“Hey Johnny, your parents are looking for you!”  My friend’s mother leaned over the railing, calling to me from her front porch, as a group of us were playing out on the sidewalk in front of her house.  I didn’t think much about what they might be wanting me for, as I said goodbye to my buddies and started to run home, cutting through their side yard, and the back yard of the house that was next-door to mine.  As I came around the neighbor’s big garage, I noticed an unfamiliar pick-up truck in my driveway, parked back behind our house.  There was a trailer attached to the truck, and my parents were standing there.  I think I probably slowed down a little.

It was the summer of 1965, between my third and fourth grade years at Eugene Field School, and I was 8 or 9 years old.   I say “8 or 9”, because my birthday is on August 2^nd, and I really don’t recall if this was before or after my birthday.

What I do know for sure is there sat that truck and trailer.  Not just any trailer, but a horse trailer.

As I walked up to where my parents were standing, dad gave a nod towards the trailer and said, “Go on, take a look”.

Climbing up, standing on the running board of the horse trailer, I peered in.  Not surprisingly, there was a horse inside.

Only I WAS surprised.  Why was there a horse in our driveway?

Okay, to those in-the-know, it wasn’t a “horse” in the strictest sense of the word.  It was a pony.  A Shetland pony.  An American Shetland to be precise, with a dark brown coat and a much lighter mane.

“What do you think?” dad asked.  He paused just a few wordless seconds, and then said, “He’s yours”.

And just like that, I was in the club.  One of the few.

The ponied few.

“What?” I remember clearly that I was both confused and surprised by this revelation.  Dad said, “He’s yours.  What do you think?”

“He’s really nice!”  (Even then, I had a way with words)

There were probably a million questions that should have crossed my mind, though none of them did.  Questions like, “Where did he come from?” “Where’s he going to stay?”    “What’s he going to eat?” “Am I supposed to RIDE him?” (duh)  “Does he have a saddle?” And perhaps most importantly, “Why?”

Now, looking back on all of this through the lens of over four decades, I don’t think I’d ever told my parents I wanted a pony.  I’m pretty sure I hadn’t ever expressed much of an interest in ponies.  I’d never really been around horses or ponies that much.  Despite the fact that my hometown, Mexico, Missouri was known (quite proudly, by school kids all over town, and for generations) as “The Saddle-Horse Capital of the World.”, I’d never really had much to do with horses.  Oh, like everyone else I watched the finely-bred horses at the county fair each summer.  And when we’d visit my Pa-Pa Shouse on the farm, I sometimes rode old “Blaze”, his aged, sway-back work horse.    But did I have even a hint of a desire to become a horseman myself?  Nah, not really.  Not so much.

So, in hindsight, I can answer at least some of those questions I might have posed that day, though for some of them I still can’t.

• Where did he come from?   I have no idea. Not a clue. For all I know, dad may have won him in a crap game.  The pony may have been ill-gotten booty.  (Not as far-fetched as you might think!)
• Where was he going to stay?   At my brother-in-law Ron’s farm. I presume that may have been worked out in advance?  I’d hate to think he was as much of a surprise to Ron as he was to me!
• What’s he going to eat?   The occasional bucket of oats, and lots of grazing on high-quality fescue.
• Am I supposed to RIDE him?   Duh. (Though as we shall see, that proved to be more difficult than one might imagine).
• Does he have a saddle?   No.  But there were some people who lived down the road from my brother-in-law who had a VERY snappy saddle (as you can see from the picture), and parents bought THAT for me too.
• Most importantly, “Why?”

So yes …. WHY was I gifted a pony?   I’m not really sure.  That’s something I still wonder about from time-to-time. Sometimes I wonder about it a lot. Well, to be honest, it doesn’t keep me up nights, but I do wonder.  IF there’s an answer to that question, I AM pretty sure, “it’s complicated.”

I need to deal with this right here.  I was NOT a “spoiled” child.   I did not get everything I wanted.  I didn’t.   My siblings might disagree.   I am the “baby” in the family by a good margin.  When I was born, my siblings were 12, 14, and 16 years older than me.  So by my pony years, they were grown and for the most part out of the house, so at times it almost SEEMED like I was an only child.  But I was not that sort of a whiny spoiled brat that jumps to mind when you think of the kind of kid that gets a surprise pony.   If anything, I was really pretty much a “low-maintenance” kid.   Give me a Woolworths to browse in for a Matchbox car (or later a bookstore for the latest sci-fi paperback or Mad Magazine) and I was a happy camper of a kid.

