Horsocalpyse!

So, it’s Tuesday again. Seems like Tuesdays are starting to roll around weekly nowadays. Since when did that start happening?

Anyhow, congrats to everyone that took the quiz I posted last time. It reinforces to me my pet hypothesis that writers to tend to fall on the right hand side of the bell curve of human knowledge. That isn’t to say that quiz was in any conceivable way an intelligence test, but it is a gauge of at least having some basic grasp of the world we live in and how it works.

I think that everyone who took that quiz got 12 or 13 of the 13 questions right. Well done everyone, it might have seemed really easy, but the truth is that very few American adults are capable of getting that many right.

Actually, that’s very sad.

Moving on…

The family went horseback riding recently, I won’t try to inflate my knowledge of horses by lying here, but I tend to think of them as 1000 pounds of death and destruction. My wife thinks of them as baby dolls that eat hugs and kisses and poop love and affection.

I did grow up in the country, and horses were always around. If you didn’t respect them they would kick you in the head. I never saw that happen, but I did know two people that happened to. Those can be lethal. Also, they will crap all over you if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (wait, maybe that’s cattle, I forget now). I’ve ridden before on multiple occasions, with friends mostly, especially if they owned horses – that was when I was younger. Before last weekend, it'd been 20 years at least.

So, it was with much trepidation that I approached my black horse, with its flaming red eyes and razor sharp fangs. I knelt and gave it my offering of fine grain and fruit. And begged for it to spare me.

My wife, she got the rainbow pony. They hugged for a bit and maybe talked about puppies and sugar cookies, not real sure about that.

Regardless, my prayer to the horse demon worked, as I survived the horrific ordeal. And the missus is none the wiser towards the great evil we faced together.

That kind of makes me a hero I suppose. It’s a mantle I wear reluctantly.

Me and the two Juniors... battling evil!

Seriously though, it did make me think of my grandfather, who has long since passed away, who used to travel to North Carolina (just over the mountains) to court his woman, who eventually became his wife, and my grandmother. He traveled by horseback to see her and said it would take about a week to get there. A WEEK!

That’s a lot of love. I remember thinking I was the most romantic person alive because I was willing to drive 30 minutes to see a girl.  If you’re traveling out in the elements for that long you can almost guarantee that you will, at some point, be 1) Wet 2) Cold 3) Hungry 4) Scared, and 5) Bored

My grandfather died almost 30 years ago now. Were he still alive he’d be almost 110 years old. But thinking about his day to day life is almost like looking through a time machine.

He hated rabbits more than Elmer Fudd. He had the biggest bicep I’d ever seen on a human being in person – even well into his 70’s. And he believed cornbread in milk was the single greatest treat a person could indulge in.

Funny how things like that come just from me riding a horse for an afternoon.