Camp Erin

As a died-in-the-wool Minnesota Vikings fan I REALLY REALLY don't want to post about Favre-la-palooza today. I AM actually quite glad that he has finally returned to Eden Prairie and is with the team, since I know he will help us win games this year, which is sort of the point of sports, but honestly, I'm pretty tired of hearing about him. I could go on for a long time about the subject, but I'm confident that very few of you will care.

So I'm going to talk about something else. It involves a different guy who is probably too old to still be playing his sport. His name is Jamie Moyer. Jamie is a pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies, a team which, as an Atlanta Braves fan, I hate by definition. But I don't really HATE them. I just want them to lose ... often.

Of course I don't know Jamie Moyer personally, but I did catch a special on ESPN last night that made me realize that he and his wife are one amazing pair of human beings. You can see some of it here. Their foundation, The Moyer Foundation, sponsors something called Camp Erin. Camp Erin is a system of camps around the country that helps young children who have lost a parent or other loved one grieve. It is the largest bereavement camp in the world and of course the campers, ages 6-17, get to stay free of charge.

I don't have time to write about this in great detail but I will say that it is a wonderful foundation. My own mom died when I was eleven years old and I would have loved to have somewhere safe like that to go and to experience my grief with others who had experienced similar loss, rather than feeling completely alone and like it was me against the world.

A lot of athletes have wonderful foundations that do great things for the world, and I applaud them. But this is the only thing like this I've ever heard of, and since it's near to my heart, I find it kind of special.

I hope it's okay with you all that I write about this kind of thing from time to time. I was discussing the topic with a reader yesterday (Lisa of In Pencil, visit her blog, she's awesome) and we agreed that was one of the things we liked about my blog. Yes I started it to be about queries. Bad ones at first. Then I started featuring guest posts with good queries, then eventually I wrote one myself. Anyway the point is that the main goal of this blog is still to help other novice writers avoid the mistakes I made, and to learn from them. But you can't write about writing every single day, at least I can't.

So I hope you guys don't mind if I throw in some humor or entertainment, or even something serious like this from time to time. I promise to keep the Friday successful query guest posts coming for as long as I am able.