Requesting Care Proposal

GRANTING FOR THE GREATER GOOD

If you pay seventy five dollars a head to sit in a swank little theater inside an arts center, you pay attention.  It’s not a ballgame and there is no replay on the big screen, but you know major leaguers are in the house.  The cost of admission guarantees that.  Who are they?  People from the states largest granting institutions are on the floor.  You get your notepad out. 

You’re there to learn from the pros, to network, to learn to network.

You pay seventy five dollars to learn trusts and foundations give money for demonstrated needs worthy of their time.  It’s really demonstrating a need worthy of the money, but time is money, right?  Either way it’s the demonstration part that gets a hard look. 

It might seem like simple logic, but nothing is too simple, or simple enough; you notice a need in your community, a gap, and you find a way to make it smaller.  Write the idea down and show the folks who’ll benefit.  Show it to groups and organizations who will benefit.  What’s next?  If everything checks out locally, write a grant.  Write two.  Write three.  Find the money to make a good idea a reality and you’ll find people who want you to have it. 

But they’re not throwing it away.

Wrench Your Gut

DOING YOUR PART

Winning cures most things in sports.  If you feel bad, you feel better with a win.  You’re better looking; you even smell better.  People look at you and expect you to say something to help them win.  And you might help.  At least it can’t hurt.  Keep it simple, but first you have to win.

Before a dual meet one year a local wrestler asked me when he should use his special move.  He had a good fireman’s carry, sneaky, Larry Owings on Dan Gable sneaky.  He was going against a seasoned guy.  I told him to wear him down, crowd him, jerk him around, then hit it hard in the third and he’ll go. 

Instead the kid hits it in the first thirty seconds and collapses.  His opponent pushed him back and pinned him.  The ref slapped the fall, the winner punched the mat.  Then he jumped up to celebrate the miracle of victory like he’d won the biggest match of his life.  Maybe it was, but thirty seconds? 

Sometimes winning feels like a gift, the sort of gift you share, a gift others really like.  The kid with the fireman’s gave a win away, but it happens.  That’s the reason you see two wrestlers shaking each other down in the third period.  One of them is going to steal a win, rip a win; one of them will celebrate the miracle of victory. 

Miracle of victory?

Falling Through Option Gaps

WHERE IT SHOWS, WHERE IT DOESN’T

Football on television always shows the sidelines of the winners and the losers.  Look closely and you see players on crutches wearing their game jerseys.  Those are the guys who took a hit, turned the wrong way, or fell too hard.  They’re injured.  You see them and know they get the best care for the quickest return to the field.

It’s not the same for the guy limping down the sidewalk, or the woman with the thick shoe at the bus stop.  They don’t have a highly motivated care team keeping them healthy; they’re going somewhere, but they’re not getting back in the game.  They see the disparity between the NFL healthcare and theirs.  Should they give up?    

An older woman pulls her shoulders loose lifting her ill husband and gets surgery.  Then she has both wrists worked on.  Instead of freeing up her range of motion she learns scar tissue in her shoulders won’t let her raise her arms.  Her doctor says she’ll have to live with it.  Regular living is painful; exercise makes it more painful.  Live with that?   

Is that care?  That’s what they call it.

Care Views

WHAT YOU SEE AND WHAT YOU DON’T

What You See:  In a grocery store juice aisle a middle aged man hands two quarts of V-8 to an elderly woman in a wheelchair, then pushes her toward fresh vegetables.  You see it often when the major Safeway and Albertson’s sit between two Over-Fifty Five communities. 

What You Don’t:  A son and his mom collect ingredients for an evening cocktail party with their neighbors.  Next stop, liquor store.  He asked her doctor if a drink would interfere with her meds.  The good doctor said “moderation; and you too,” leveling his concern with a well aimed forehead. 

“Watch for Tom.  I think he’s pocketing celery.”

“He looks more like a carrot guy, but okay, Mom.  What about William?  He left a message.”

“While I was at the pool?”

“Maybe.”

“While I was at the gallery?”

“Probably.”

“What did he want?”

“He wants to hang out; spend some time with you.  Seems like a nice enough man.”

“I’m not making time for a man who can’t keep up.  He’s too old, son.” 

Foundations Of Care

REINFORCING SOCIAL FABRIC

 A Dream Team gathered in Hood River recently, five people making a difference in more lives than anyone will know.  Larry Bird would have approved.  Michael Jordan would have smiled even though none of the five came to shoot a basket or play a game.  They weren’t there to resurrect Olympics dreams; they came to the Mid-Columbia to help everyday dreams come true.

The original Dream Team, the group assembled for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, were on a mission to bring basketball gold back to America where the game started.  Too many bronze and silver medals made National Basketball Association All-Stars a necessity for international competition.  If you care about Olympic gold medals, you send the best athletes.

If you care about your state, your community, then you find a way to make a difference.  In the Mid-Columbia the difference makers came from Big Brothers Big Sisters and Hospice of the Gorge, from Home At Last and New Hope Farms, among others.  You won’t find Magic Johnson or Charles Barkley, but you will find Stephen Head and Susan Frost.

