Ashley didn’t go back to the gym. She moped for three days. Then she began to picture the difficulty she faced as a huge boulder in her path. And boulders, she knew, could be moved, or at least chipped at, in a variety of ways.
She began talking to her gym friends when she saw them at school. That in itself was a disillusioning process, as several no longer considered themselves her friends because she didn’t train in their gym. But some of the lower level gymnasts, most of whom Ashley hadn’t before taken the time to get to know, turned out to be solid companions and confidants, holding no bad feelings toward her because of her predicament.
Amongst all of her friends, old and new, Ashley was able to borrow every gymnastics magazine available in the English language, and by the end of the school year her mother had helped her to write letters to every gym in the United States and Canada that advertised any kind of residential training program.
One evening in late June, after Ashley and her parents had eaten a pleasant dinner, she decided the time was right.
“Hey Dad, can I show you the stuff I’ve been getting from gyms? I think I’ve gotten them all now, except for one that closed and I got my own letter back.”
“Sure, Ashley. Let’s take a look,” her father said, getting comfortable in his favorite stuffed chair in the living room. “There’s nothing I want to watch on the tube tonight. How about you, Mom?” he said, craning his neck toward the kitchen.
“I’m just doing the dishes and finishing that sweater for your niece,” she said from the other room.
Ashley ran to her bedroom and dashed back with the shoe box full of envelopes and papers.
“Oh, boy, where do we start?” her father said. “Why don’t you first show us the one you like best?”
“Okay! It’s this one.” She handed him an envelope that had a letter and a thick full-color brochure in it.
“Hmm. Fancy place... Phoenix, Arizona... Twenty thousand square feet...
Beginners through world class elite. It even has pictures of their gymnasts who have been champions... state... nationals... even the Olympics. Now lets take a look at the bottom line... room, board, and supervision, with elite optionals program, two thousand five hundred fifty dollars a month.” He glanced at Ashley, and realized she had no idea how that figure compared with their income.
“What do you think?” the eleven-year-old asked excitedly.
“Very nice. And I truly wish we could consider it, but we can’t. So now let’s take a look at the lowest priced one, shall we?”
“I know which one that is, too.”
“Smart girl. Hmm... over near Chicago... smaller, no names of champions to flash... not a great neighborhood, if I remember Chicago at all. Six student dorm room, basic board, clothing and spending money not included, twelve hundred a month.”
At that moment his wife sat down near them on the couch, knitting basket in hand. He leaned back in his comfortable chair and closed his eyes to plan how to say what he had to say. Finally he leaned forward and hunched down to her level as much as he could. “Ashley, dear child, when we adopted you, we knew there would be expenses, especially as you got older. We thought about it hard, and decided we would do it with glad hearts. And you told us clearly that we could only have you if you could have gymnastics lessons.
Over the years, those lessons have gone from forty to one hundred and fifty dollars a month, and we have paid for them gladly, knowing how important they were to you. We want you to know that we would do this for you if we could.” And his voice became very quiet. “I’m sorry, but we can’t.”
Ashley didn’t quite understand why, but her reaction to what her father told her was completely different from what she had felt after last talking to her coach. She knew her parents loved her, and she believed her father when he said they would do it if they could. She didn’t completely understand the stuff about certification and insurance, but she knew it felt cold and heartless.
That night in her room, as she was putting all the letters from gyms neatly into one large envelope, she admitted to herself that somewhere, deep down inside, she had known it would be too much money.
The next day her mother suggested that one of the gyms might be willing to let her do a little work or assistant coaching in exchange for her tuition, and she could use the telephone to call some of them and find out. After six long distance calls, Ashley gave up on that idea.
All of a sudden Ashley had a very grown up insight into something that had been happening to gymnasts for a long time. She realized that all of the people who wrote the articles and advice columns in the gymnastics magazines, and all of the coaches and judges, like her ex-coach and his wife, were once in training and going to meets like she had been, and then for some reason they decided to stop and do something else. For most of them, if she remembered correctly, it happened at eighteen or twenty. It was happening to her at eleven.
