire country of Australia which holds Ash as a special part of its large tennis heart that is sprinkled with awesome champions in the past. I’ve just about given up on tears, but mine flowed alongside Barty’s during her interview after the match. You see, I remember when Evonne Goolagong won Wimbledon so Barty’s respect for her mentor and friend made me feel the emotions I always felt when Dick Enberg wrapped up NBC’s Wimbledon coverage every year. Enberg was a man who tapped the spirit of sports – and the tennis tradition that was Wimbledon.
My love for this game runs deep, and one of the ways I mark time is by the tennis season majors. The Australian Open, Roland Garros and now Wimbledon are in my 2021 rear view mirror. The Olympics are an added attraction this year but I know the year is drawing to a close when the US Open ends in September. Remarkable how time slips away.
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On a totally different subject I had a remarkable conversation this week with someone who told me he hadn’t been vaccinated against the Covid virus. We live in South Carolina which currently ranks 39th. in the nation out of 50 states with our 39% of the population fully vaccinated so I wasn’t surprised to talk to someone who was in the majority. But his objections to the vaccine included his opinion it had not been fully tested plus his belief in a mysterious component lurking in the vaccine which was designed for “culling” the population. I shook my head and asked him who he thought was being “culled?” Hearing this fiction on the news made the ideas seem distant, unrelated to my life. Having the black magic plots brought to me at my back door steps by someone I knew personally – someone whose work I admired – chilled me in the hot summer humidity.
As John McEnroe would say, You cannot be serious?
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Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.
In the summer of 2018 I published eleven stories focused on letters written during WWII by my father to my mother, his mother and others. I ended the series with the assurance that I had other letters written by my dad – letters to me when I was in college and beyond, more letters to his mother and father. However, I was all “lettered out” at that time and couldn’t continue.
Today is another day, another year…summer heat continues with a vengeance. The earth is burning, scorching our world, searing our souls. Losing those we love has been too frequent in the past two years because of Covid and now its variants. Last week an entire condominium community in Miami, Florida was destroyed with more loss of lives. Gun violence rises daily in America as surely as the temperatures increase. I mourn with the families and friends of everyone who must face the reality of death.
But today is the 45th. anniversary of a death I faced when I was only thirty years old: the loss of the man of letters. Born in 1925 in Huntsville, Texas, my dad survived 32 bombing missions as a navigator in the 8th. Air Force in Europe. He came home in 1945, eloped with his home town girl, had a disastrous honeymoon in Miami but successfully recovered to produce a daughter in 1946. He was unable to survive colon cancer in the summer of 1976.
My dad and I grew up together. He was twenty-one when I was born. He loved to hunt doves and quail when they were in season but most of all he loved our bird dogs who were too spoiled to be much good to us in the fields, regardless of the season. He caught fish in any tank or stream in Grimes County, read poetry to me from Best Loved Poems of the American People. He taught me how to read The Houston Post – particularly the sports section. He followed the Dallas Cowboys, he coached high school basketball teams, he even coached a baseball team in Richards when he was the school superintendent of those two segregated public schools in the 1950s. He taught me to play golf on a public course in Freeport, Texas when I was a teenager. We cooled down with a root beer from the A&W root beer stand.
He was always in school himself – the first in his family to get an undergraduate degree followed by a master’s degree that was capped off (literally) by a doctorate in education when I was also in college. He believed in God, the Richards Baptist Church, the First Baptist Church of Brazoria and finally the First Baptist Church of Richmond where his membership days were done. He also believed in writing letters.
This letter was to his mother in lieu of a birthday card. It’s legible, reads like he talked, and so I am reminded of this time when he was nearly forty years old and finally able to buy his first home. Imagine his excitement.
“I believe one of the ways that you have been most helpful to me is expecting good things of me. You know when you have people who believe in you, you don’t want to let them down.”
I’ll close with a portion of a letter he wrote to me in 1970 when I was a student in Southwestern Baptist Seminary. He and I had an ongoing joke about my mother’s obsession with her camellias – hence his acknowledgment he was learning the names. Good one. Then he closed with a blessing from a Native American proverb. When I was a child, he regaled me with fictional stories about his rides with the Pony Express. I think this is a beautiful ending message so I wanted to share this with my followers in cyberspace who may appreciate the comfort he captured. My dad may have truly loved those bird dogs, but I know he also loved me.
“May you keep your heart like the morning and may you come slowly to the four corners where men say goodnight.”
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Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.
I'll Call It Like I See It 
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