Monday, May 18, 2009

To Eldon

In honor of the Preakness, my wife and I spent Saturday taking care of one of our horses. Actually it was not in honor of anything but it needed to be done.

I can't do anything with a horse without thinking of Eldon, our first farrier.

When we moved to Missouri in the early 90s and knew less than nothing about animals and the country and all that, he came and trimmed hooves, put on horseshoes, gave us valuable lessons about horses and country life and occasionally would sit down and play guitar.

He was a small wiry sort of man who looked older that he should have. He died much younger than he needed to.

Eldon traveled around in a beat up old pick-up with all his farrier tools and would spend hours sometimes at our place and when time came to write up a bill, it often seemed like it wouldn’t even cover his gas (and this back when $1.50 seemed high!) My wife got in the habit of paying him more than he charged. Bet you never say that about your mechanic or hair-stylist!

Working on horses is similar to shearing sheep: you spend a great deal of time bent over in unnatural positions hoping an animal won’t step on you, kick you or take a crap in your face!

We managed to avoid two out of the three Saturday.

After spending only a couple of hours on this; on the next day and the day after that, my quads (those muscles on the front of your thighs) are still sore. I guess I overcompensated to protect my back (a good thing) and ended up bending my legs a lot more. I will definitely take sore legs over a sore back any day. My back only hurt Saturday evening and a little on Sunday.

At one point my wife complimented my work (which was OK, nothing to write home about) and I said ‘Eldon is up there laughing at us,’ as we gamely tried to get it done.

So Eldon, if you are reading blogs up there, thanks for the memories.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Top heavy

We’ve all seen the old men wearing Hawaiian shirts, Khaki shorts with a belt, socks and sandals. (I promise, Gill, I will NEVER dress like that!) From underneath their shorts, spindly little bird legs appear. They often wear floppy hats. Apart from being gross violations just begging for the style police to show up, they also usually look top heavy. Wouldn’t take much to humpty-dumpty them right down.

Today I saw a big truck. A jet-black long-bed quad-cab thing. It had custom wheels – those silvery kind where you can see through the spokes. Also the tires were low profile – big 17 or 18 inchers but that can’t be more than an inch thick. I can’t imagine how rough the ride must be.

But the observation here is that the top didn’t match the bottom. This truck under normal circumstances with large tires, normal wheels etc. would have been a pretty nice looking ride. But with what I can only call “wheels of bling”, it looked like it was about to fall over.

Why would anybody – even someone with obvious money to burn – take a perfectly good truck and “goober it up” like that? This younger generation!