She had an invitation to compete in the United States National Women’s Gymnastics Championships the following year in Miami, Florida, and her only resources for getting trained were her four by eight foot tumbling mat, her eight foot practice balance beam, and a few books and videos. She knew it wasn’t enough, not by a long shot. She was retiring from gymnastics, she realized, not out of choice, but out of necessity.
With no longer going to the gym, and then school being out, her circle of friends had shrunk to a very small number. But they were better friends, she
thought, than she had had before. They really liked being with her, and she really liked being with them. Three were gymnasts, but at lower levels than Ashley herself. Two other girls she had gotten to know after becoming the state champion weren’t gymnasts at all, and she was constantly surprised that the one she liked to spend time with the most was Julie, who was over-weight, smart, wore glasses, and spent most of her time in front of computers.
One very hot July day, Ashley and Julie were racing each other to the ice cream stand. Julie, as always, got tired halfway there and started walking.
Ashley stopped to walk with her.
“You know, Ashley, I was thinking. You should put a notice on some of the bulletin boards, you know, about wanting to train in a good gym in exchange for leading warm-ups and things.”
Ashley looked puzzled. “The only bulletin boards I know about are at the laundromat, the library, and the supermarket. What good would that do? I already know I can’t train at the only gym in town.”
“Oh, come on, Ashley! Think globally! I mean on the Internet! There are boards for all kinds of sports. I never read them myself, but I’ve seen them on menus. People all over the WORLD are looking at those bulletin boards constantly, Ashley!”
“Wow. I never thought of that. My mom and dad try to keep the phone bill low, so I haven’t used the Net much.”
“I rack up a massive Internet bill every month, but it’s okay with my parents, just like your parents paid for your gymnastics. You could come over to my house, I could help you to find the right bulletin boards, and you could even use my net address for responses!”
“Really? When can we do it?”
Julie looked thoughtful. “It might go slowly, ‘cause there are some computer games I just have to show you. Why don’t we do it on Saturday?
Connect time is cheaper, and you can have your ad all written up by then. But there is one expense.”
“Uh oh. I knew it. What?”
“You have to buy the ice cream!”
Ashley giggled and they ran the last block to the snack stand together.
Ashley didn’t sleep much that Friday night. She tossed and turned, going over and over in her mind the ad that her mother had helped her to draft, wondering if she had said each thing in the best possible way. In her groggy state, she would try a different phrasing of one of the sentences in her ad, and that would melt into a dream about the same topic as she fell asleep.
When the sun finally rose Saturday morning, she could vaguely remember one dream in which she was sweeping floors in a big gym while gazing longingly at the apparatus, and another dream in which she was leading the warm-up in a class of beginning gymnasts. As she hopped out of bed, her mind was set on making those dreams come true.
Waiting until the agreed upon time before dashing to Julie’s house was one of the hardest things Ashley had ever done. Her mother helped by reminding her that she had dishes to do, and pointing out that Ashley had not yet brushed her hair. Even so, Ashley arrived at 9:55, almost bouncing up and down on the door mat as Julie opened the door and was unable to hide her amusement at her friend’s excitement.
As much as they had begun to enjoy each other’s company, Ashley had never seen Julie’s room before. She was greeted not by one computer neatly sitting upon a desk, as she had imagined, but by five computers of different shapes, sizes and ages scattered around the room, all cluttered and piled with books, toys, dolls, pencils, and other things. The walls were covered with virtual reality and holographic posters, and on shelves there perched color organs and strobe lights amongst more dolls and books.
“Jeez,” commented Ashley, whose personal time, as well as most spare family spending money, had gone into gymnastics for so much of her life,
“where did you get all this stuff?”
