Once upon a time, when Papa was just a little boy,
he rode horses with his family, who for a time were "horse crazy," attending auctions and horse-trading and gallivanting about in cowboy hats and cowboy boots. And for a short time Dougie had his own horse, well, not actually a horse, but a pony, well, not actually a pony, but more a Squirt (that was his name, a wee Shetland pony, colored gray and white like an Apaloosa). Now Squirt was a very, very wicked pony, and took great delight in playing jokes on Dougie, whereas Donna's Red Welsh pony, Blaze, was almost as ornery as Donna, but Donna proved ornerier in dominating the cantankerous pony when it attempted to scrape her off on any fence close-at-hoof. But Squirt took great snickering delight in his unflagging ability to cast Dougie from his back, seemingly at will.
Dougie first learned how to ride at about the age of seven, and on a full-sized horse, a very old horse, a very old and gentle horse with a beautiful face only to be outclassed by his beautiful character, gentle old Sparky. This dark brown horse loved to nuzzle his soft nose into any human in nuzzling distance, and even loved to have children riding him bareback. But he did have one humorous, slightly dangerous habit. When he approached a gopher hole, or a jackrabbit hole, or the more decidedly preposterous Jackalope hole (a creature originally found only in the Antelope Valley [although other far-flung places have reported sightings as well], and is believed to be the hybrid cross-breeding of an antelope and a jackrabbit), Sparky, very cautious, when coming upon said hole n the ground would immediately dip his head to place his nose inches from the hole, as if he were worried about a rattlesnake lurking just inches beneath the surface of the round hobbit hole.The unfortunate portion of this amusing habit, was that if Sparky was easily loping across a field and happened upon a hole in the ground, he would immediately stop dead in his hoof tracks, his head at ground level, and so of course Dougie often found himself flying pell-mell toward outer space, almost always landing on his chest and face in a giant tumbleweed. Tumbleweeds, which although puffy and somewhat softer than the ground, are also prickly, and any kind of brush with them generally produces a remarkable green itch (at least when they are young tumbleweeds). when dried and ready to tumble in the Lancaster wind, they are somewhat more HARD and just as prickly, and can leave a variety of interesting holes in your skin. To his grown-up way of thinking, Douglas certainly would not wish to see any of his six children flung headfirst off a comically stopping horse (tumbleweed cushions or not), but to the best of his memory, young Dougie could not remember a time that either of his parents showed any concern about him landing on his face after being thrown from a variety of horses. And he was never informed of any insurance policy, so the grown-up version of himself must surmise that it was just a time when children were a tad more expendable, and perhaps a tad tougher, than they are today."Stop acting like a baby! Get up and get back on the horse," they scolded him, Mama and Dada did, and Donna would generally be laughing from the back of another horse, and Pammy would be laughing too behind Mama or Dada. Ha, ha, ha, hear the family laugh. Poor Dougie, his bones creaking, would weepingly get back on the horse, only to be thrown about five minutes later, and only now both the weeping and the laughing would be louder. In a two-hour ride Dougie might find himself face-down in the tumbleweeds more than ten times.Dougie consoled himself with the fact that all the best cowboys took plenty of falls. Not that he had ever seen a cowboy take a fall, at least not in any western movie (his whole family preferred Gary Cooper westerns to the John Wayne variety, and they saw almost every Clint Eastwood spaghetti western at the drive-in movies), except for maybe the cowboys in black hats, after they were shot half a dozen times. Dougie always got up, found his cowboy hat before it blew too far away in the ever-present Antelope Valley hurricane-blustery wind (always hot, never cooling, those blustery winds of Quartz Hill and Lancaster), then rubbed the dirty from his eyes and spit the mud from his mouth. And climbed back onto his mount.But that was nothing to what Dougie suffered at the hoofs of Squirt, the gentle-seeming Shetland midget horse. Dougie often swore that he heard the pony giggling madly as its hoofs thundered off into the distance, as Dougie AGAIN did a straining push-up in the dirt to get his face out of a perfect impression of his likeness in the earth. This most often occurred when they visited Grandma and Grandpa's house up on the hill near Quartz Hill "mountain," as all the Larsen horses knew Grandma and Grandpa's house as their second house, where they could cozy up to Aunt Linda's horse Geronimo and receive a refreshing snack of hay and cool water.As Squire approached the long stretch of ground before reaching the long white fence that led up to the back entrance to Grandma and Grandpa's house he would pick up his pace extravagantly, outracing all his much-larger fellows, regardless of how hard Dougie yanked on the reigns or bellowed: "Stop! Whoa! Cut it out you stupid --!"Generally before Dougie could finish his exclamatory sentence (which probably would have garnished him another spanking) Squirt had by this time reached the end of the fence and yanked a hard right turn, almost a comic book maneuver, not slowing his gallop even half a hoof beat, and so as Squirt changed direction from straight forward east to direct south, Dougie made no such change of direction and continued at the exact same speed due east (usually flying, without the aid of wings, in excess of thirty-two feet -- though the distance was never mentioned) and he would land in a perfect cowboy roll (the way Dougie imagined a cowboy would roll when thrown from a runaway pony), twirling nonstop for thirty-two revolutions in the dirt. His approaching family would only see a dust cloud rising, which they interpreted as a weeping Dougie, mud streaming from his eyes, as Squirt, laughing and giggling, nuzzled noses with Geronimo, one hundred yards distant."Stop crying!" Dada would yell, already heading up the hill to Grandma and Grandpa's house."Get up and dust yourself off!" Mama shouted, heading up the hill behind Dada."Hurry up!" Donna called from Blaze, "or we'll eat up all the polichinta!"And Dougie would begin the slow march up the hill to see Grandma (he knew at least she would comfort him). Despite Grandma's nickname for Dougie, Roos Chuunt (bad bones), he never broke a single bone (at least not in the first forty-seven years), despite all the cowboy throws from swiftly moving beasts of burden.All Stories © 2009 Douglas Christian Larsen
important - FIGHT THE FLU WITH HERBS - important
