Some years back we left the city to find more comfortable and larger dwellings to accommodate our growing family, both in size and numbers. I didn’t realize that if you fed kids they would grow. We bought a house that had a bunch of land in what could be euphemistically defined as “a bedroom community” with a myriad of hiking and horse trails, dirt and dust, and one huge population of flies mostly the size of a small Piper Cub. After a period of settling into a general state of acclamation I began to get severe subliminal pressure to acquire the means for equestrian delight, meaning a damn horse. Indirect comments such as “Gee, Daddy, all my friends have one,” prevailed, winning the day.
I had the sinking feeling that this was going to go the same direction as the acquisition of our fish tank and the eventual allocation of responsibility. (But that’s another story.) You have to keep in mind that our family already had:
- A dog called Rusty,
- A myriad of goldfish whose names I couldn’t keep track of,
- A stray cat that I named “Cat,” which later social pressure and demands required that “Cat” have a real name,
so I call it Rusty simply because of it’s color, figuring that if I called “Here Rusty,” the damn cat wouldn’t come anyway, and - An uncountable array of gophers, which neither of the Rustys paid any attention to.
During this time I was trying to domesticate the horde of the furry cave dwellers to teach them birth control, with no luck whatsoever. Besides that, my loving spouse suggested if successful I would be in big trouble with the Humane Society.
One day at work I was discussing some of these family matters with an associate who lived a few miles from me and whose daughter had grown and left home, leaving behind an aging Wyoming Mustang that had been trained for working cattle. He told me the horse’s name was “Lucky” in that “he used to be a stallion” (active words “used to be”), however, he had been neutered or spayed or whatever they call it. I did not say anything, but I wasn’t convinced that this was a real appropriate name. Think about that for a minute! Anyway, you know what I mean. Good old Lucky would whinny in a very high voice, thereby eliminating any doubt whatsoever about his sexual proclivities.
As part of the deal my so-called friend would throw in all available accoutrements which were collecting dust in his stable. I thought this was all the paraphernalia needed for any kind of equestrian activity. Wrong! This included a Western saddle, multiple halters with multiple reins – as in bridles, which has nothing to do with weddings.
He touted a horse blanket and a saddle blanket, and I thought “with all that hair, what the hell does a horse need a blanket for, and do saddle blankets have to be warmed up before you can ride?” Included was a horse brush, a real brutal looking implement for scraping hair off the horse’s rear end, which might be useful as a discipline tool for the kids should they get out of line, and the perpetual horse droppings. Just kidding about the droppings. Wrong!
When you buy a used car one should look at the tires, ask about the brakes, check out the engine, ask if it burns oil. You try to find out how many miles are on the heap and what type of fuel is used. In buying a horse, these questions are slightly different. For example, “how much is a ton of alfalfa? Do you feed it corn? When was the last time the horse was shod, like in new tires? What’s your annual vet bill? (This is a high-priced horse mechanic!) Has the horse had its teeth floated in the last year? (What the hell is that? Picture yourself having your teeth floated!) Naturally, I asked all ask these questions. I’m lying through my floated teeth!
Somewhere in there I agreed to take his Wyoming thoroughbred off his hands for a mere 400 bucks. When I got home that night, sitting in the yet-to-be-constructed back patio, having prided myself on making one hell of a deal, I suddenly realized that I had put the “cart before the horse.” Stark realization hit me — I had no corral!
I did a backflip into double vodka martini and thought about the problem. I had planned on a nice quiet relaxing weekend. Those concepts suddenly went up in smoke when I realized I better think about building a corral, which of course I was an expert having been educated by a well-founded Jesuit institution, (Mea Culpa is Latin for getting hit in the head with a hammer) — let alone a stall, now that I was the proud owner of a horse. Notice I didn’t say “we” because when it came to the corral construction, the “we” part went south with the ducks, but that’s another story. As an alternative, I thought about selling the kids, but we passed through that proposition during the “Curse of the Golden Fish,” so I won’t bring it up again.
