The First Saturday in May

I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and my mother grew up there, and my father lived there long enough to meet my mother. My mother’s parents lived there all their adult lives. Thus the Kentucky Derby was one of our family’s High Holy Days. My parents always threw a well-attended Derby party. There were Mint Juleps served in icy silver cups. Of course there were hats, and there was also betting that my father would record with a black marker on a big poster board. Traditions, right? Things could get loud. “Friendly wagers.” Of course.

Derby Day, 1996 or 1997. With me ma and pa.

I was horse crazy from early on. When we lived in Atlanta, sometime around when I was four years old, I remember being at a riding ring watching my mother on horseback, and someone handed me up to her, and she placed me in front of the English saddle, and her two hands on the reins kept me in place while she urged the horse into a gentle canter, and I remember the wondrous feeling that was not quite like flying but not far from it.

In grade school, even though we’d move to a new city about every other year, each summer my parents would send me to stay a while with my grandparents in Louisville, who remained for decades in the sweet red brick house that sat atop a grassy little hill on Gresham Road. During my tenure there, I’d be dispatched for a week or two to Longview Riding Camp in Georgetown, Kentucky, owned and run by one of my mom’s Chi O sorority sisters, “Perky” Ellison. We’d ride twice a day, and at the end of each weekly session there would be a horse show. Perky’s daughter Shannon, with dark hair and dark eyes, was a champion horse show rider with dozens of blue ribbons and trophies, and she and her Thoroughbred, Jefferson Davis (I know, I know. Context: the South in the 1960s.), held us all in thrall. Once, when he had an upset stomach, we gathered around and watched in amazement while she lifted a glass bottle of warm Coca-Cola to his horsey lips, and he nuzzled at the bottle’s long neck, and then she poured the entire thing down his throat, which he seemed grateful for.

When my family landed on our Ohio farm and knew we’d stay a while, my parents bought me a Quarter Horse, Hobo, that a trail riding business was unloading for cheap. I learned why. He was stubborn and rude and spent a good deal of time trying to get me off his back. He’d brake hard without warning to see if he could use physics to toss me over his head. He’d veer toward a tree, hoping to smash my leg against it and unseat me. Sometimes, he’d ignore my commands to go forward and instead spin in a slow, maddening circle. I guess he thought I’d get dizzy and tumble off. On occasion, he’d run away with me, careening through the fields that were dangerously pocked with groundhog holes, and even if I pulled so hard on the reins that I was practically lying on his back, he paid no mind, he was that tough-mouthed.

This pin is one of the few pieces of my mom’s jewelry I kept. She wore it every Derby Day.

For a while he got into the nasty habit of biting, once connecting with one of my very tender thirteen-year-old breasts, leaving a large, lumpy purple bruise. The last time he tried to bite me, I was on his back and he casually reached his head around toward my leg, thinking he was going to grab a hunk of my calf. Instead, I leaned forward and grabbed his right ear and bit hard enough to draw blood. I had to hold on tight for a few minutes, but that horse never tried to bite me again.

I was crazy about the son-of-a-bitch. We were buddies. He let me pick his hooves and pull and tug burrs out of his mane and tail with no complaints, and, astonishingly, he never ever kicked at me. After a while, when I rode him, I didn’t even bother with a saddle anymore. For an old guy, he was surprisingly spry jumping over the occasional fallen tree we’d encounter. He carried me over acres and miles of meadows, woods, and country roads and didn’t mind when I’d stay on his back as we swam in the cool reservoir near our farm. On lazy summer afternoons we’d take a break in the middle of a long ride and I’d drop the reins so he could munch on lush green grass while I reclined onto his sun-warmed rump and dozed. He could go all day, and sometimes we did.

My parents sold the Ohio farm in the spring of my sophomore year in college and moved to Florida. Hobo went to live out his days in comfort elsewhere, and he’d sure earned it.

The following year, 1973, I attended my first and only Kentucky Derby, when Secretariat ran away with that race, and then in the following weeks took the Triple Crown in two more stunning races. (His records for fastest time in all three races still stand.) I was at the Derby that year with some friends from Wittenberg. I was shit-faced on the vodka-spiked watermelon and gin-and-tonics we’d smuggled in, and frustrated that from the infield, where all us riff-raff were relegated, you couldn’t see a ding-dang thing of the actual races, only vague shapes floating by as if we were watching watery images from a Zoetrope. At one point I recall grabbing some guy who happened to walk past and climbing onto his shoulders, but the fences still obscured the view of the track.

Later, after I sobered up, I watched the TV replay of the historic race and, covered over with goosebumps, wept as Secretariat pulled ahead and then away and then crossed the finish line. That happens every time I see the video, by the way. The wonder of it never leaves. The heart of that horse. The magnificent heart. His beautiful red flanks. The long, elegant stride that made it seem he defied gravity.

Noting the fifty-year anniversary of Big Red’s big win, the Washington Post published this article about Secretariat’s “immortal wonder.” The piece includes a video of the race.

Watching it, I realized as the television camera sweeps over the infield, that somewhere in that sea of people is twenty-year-old me, happily pie-eyed and unaware of all that the coming half-century will bring — the joys and the heartaches, the turns my life will take, the losses and gains, the unexpected wonders and the unrelenting, dogged forward lean of time.

And then, much later, the way the years will become almost weightless, floating away from beneath me like sighs on the wind.