Lifelong Pursuits: Musing on the Triple Crown
Justify narrowly wins in a *blanket finish at the 2018 Preakness; Source Preakness, Wikipedia
The Kentucky Derby is always a bittersweet experience for me. Most people enjoy the excitement and glamour and real beauty of the contest. In ages to come, horse races should become as iconic as the athletics depicted on Greek amphorae. These events have tradition, color, suspense, amazing beauty — everything to make them aesthetically almost perfect. But seeing these spectacles on a hostess's television screen comes close to spoiling it for me. It's one of those cases of too much information, I suppose. That and an admitted emotional connection to the horses.
I was younger than ten when I first sat on a horse with a retired cavalry officer as instructor, walking along a woodland trail so cushioned with old leaves and moss that most of the sounds we heard came from creaking leather, chinks of curb chains, and an occasional snort from a mount. Full summer shade kept us cool, scents of flowers on a wild raspberry bush, crushed green stems of undergrowth, the faint musk of clean horses came in whiffs as the air moved around us. We rode through an environment that seemed to have been extracted from fantasy. It was entirely different from following the same route on our own feet.
Like many girls, I can't remember when I became enamored of horses, but the passion has yet to dissipate in spite of the fact that I'm more than old enough to have outgrown it.
With astonishing good fortune, I married a man who found the animals as appealing as I did. We met a marvelous old lady who gave riding lessons and who found us two of our horses (yes, we came to own them), and taught us how to train and love them in suitably adult ways.
It's been a while since I have had the unique pleasure of sitting above the common order of humanity, to become a part of the grace and strength of the horse under me. We communicated through my fingers on the reins, the nervous ears in front of my face, and the sensation of leashed energy of half a ton of controlled power on which I perched like a paper monarch on sufferance. Anyone on horseback becomes a new person somehow more important, who exists until her feet touch the ground again.
Read the rest of Joan Cannon's essay: http://seniorwomen.com/articles/articlesCannonTripleCrown.html
*a finish so close that a blanket would cover all the contestants involved ©Harper Collins Publishers
©Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com
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