I won’t bore you with the details of construction, but the local lumberyard was about $800 richer and counting. My schedule was in complete disarray. The family ganged up on me exclaiming that my attitude and demeanor were questionable, and my logic was dismissed as inconsequential because I was incapable of understanding why the damn horse had to have a house, in horsey talk — “stall.” I was learning a bunch of new phrases that are unacceptable in this narrative, if we are to maintain a PG-rated story.
You need not be reminded that the only “stud” in that corral was a 2 x 4 spruce, and not Mr. Lucky. I’m still hung up on that name and can only define it as something of an oxymoron, with an accent on the moron being the guy who bought a horse without a corral! My rebuttal to these insistent passionate inquiries was “Hey, when the horse was in Wyoming I doubt if they provided it with shelter which included hot and cold running water!” The collective common retort was “this is not Wyoming, Daddy!” I lost it again.
Any form of syllogistic logic fell on deaf ears and I was once again outnumbered 5 to 1, so I hastily drew up the plans that included a tanning booth, a Jacuzzi and a massage table for good old Lucky for relaxation after a hard day of standing around in the yet to be completed corral. I’m sure you think I’m exaggerating. Well, maybe just a little bit. To pour salt in an open wound, my ex-friend wanted to charge me rent for his corral. He was fortunate that I didn’t have any ammo for my trusty Colt 45, version 1904.
At that time I had a vintage Porsche that could be called a project car, meaning it was a real wreck, according to my spouse who knew squat diddly about vintage foreign autos. It was one of the first Cabriolets that had roll-down windows. Because of the horse, Mr. Lucky, I no longer had the time nor the funds to complete this male-oriented right-brain project. I often thought of buying a harness for Mr. Lucky and attach it to the Porsche and have him drag the wreck downtown. Said spouse suggested that I “had lost my ever-loving mind” and that I would be “incarcerated for not having the proper license or documentation for horse-drawn Porsche.”
Sometimes after work, when it was too dark to go slosh around in the uncompleted corral and its subsequent 8000 foot luxury stall, I would sit, with my vodka martini, in my Porsche dreaming that I had just taken first place at the Laguna Seca, but someone had named the car Mr. Lucky!
Now if you get the impression that the kids didn’t help, you’re wrong. They would cart the necessary two-by-fours and two-by-sixes, mix cement for at least 15 minutes a day, not including wicked weekends where their quota was at least doubled. By now, it was winter and I took my customary two weeks off for the holiday season which was spent sloshing around in the mud completing Lucky’s new abode. I came to the conclusion that there is no Santa Claus!
I’ll finish this at some other time because Mr. Lucky turned out to be a rather extraordinary member of the family even though it, (“IT” versus he or she only because of the previously mentioned loss of “ITS” stallion status and to be politically sensitive, no gender discrimination was intended. I think this is called a legal disclaimer) cost a small fortune, but had tremendous long lasting side effects that aided the growth of the flora surrounding the residence. Now that’s no bull. Lucky put new meaning into the words “Mucking around” and brought life to many heretofore dying azaleas, some tuberous begonias and one pomegranate tree.
The disappointing aspect was when we brought him home, which means I rode him 10 petrifying miles, and once in the corral, IT completely ignored the stall and spent both day and night standing in the rain, or whatever. When I went out there to suggest he use this elaborate facility, he bit me! My soon-to-be disowned offspring stayed up most of the night worrying about Lucky standing in the cold rain. My response was “Hell! If he’s that cold he will put on a blanket!” At this point, I began to suspect that when Lucky got his you-know-what cut off, whoever did it slipped up and performed a frontal lobotomy. Some people don’t know one end of a horse from the other. That could be construed as a political statement. I tried to explain this to my kids, but my lovely wife told them that “Your Dad had one, (frontal lobotomy, not the other procedure) when he was 13.”
The detailed exploits of Mr. Lucky will continue once I recover from the depression caused by the memory of these transcribed events.
The moral of the story is that proper orientation is very important and one should never look a horse in the rear end when you should be looking at its teeth to determine when was the last time it had its teeth floated. Think about that if doesn’t hurt too much!
J.J. Addingnuttin 