Blue Ribbons & Ground Beef

For Mack

The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo was in full swing this weekend.

The smell of ranch life. (No, it is not a pleasant smell, but it’s a smell we all know.)

Watching these tiny specks of kids showcase giant steers that could trample them at any moment is really something.

The hopes and prayers of these farming families hang on every one of those steers being led into the arena. Just one showing away from the grand prize

But a bad showing?  Well—

The steers don’t get sent off to the “dead sea” corral like the pigs. For them it’s off to the hamburger truck.

A tiny girl with brown pigtails parades her lumbering, gentle goliath into the arena.

It’s strange to look at a steer and think it’s beautiful.

But as I stare into his big brown eyes, he is.

Sometimes in my life I’ve felt a bit like that steer.

Just being led on to someplace that I can’t make heads ‘er tails of.

Guided on—

one thumbs down away from ground chuck.

Maybe I am. Maybe I’ve been ground chuck a lot.

It’s easy to look at your life through that bad luck, “woe is me,” lens when you’ve done it enough times.

To imagine yourself shrink wrapped in a Styrofoam tray nestled in the refrigerator section of Winn-Dixie. Just waiting for a single mother to put your $7.98 a pound ass in her basket for taco night.

But when you get stuck there you forget about the blue ribbons.

You lose sight of the other stuff.  

That there’s more path ahead.

That there’s “try again.”

The taste of the victory rodeo milk punch in the committeeman’s room.

You forget the hope that steer carries as he’s led into the arena by his David in pigtails.

Maybe we’re just all down here on this little blue dot in the middle of this place, simply trying to make our way.

Maybe sometimes we’re on the hamburger truck, and maybe sometimes we wear the blue—

And maybe sometimes still we’re just out at pasture.

Just grazing in the dry Texas sun.

I know nothing much about farming or steer showings.

Let alone what makes the prize bull the prize bull.

The feed?

The exercise?

The shower?

The judge?

The genes?

Maybe it’s the way the wind moved through the blue bonnets that day.

Maybe it’s luck—

or maybe he just believes he is—and maybe that’s enough.