Now that Matt Lauer has moved onto his infomercial for the travel industry, I can turn to a different, and personally more satisfying obsession: HORSES!
Last night, I saw a PBS documentary on Proud Spirit, a horse sanctuary in Arkansas. I realized just how horse crazy I still am.
It all began when I read Black Beauty. This is who and where I wanted to be when I was about 7 years old:
Since a real pony and a change of environment weren’t in the cards, I started obsessively collecting books and plastic horse models.
But I didn’t really meet one until I went to Vermont to visit relatives of my mother’s, who raised Morgan horses. I was 7 or 8 at the time, and those horses were very tall! Also, I had never been near a stable before and wasn’t used to the smell of horse manure. There were a lot of men around, stable hands who seemed kind of aloof. Needless to say, the reality of this first encounter did not match the fantasy.
I didn’t meet my next horse until my family moved to a suburban neighborhood just this side of rural, and there was a field with a cranky pony living in it who bit my thigh when I tried to feed it roses. The bruise, really a huge blood blister, covered most of my thigh and hip. But even so I liked that pony; I could see he had a point of view.
I didn’t find myself around horses again until I moved to Santa Barbara, and got it in my head that I wanted to ride English style. I took lessons for a while but never really got the hang of it, or rather I never got over the fear of being thrown.
I did befriend one horse, a quarter horse named Port, who had a reputation for being arrogant, but for some reason he liked me. He had the most beautiful canter, but he did not like to gallop. I used to groom and exercise him and ride him around the ring until the lessons got too expensive and I had to stop. Oddly enough, I somehow got on the subject of Port at dinner the other night, and then when I came home and saw the PBS documentary on horse rescue, my memories all started to come back to mingle with feelings of love and the fear, and then revulsion, when they started talking about Premerin ponies.
Fantasy meets reality, indeed.
Vox Pop Sudari 