china dispatch #17 - medals

I showed up at our drop-dead-amazing club tonight in time to have a puff at a cigar before starting. NBC had rented out the place for a big shindig tonight. Some guy came over and said, "Do you mind if I ask who you are with, are you with NBC?" I said that I was with the band; he asked me if I could cigar somewhere else because they were getting the food ready.

I was glad to. And especially after I saw the layout: row after row of white wine, red wine, champagne, and Lantinis (the bar's specialty that has little to do with the martini and is really just a delicious raspberry drink); table after table of sushi, jiaozi, spring rolls, breaded fish, skewered meat, buttery sea bass (the best I've ever had), fresh fruit, mysterious desserts, and on and on.

Then the people showed up. It eventually got really crowded with NBC people. I didn't see any celebrity faces, just tons of folk who work one way or the other with the network. After the band was done, I plunged into the crowd, and immediately noticed several extremely tall women with red ribbons around their necks.

It was the women's rowing team. I eventually got to meet all of them who were there (Eleanor Logan, Lindsay Shoop, Anna Goodale, and two others), shake their hands, tell them they did us proud, and congratulate them on their accomplishment. Lindsay Shoop offered to let me examine her gold medal. Cool! It was much heavier even than I'd figured. On one side is the classic woman-with-torch that they always have on it, and on the other side is the stuff belonging to that year, so it was the Beijing logo and it was inlaid with a ring of jade — white jade for the gold, typical green for the silver (Slytherin colors!), and a dark dark green for the bronze. I told a couple of the gals that they were the best in the world, actually the best: that's not their mom's opinion, they really are verifiably the best. One mentioned that she'd seen rowing in the Olympics as a kid, but forgot all about it till she started up six years ago. Now she's a gold medallist! She still seemed a bit dizzy at the thought. Pretty dang cool.

A men's bronze medallist was also there: Dan Walsh. We had a nice chat, and without any provocation he just took his medal off and gave it to me to look at. Wow! I took it and said, "Wow! ... Wow! Really?" He said, "Yeah, it's not just mine, it's yours too; it belongs to America."

What I said was, "That's really really cool. Thanks. This is amazing." What I didn't say was:

It does belong to America, but only in the poetic sense. In the actual sense, I didn't do diddly for this. I didn't wake up at goodness-knows-when and abstain from tacos and work and work and work to earn this. The fact is, Dan, that very few people — not even your parents, really — will ever know what you did to earn this medal. Very few people have ever wanted anything that badly, or worked that hard for something, in their lives. Only a tiny, blessed group have any idea how much this cost, or how much you gave to achieve this thing. So, enjoy this moment, and allow our pitiful ignorant Wow to stand in for the great "Well Done" that echoes through the Real World, unheard by us.