NCHA

The Cutting Horse event in the Civic Center is the one event that I look forward to every year. Even if it is sold out, just riding around checking out the rigs, the real cowboys in tight jeans and the horses whose blood lines go back as far as King P-234 is thrilling. In younger days showing horses was what I lived for. Although I never got into the cutting horses, they were too expensive; it was amazing just to watch them work. This year, however, I was observing more than the horses. As I watched the crowd mill around the question that begged to be answered was, why do people who never sat on a horse feel the need to dress up in “cowboy” clothes? It is easy to spot them. It is easy to tell the difference because they are not comfortable in their outfits and they don’t have that ease about them that real horse people do. You wonder how some of them got into those jeans in the first place and you wonder if some of them do not have mirrors. The men pull it off easier than the women although there are telltale signs. Real cowboy’s hats just sit right on their heads. Most of the time there is a mark on the forehead where the hat has been delineating the place where the sun hit and didn’t. One can just tell by the way they walk, the slow easy way they attend to their horses or sometimes just that weary look in their eyes. Then you see the pretenders, the wanna bees and can’t help but smile. So what does make people think they have to dress the part in order to attend an event? Why can’t they just be who they are and enjoy the spectacular horses and the work they do? Hope all of you who wanted to attend this year got to go, word is the NCHA is getting pretty fed up with the disrepair of the Civic Center and the shoddy way it is run. Seems like Mr. Morris would find or build them a better place to hold the event; say over here in North Augusta where we would appreciate it not take it for granted.
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I would like to take this opportunity to answer the question “what does Augusta have to do with Downtown Developments?” Contrast. The opportunity to point out how fortunate we are. All one has to do is look around our city to see that we are so much better off but the opportunity to point it out just has to be taken. We have, as I have stated numerous times, a city government that works with us and for us. We are not constantly in the news because we bicker or can not get along. We are in the news for our progress, our beauty, our people and for now, our safety. We are no longer that little city across the river people visited just because our bars stayed open later. We are no longer the little city across the river that had a hard time coming up with a name for itself; no one makes fun of us anymore, we have come into our own. We are no longer an appendage as some thought, we are North Augusta the place more people seem to want to be. Instead of traveling to Las Vegas to learn how to run a city, those folks should just come across the river to see how it is done.