Julie giggled with pride. “This one,” she said, removing the junk from one fairly new computer, “is my gaming machine. Four thousand pixels resolution, one gigahertz dual processors, two gigabytes of memory. It’s not the latest thing, but it’ll run most game software.”
Ashley watched with big round eyes as Julie invoked some three-D
animation to show off the machine’s capabilities. A winged fairy dashed in and out of forest groves and caves as Julie used a joy stick to control the flying creature’s movements.
“And this one,” Julie said, going to another machine and moving some books, “is my programming machine. Not as good a screen, but it’s got four gigabytes of memory and quad processors. I can run the latest version of General Knowledge Processor without using the disk for virtual memory.
That’s smooth!”
“Uh... yeah!” Ashley agreed, vaguely remembering that her father’s computer contained only a small fraction of the computing power that was sitting on the table in front of her.
“But here’s what you want,” Julie said as she moved a stuffed snake that was wrapped around another computer. “This is the one with the mega-baud modem, and it’ll do anything the Net could ask for.” She sat down and started to rattle the keys. “We can go into any public network nodes we want to, and I’ve put my access codes for CompuBase, PlatoNet, and InfoService into it, so it can pass all doors protected with those codes.”
“Network nodes?” Ashley parroted, confused.
“Yeah, it’s like a spider web that goes all over the world, and each node is a computer that’s set up to provide some kind of service. Most nodes have bulletin boards, where people can post notices, download programs and files, and stuff like that.”
“And what did you say about doors?” Ashley said, trying very hard to understand.
“Doors are places you can’t go past unless you have the right keys. There are nodes you have to pay to use. And there are nodes and whole networks of nodes that are private.”
“How many... um, nodes, are there?”
“About a hundred million, I think. ‘Course lots of those are private, and a bunch are in other languages. We only have to worry about ten million or so.”
“How could we ever find a bulletin board on gymnastics if we have to look through ten million computers...?” Ashley said with a hopeless tone.
“Fear not! That’s where the Net Searcher comes in. But first we have to decide exactly what key words we want to use. It can look up a hundred of them just as fast as one.”
“Just
gymnastics I guess.”
“Do you want to search the whole world? I bet it’s not called that in some
languages!”
“The whole world...?” Ashley pondered, slowly absorbing the implications of finding a gym in Russia or China that wanted her. “I don’t think my parents could afford plane tickets to somewhere overseas...”
“Then how about just North America. That will keep my connect bill down, too. And that’s only three languages.”
“Three languages?” Ashley said, confused.
“Yeah, dim wit, don’t you know that there are three different major languages spoken on our continent? English, Spanish, and French.”
“French? Oh, yeah, I forgot about Quebec.”
“And Haiti,” Julie said as she rolled her chair over to her programming computer. “So now we ask G.K.P. what gymnastics is in those languages.”
She rattled the keys for a moment. “And we get gimnastica and gymnastique.”
Ashley grabbed a pad of paper and a pencil and wrote down the words on the screen as Julie rolled her chair back over to the network machine. “Okay, so I’ll define the node search parameters first so we’re only doing North America... there, that was easy. Now I’ll define the depth of the search so that it just looks at the menus at each node... like this. It could read every public notice on the boards looking for the key words, but that would be a waste.”
Ashley thought for a moment. “Uh... yeah.”
Julie went on tapping at the keys. “And now it wants the key words. You check and make sure I spell ‘em right. It would be a total bomb if it searched the whole continent for G-Y-N-M-E-S-T-I-K-S or something equally demented!”
Both girls giggled at the thought of the computer searching diligently for the wrong spelling. “How long will it take?” Ashley asked as soon as she quit laughing.
“Don’t know. It’ll tell us as soon as it starts. Are they right?”
Ashley peered at the three forms of the word that Julie had typed onto the screen, comparing them to the note pad. “Yep!”
“Do it, machine!” Julie commanded as she pressed a key. “As soon as it makes the first meta-node connection and samples the network load, it estimates the time it will take... there, twelve minutes, ten seconds.”
