One dull November morning in Mr. Grisko’s seventh grade science class, we were supposed to be observing gerbil behaviour, but Dwayne Snow was whispering to my friend Karen and me about his horse, Whitey. Whitey lived at Horse Haven, way out on the other side of town.
Dwayne went into exquisite detail about riding through the woods and meadows and how the gates to the stables were opened with a special skeleton key that was hung from a nail on the fence post. From his desk chair, Dwayne demonstrated how he had to lean way out of the saddle to reach for the loop of bailing twine on which the key was thread. He promised to bring Whitey over to my house on the following Saturday.
To Mr. Grisko, it may have looked as though we were conscientiously scribbling gerbil notes, but Karen and I were actually drawing a map. “Could you get there about 2 o’clock?” we asked. Dwayne studied our diagram carefully. “It’s a long way,” he answered softly. “I don’t know.”
That next Saturday afternoon, I spread my father’s heavy wool Marine Corps blanket out onto the concrete steps that led up to the front door of my house. Karen and I settled ourselves down, arranging and rearranging slices of carrots and apples between us. We could already see the big, grey horse rounding the corner and trotting up the street and across the front yard, right to where we sat. In our pigtails and bellbottoms, we waited and waited, until our shadows stretched long and black and poured down the steps and out onto the lawn and we began to shiver.
Gradually, the sky clouded over entirely and the air around us grew warmer. Large flakes of lace drifted slowly out of the darkening violet veil above. The flakes landed on our heads like tiny constellations of liquid, melting stars. We waited and waited, but Dwayne and Whitey never arrived.
On Monday before math class, Karen and I cornered Dwayne in front of his locker. “Why did you lie to us?” we thundered. Beneath his short, neat fringe of straw-coloured hair, Dwayne’s pale, pudgy face and ears began to splotch with pink. “I don’t know,” was all that he could say.
Almost two decades later and three thousand miles away, on a clear May Day, I wound my way into Carmel Valley in search of a horse. No one told me it was an absurd thing to do. And so I drove into the first ranch I spotted on the south side of the road. A young man in a white cowboy hat was balancing a wooden-handled shovel across his shoulders. I asked him if there might be a horse available for me to lease. He told me to try the adjacent property to the east.
Next door stood a slightly dilapidated red barn. I pulled into the gravel entrance and parked my Jeep. On a patch of green grass near the barn, a sturdy, salt of the earth type woman was brushing an elderly pony. His coat was as ice- white as her own head of thick, cropped hair.
The woman introduced herself as Jean Snow. The pony was named Cloudy. With all the audacity and naiveté of someone who did not know a wit of what she was doing, I asked if there were a horse here for me to lease. I will never forget Jean Snow’s reply. “I think so,” she said.
And so there was—a twenty year old, dappled mahogany bay Arabian gelding. The first moment I saw El Ami, my heart was lost to him. I didn’t know anything could be so beautiful. For the next twelve years, this elegant and loving creature would carry and console me and make me feel competent. He would complete my dream of having a horse in my life in ways I could never have foreseen.
Together we galloped through forest and dunes. Ami knew where every fallen pine log for jumping was along the way. We meandered under the light of the full moon and pranced in the foam of the ocean’s edge. My little steed brought me to improbable places. He led me to my vocation and straight to those who would become lifelong friends.
Yet, as magical as it was to have Ami march into my world, the joy of having had him is never completely separated from the sweat and tears of having had him. Wishes that come true are inextricably bound to work and worry and inevitably lie hostage to loss.
The thing about Whitey is, that he only ever existed in the minds of three twelve-year-olds, whose imaginations gave him breath and bones. After all this time, the excitement of the expectation that he would appear at my front door is suspended and crystallised in my memory like a single snowflake that never touches ground and so never dissolves into all the other elements of experience or gets buried in the avalanche of events that make up a life.
So much depends upon where we end up finding ourselves, on who is there when we get there—and on who shows up and who doesn’t. What an infinity of possibility floats within the space of an “I don’t know” and an “I think so.”
for ami
Blesséd horse
Belovéd being
You, who are kept
From these eyes unseeing,
Speak to me still in tones so clear
That even feeblest ears might hear.
You, who are borne
On countless wings,
Hold fast awhile to earthly things.
Blesséd horse
Belovéd friend
Grief has no bounds,
Yet love no end.