When my family and I were on a (rare!) spring break trip to Nashville we took a walking tour with a musician friend of my husband: Walkin’ Nashville Music City Legends Tour, with Bill DeMain. It’s a great tour, even if (like me) you don’t love country music, there’s great storytelling about some real characters.

Two of my favorite stories were about champions. Yes, Bill talked about award-winners, like Chet Atkins and Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton and Patsy Cline, people who have been or still are on top of the country echelon. But for me, the best stories were about people who championed others.

Tootsie, of Tootsie’s Wild Orchid Lounge, loved her young songwriters so much that she built a room for them in the back of the bar and made demo records of their songs and stocked them in her jukebox — young guys like Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson. When Patsy Cline’s husband heard a demo of “Crazy” on the jukebox one night, he asked about the songwriter; Tootsie went in the back and brought out Willie. The connection was made, as was a hit record.

Skull Schulman, of The Rainbow Room, a music venue and burlesque club, loved to wear Hee-Haw merchandise, like overalls with the laughing donkey all over them, accessorized with a belt with a dinner-plate-sized belt buckle. He was known for giving young folks their first chance in Nashville — they’d play with the house band, who’d stay on the stage when the song set was done so they could accompany the stripper. Skull was also known for slipping some money to kids he believed in, something that may have kept Tim McGraw in town when he was close to giving up.

It got me thinking: very, very few of us will be world-famous for what we do, but it’s not hard to champion others. We don’t even need to own a music club. If we know someone who makes art, we can buy some or go to a show, and talk about it. We can support the passions of our friends by giving money to their organizations or volunteering for their events (or both!). We can read our friends’ books (either purchased or borrowed from the library) and leave a review or just talk about it. It’s that simple. And that fun.

Now, I’m not saying that one day a tour guide will tell stories about you, but you never know…

Here are some things I’m championing lately:

• DisArts Festival: going on right now in downtown Grand Rapids, events and exhibits every day until Saturday, April 25, with special family activities on Saturdays. Let’s use our imaginations to bust through stereotypes of people with disabilities while celebrating their creativity. I can’t wait to get downtown.
• Writer Unboxed: They’re a popular writing group blog, so they don’t exactly need any championing, but I’ve been making an effort to read books by the people I met there. So far I’ve read Poole’s Paradise and Lucy in the Sky by John Vorhaus (who taught me how to play poker), The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles by Ray Rhamey, Picture Me Gone by Meg Rosoff (which is that rarest of rare birds, a novel both I and my 13-year-old daughter loved), and a project by Lancelot Schaubert and his friends. And I’ve only just begun.
• I.H. Laking: He’s a young writer from New Zealand whose Twitter presence I really enjoy — charming, positive without being smarmy, funny without being rude. He’s also a writer of steampunkish detective stories. I downloaded two of his stories for free and then paid for the third. They are charming. A fun way to spend an hour or so.
• airbnb: Our place in Nashville was one of the coolest houses ever, in a neighborhood with great food, and a host who steered us right. It’s great to have spaces each family member (particularly the teenagers) can retreat to at times, which is almost impossible to do in a hotel room. And I’m no longer stuck having to twiddle my thumbs when I wake up 2-3 hours before everyone else. Seriously, I may almost never stay in a hotel again.

How about you? What are you championing these days?

Or, How a Drudge Becomes a Calling, Part II (you can see Part I here)

It is time for girls soccer at my daughter’s school, which means many things — smelly socks, mad scrambles for hair ties, more dinners at Subway than I can stand. Did I mention the unholy stench of the feet? But the thing any middle school sports season always means for me is heavy use of the Ministry of Rides and Snacks.

I haven’t written about this before, because it smacks a little too much of, “I am awesome!” for my tastes, but I was telling some friends about it, and they insisted. (So if you think I’m being too self-congratulatory, let me know, and I’ll tell you who to blame.)

Here’s the situation. At my kids’ elementary and middle school, over 80% of the students qualify for free or reduced hot lunch; many also get free breakfast and a free bag lunch from a local organization. There are kids there from over 50 countries, and when I say “from” I mean actually from; there are recent immigrants who don’t speak much English and children whose families came over when they were very young, so the kids’ English is good, but the parents, not so much.

It’s always easy to find my kids in a school crowd; all I have to do is look for the blonde heads. But there aren’t many stay-at-home parents to come and volunteer in the school. There aren’t many families who have two vehicles, or who can take time off work to watch their children play a sport.

And kids love to play sports. Whether it’s for the love of a particular game or a chance to hang out with their friends or an opportunity to shine at something you’re good at, there is no shortage of kids who want to participate. There is, however, a shortage of rides.

