The Roy Rogers Riders Club - MEMBERS ONLY POST
Funny how the mind works… just thinking about things and life. This is not socially relevant or anything like that, just something that popped into my head as I was cleaning up my desk.
How does this all get us to the happy nostalgia of Roy and his faithful Trigger, bunker down cow”people” and I will tell you.
Tearing up some papers and tossing them brought me back to a day around the time of middle school (that weird period between “grade school” and High School in the US), being a kid in a class full of other kids but feeling weird and different. These are issues we have all dealt with at one point or another in some way I am sure. Well the short story is there are bullies in the world, all sorts, and they do what they do to fill a hole in themselves they probably do not even know exists. Maybe to give themselves some validation of sort, to get in front of or cover up some other deficit they may perceive themselves to have or want no one to see.
Anyway the whys of their actions don’t matter so much, but the memory is of seeing paper that had been torn up on and under my desktop in class. Curiously I picked them up off the floor and starting working the ad hock jigsaw only to realize it was my Roy Rogers Riders Club card. Not sure what happened at the moment or how long and stupidly I stared at it but time stopped, I could not tell if I was breathing, the room became silent – I know it wasn’t as the asshats responsible were probably laughing until they felt the joyful equivalent of what I was feeling.
This should have meant nothing to me, dumb piece of paper, kids thing, not even a real club, never even rode a horse – bit somehow it wasn’t. It was something. Aside from having been inside my wallet, being my property, being taken from me and destroyed it was something more than these assholes could ever know.
I know much later on in life that it was a representation of my own self-worth. It was that one time years earlier going to the restaurant with Dad and he wasn’t a dick because of something I must have done, then he helped me fill out that application for the club. Mailing it in, my first outgoing letter and I got to lick and stamp the envelope. Finding real mail in the box actually addressed to me for the first time with my name written on it, being allowed to open it. Here was some physical validation I was a person, printed and typed up and sent to me with a letter and everything. It even had a coupon for a free drink or something at the restaurant inside to thank me. This treasure took its well-deserved place front and center in the see through plastic ID part of my little Velcro wallet. The wallet never really had anything else in it since I was a kid and had nothing else to store, it didn’t even fit into my pants pocket at the time. But somehow that card always moved from wallet to wallet as I got older.
Now year’s later sitting in that classroom after forgetting this card was even in my possession, seeing it destroyed, all I could feel was the pain. I was rocked to my core and I assure you at that moment I couldn’t have shared why, but I felt it all just as strongly as if I really understood it. So what did I do? What I needed to do for everyone else in that room at that moment, What I needed to do for me to make it through the day and next one and the next, to not look like I was some stupid kid. Because me not looking stupid was more important than anything else. I lifted my head, chuckled through a tiny smile, and brushed all the pieces off the desk, not looking as each one fell to the floor like snowflakes.
Roy and Trigger and Gang, Thank you for the reality of what you were to me and millions of other kids at that time and the lesson you now teach later in life that I didn't really need to worry about what these other other people thought or said because that doesn’t diminish or change my narrative. Where I am, what I have done, and where I am going have always been and always will be my own decisions - for better or worse.