“To search ten million nodes!” Ashley said, incredulous.
“Yep. There are indexes, but they’re expensive to use. Or we could do it by hand if you want. You might find a gym by the time you’re seventy-five!”
Both giggled again, and Julie drew Ashley over to the gaming computer for some entertainment. Within ten minutes Ashley was hooked on Spider’s Lair, and Julie thoroughly enjoyed watching Ashley solve the same mazes she had mastered at age seven. Before they knew it, the network computer had finished it’s task.
“The information you requested is ready, Julie,” the computer said.
Ashley jumped up and looked around the room, wondering who had spoken. When she realized her mistake, she grinned with embarrassment.
“My dad’s computer doesn’t talk.”
Julie smiled. “Well, well. Eleven gymnastics bulletin boards, one for each year of how old we are!”
“And look!” Ashley said, pointing. “You were right. One in Spanish, and one in French!”
“Yeah, Mexico City and Montreal. Did you bring your ad?”
“My mom helped, so all the spelling and everything should be right,”
Ashley said, digging the folded piece of paper out of her pocket. Julie typed it in, added her network address for responses, and they both checked it over for mistakes. Ashley looked at it proudly.
Champion Seeks Elite Training
I am Ashley Riddle, the South Dakota Women’s Gymnastics Champion. I am 11 years old now, I lost my parents when I was 8, and the people who adopted me can’t afford the cost of a residential training program in another city. I am ready to begin elite training for next year’s National Championships in Miami, but our gym doesn’t have an elite program. I would like to do chores, lead warm-ups, teach beginners, and things like that to pay for my room and board at a gym that has an elite program. I get good grades and don’t get in any kind of trouble. Please send responses to JulieMK@SouthDakota.net. Thank you!
Ashley watched as Julie accessed each of the network bulletin boards that
the search program had found, and posted the notice on each of them.
“That’s all you have to do?”
“That’s all! People are literally starting to see it right now, this very minute.”
“How long will it take to get responses?”
“Someone could respond in five minutes, I suppose. But most people I know who cruise the bulletin boards do it once or twice a week. In a week or two, most people will have seen it who are going to. I’ll check my net mail every day, and call you instantly when you get one!”
“Promise?”
“Promise! Want to play some more Spider’s Lair?”
“Sure!”
The responses filtered in over the next ten or eleven days, and Julie printed out each one for Ashley to read. They were all a variation on I’m sorry, but we get hundreds of requests for scholarships every year, and only offer 5 such positions, and those are filled for both this year and next year.
We wish you luck in your search for elite training.
Ashley’s spirits slowly sank as the days ticked by and she read each response. The responses trailed off during the second week, as Julie had predicted, and when fifteen days had passed, Ashley quit asking Julie about new responses.
They stayed friends, played computer games together, and ate ice cream whenever they had the spare pocket money. But the boulder was still there in Ashley’s path, and it had not yet yielded to any of her efforts.
During the next couple of weeks, Julie noticed that the smile faded from Ashley’s face, and the bounce disappeared from her friend’s walk. Try as she might, Julie could not coax Ashley into racing with her anywhere. But they continued to spend time together, and often Julie would just sit quietly, wondering what her friend was feeling, as Ashley gazed off into space.
It was not until the twenty-eighth day after they had posted the ads on the Internet, in almost the middle of August, when Julie found a brief message for Ashley in her mail.
TO:
Ashley Riddle c/o JulieMK@SouthDakota.net FROM: Claudia292@UnitedNations.net
DATE: 13
August
TIME:
07:23:30
Dear Ashley Riddle,
I know of a place that has a small gymnastics program that may fit your needs. It is not a typical gym, and you will have to decide for yourself if it is the kind of place you would like. To find out about it, call 800-592-3861, and ask for information for prospective members.
Best wishes,
Claudia