I’ve been a stay-at-home mom, or at least a freelance-at-home mom for most of my years at the school, so I’ve done a lot of volunteering. From class parties and field trips to my regular gig in the library to guest editor stints for a couple of classrooms, I am a regular face at the school. And then my kids entered middle school and sports eligibility.

The year my son played soccer, two boys, both recent immigrants from Africa (different parts), one of whom spoke almost no English, needed rides. One lived near us, so we drove him home after practices and to and from games. The other became a regular rider on game days. Soon, the van was full of kids who needed rides.

I could’ve grumbled. But I chose to think of it as a way to be of service to these kids who otherwise couldn’t participate, and to their parents. Of course, I couldn’t let kids play hungry or thirsty, so I bought extra snacks and cases of water, and made sure they had something in their stomachs before game time. And, often, after.

Hence, the Ministry of Rides and Snacks.

You may be unsurprised to learn that the kids love riding in my van. There are benefits for me. The kids kind of forget that I’m there, and I get a great window into how my kids are with their friends, and what the school scuttlebutt is. I learn new slang (that my daughter forbids me to use). The girls give me hugs when they see me at school.

I won’t lie; it’s exhausting. It can add close to an hour after the game to bring everyone home. But I love this school and I love these kids. It’s so thrilling to see a Muslim girl wearing a head scarf charge up the basketball court. Or to hear dads yell soccer instructions in four different languages. The variety of kids we know from all over the world and from different backgrounds here in our same city is just … beautiful. I will miss that gorgeous diversity when my daughter graduates in June.

But, for now, I will drive. I will buy way too many bags of Cheez-Its and boxes of granola bars. And probably Krispy Kreme for the last game. And love every minute of it.

So let me encourage you: if there is something you do that you feel a little grumbly about it, think of it as a ministry. Give it a fun name. It might help you feel differently about it. (Sadly, this doesn’t seem to apply to the doing of laundry or dishes.)

In the icebreaker game, “Tell us something about yourself that you don’t think is true of anyone else here,” I have an ace: I’ve been in a plane crash.

It was January, 1986. I was 18 and I traveling from Toronto to Grand Rapids, Michigan (via Pittsburgh), to visit a friend at Calvin College. The weather was cold and icy, but that’s normal for winters in both places. We were scheduled to have a brief touchdown in Erie, Pennsylvania, but as the time for that drew close, the pilot told us that we wouldn’t be making it. Shortly after that, the pilot came on again: something was cleared up and we were going to go there.

You know that heavy rushing sound that lasts for maybe 20 seconds when a plane is first landing? It never ebbed. The whine just got louder. That was the first clue that something wasn’t right. Such a subtle clue, but enough that I tensed my legs and pushed myself back into my seat. There was a thud and snow flew back, obscuring the view out of the windows, so none of us knew what was happening, other than, “we hit something” and “we’re not stopping.”

And then silence and stillness.

The flight attendants were just as calm as you’d hope they’d be, guiding us to the front of the plane, telling us not to worry about our stuff, but to keep moving forward. To the slide.

Yes, I got to go down the slide, and yes, I did have the thought, “I get to go down the slide.” And then I turned around.

That was when I started shaking.

“The DC-9 went off the runway at about 9 a.m., rumbled down an embankment and came to rest straddling a local road” (from the AP story). It might be the embellishment of imagination that I saw a car pass under the front of the plane, but I know I watched a car stop on the side of the road (how could you not!?!), and another newspaper article said that the plane blocked the road.

There was only one injury: a woman bumped her head when she stood to evacuate the plane. We were bussed to the airport and put in a bright and airy room where several men ordered whiskey–at 9:30 in the morning. I kept it together very well. There was a gospel singer whose work I was familiar with on the plane, and I sat at her table.

When it was my turn for the phone, I called home, although I was pretty sure my mother was teaching. So then I called my dad at the office. I was working for him at the time, taking a year off between high school and college. He was having an important meeting with huge clients, but I had to talk to someone. So when I got the secretary and she told me in an irritated tone that he was in a meeting, I was just petty enough to take a little satisfaction in saying, “Well, then tell him when he gets out that I was just in a plane crash,” and having her rush off the phone to get my dad. My official reason for calling him was to let him know that I was okay, in case the plane crash made the news. But it wasn’t going to make the news. I just needed to hear my dad. And take the opportunity to not handle it like a grownup, and cry like a kid.

Writing about that phone call has made me cry all over again.

So what is your go-to story for that ice breaker game? Please share in the comments.

My favorite one (other than my own) is from the older student in my college freshman composition class: “I have 5 kids.”