America needed an Olympic basketball gold medal in 1992 and sent the best.  The Mid-Columbia needs the gold in 2009 and met with the best.  Representatives from the top five Charitable Trusts and Foundations in the state met to explain how to get the gold.

Who are the top five and what do they do?

Walking Through Lebanon

THE CO-COOKING KITCHEN

Ethnic food where I grew up meant opening a can of spaghetti-Os.  The only Chinese restaurant in town sold more hamburgers than hot chicken and rice. 

The cook in the family, my Dad, grew up in a logging camp eating logger food.  He joined the Marines during the Korean War and came back with a Purple Heart, a Silver Star, and the Marine recipe for SOS, chipped creamed-beef on toast.   He said the Marines had better food than loggers.  Neither has a kitchen you want to visit on purpose.

If the path to man’s heart runs through his stomach, and an army marches on its stomach, what goes on in there?  The stomach is a constant, the food varies.  Why?  Catch a bad meal at your girlfriend’s place, or miss a day of food, and you feel like you’ve been kicked in the gut.  Take care of your stomach and it takes care of you. 

On the other hand, you’ll eat most anything if you’re hungry enough, which is a good time to try new food, old food, any food.  This is when you’re likely to believe that culture begins in the kitchen.  You want to understand.  You want to be in that kitchen.  Any kitchen.  Anywhere.

I was haunted by kitchens, but not anymore.

Washington Cares

NURTURING HEALTH REFORM

When you need a doctor, you need a doctor.  Not a social worker or advocate when the blood flows.  You’re not asking for an attendant or case manager.  You want a doctor.  DOCTOR?  It’s not a matter of which side of the aisle you sit on.  You’re still sitting in America and you need a doctor.

Right now America needs a doctor andPresident Obama is the treating physician on healthcare reform.  He is in the operating room with the sedated patient.  Costs rise by the second.  He is checking under the hood, rattling around the rib cage, tightening here and loosening there.  He feels the heart beating in his hand, and follows what the Hippocratic Oath calls for: first do no harm. 

Dr. Obama will change the face of healthcare.  It is more accurate to say he will restore the face of health care.  Gone is the high priced, high maintanence, pumped up, juiced up face of the present system.  Be ready for the school marm/librarian face. 

Think of the severe looking farm wife in Grant Wood’s American Gothic face of health care instead of the always beautiful, but troubled, Kirstie Alley.

Thank Your Robin

AIM FOR THE STARS

You learn more if you pay attention, but still learn if you don’t; touching a hot stove burns; jumping off a roof hurts; doing hard things right never gets any easier.

Is it hard to make a pile of money the right way?  Bernie Madoff made it look easy and now expects to cruise through prison unscathed?  He hasn’t even spent his first holiday season in the can, or a cycle of memorable events he won’t attend that pile up year after year until he snaps under the weight. 

Winning a Super Bowl looks hard, though Tom Brady didn’t seem to notice.  The guy racked up titles like he’s walking down the street.  Then we see it go away after an off-balance roller snaps his knee and he’s out a year.  The experts say he’s still not making it look like a walk, but he skated on Tennessee.

The big secret you forget while struggling with your hardest problems?  Everyone else is doing the same thing.  Just like you, they are trying to figure things out, trying to ignore distractions,  keeping an eye toward the future.  It takes a particular skill to do it well. 

It Takes Practice.

Rush To Care

WHERE THE NEED IS GREATEST

The St. Louis Rams are down.  How far?  So far down that they need a caregiver, someone to give them a boost, a pat on the fanny when things go right, a hug when they don’t. 

That’s all Rush Limbaugh wanted to do.

How do you know when you need a caregiver?  When someone moves from their regular home or apartment to an assisted living facility, it means they need a little help getting around on their own.  Maybe a lot of help.  Any mention of the Rams moving back to Los Angeles tells you the sort of shape they are in.  They need a caregiver.

Owners moving teams from town to town shouldn’t be a surprise anymore.  If they could out-source their labor costs, they would, but it’s football and no one else plays it right.  We don’t need to see more confused Russian shot putters on the D line.

Do owners hijack their own teams to other cities, or do cities make them an offer they can’t refuse?  Either way, it has turned into Super Bowl Championships:

Kansas City gets the Dallas Texans and the Trophy.

St. Louis gets the Los Angeles Rams and a Lombardi.

Baltimore gets the Cleveland Browns and a ring.

Indianapolis gets the Baltimore Colts and a world championship.

Yet, it doesn’t always work out.

Check The Clock

TEN SECONDS, TEN SECONDS

From the outside looking in, all caregiving stories end the same; someone runs out of time.  They’re all about fighting the good fight to a dignified end.  The only rule is decency.  

All good sports stories end like that, too.  The underdog who almost wins is always a better story than the odds-on favorite laying down the expected whupping.  Remember ‘it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game?’  It was said after a late comeback that nearly won a game, along with the moral victory trophy.

The best you can hope for in caregiving and ball games is a heightened sense of enthusiasm.  If you’re a caregiver, you bring the fun, the song and dance; if you’re watching a game, take it to another level.  If you watch a game with your loved one, bark away until the end, even if you have an idea of how things might work out.  You know the clock is against you.  You know it will run out. 

It’s the same story time and again, with one exception.