So we headed out to Janet and Ron’s farm halfway between Mexico, MO and Paris, MO to unload the pony and get down to the business of being a horseman.  But first, that saddle.  I remember we stopped at a farm somewhere on the way out to Janet and Ron’s place, went to the barn with the man who lived there, and my folks bought a really snazzy saddle for my pony.  I remember how it looked, how it smelled, and how excited I was beginning to feel about the prospect of sitting in that saddle, high astride my steed as he thundered across the prairie.   (Do Shetlands thunder?  Does a fallow field beside the house count as “prairie?”)     We also got the rest of the tack… bridle, reins, etc.   And the various combs, brushes and grooming tools that one needs to keep your noble steed in tip-top shape.

We arrived at the farm, and got the pony out of the trailer. Dad and Ron went about showing me how to put on the saddle and tack, and it was time to ride.  As I put my foot in the stirrup, and mounted up, I did indeed feel like a cowboy.  Yes I did.  Sitting up there, looking down on the world around me, I could have been Roy Rogers on Trigger.  Or, Matt Dillon on his big bay horse.  Or, Woody on Bullseye, though I wouldn’t know that for another forty years. I was a cowboy.  I was a cowboy right up to the time that I nudged the pony in the flanks with my heels and said “Giddyup!” …. Startled, he bolted like he’d been shocked with a cattle prod and took off at whatever his top speed was.  It was fast enough.  Though I held on best I could, it was just a matter of seconds until THUD, I found myself lying on my back, staring up at the clouds.  Dad and Ron came running, but I was ok.  Just had the wind knocked out of me.  I tried again and again that day, but somehow that little pony just did NOT like to be ridden.

There was nothing to do, but to give up and try another day.  A day or so later, back out at the farm, we saddled him up, and I got up on the pony.  Same result.   Dad and Ron had the idea that one of THEM would ride the pony … you know … to “break” it so to speak. (snickering, chortling, or even a guffaw or two is OK here.)  I don’t know if they flipped a coin or what, but dad climbed on the Wild stallion of the Cimarron ….er, pony… and ZOOOM… it took off across the field.    Now, dad ALWAYS had on a white dress shirt with a necktie.  In his shirt pocket, there was always a pocket protector with a slide-rule, various pens, mechanical pencils, magnifying glasses, small screwdrivers (flat AND Philips), engineering reference books, used toothpicks, etc.  You know … regular “dad” stuff.  Sort of like I carry now.  Dressed thusly, astride and all-too-small Shetland Pony, he was quite a vision.

Somewhere mid-field the pocket protector decided it had enough of this wild ride and vacated dad’s pocket.  Not long after that, dad performed an “emergency high-speed dismount” himself.  I took no comfort in the fact that he didn’t seem to land any more gracefully than I had.

Eventually, we found most of the stuff from dad’s pocket protector, including ALL the important toothpicks.  But we NEVER found his prized, personalized, engraved Sheaffer pen, despite hours of looking. (As an aside, Janet just recently sold the farm, and I must admit there was a little bit of me that wanted to give that damn field ONE more scouring looking for that 47 year-old pen).

And that was basically the end of my cowboy days.  I tried a few more times, but the pony never caught on to how the game was played.   It was clearly the pony’s fault.

I never gave my pony a name.  Several years later, a movie came out called “The Culpepper Cattle Company”.   It was a pretty unremarkable film, a “coming of age” tale about a kid who wanted to be a cowboy, and who ends up on a cattle drive with a bunch of crusty old cow-hands.  There’s a wonderful line from the movie where the kid says to one of the cowboys, “Sure is a nice horse.  What’s his name?”  To which the cowboy replies, “Kid you don’t put a name on something you might have to eat.”   I’m pretty certain I never expected to have to eat my pony.  Still, I never gave it a name.   I had a dog with a name.  “Jumbo.”   He was a Chihuahua.    He got run over in traffic. Before long I got another Chihuahua, and gave him a perfectly logical name:  “Jumbo.”   I was nothing if not creative.   Unlike the singer in the band America, I never rode through the desert.  But just like him, my horse had no name.

Gifts given by fathers to their sons can be a tricky and complicated thing.   Sometimes it’s as much about dad and HIS hopes and dreams and private motives as it is about the sons and their desires and needs.  As a dad, I know this.   I’m self-aware enough to know that when I think about a gift for one of my boys, especially the random and spontaneous gifts, there’s a fair amount of “dad’s needs” in the mix.

So I have to wonder, did the gift pony meet some unspoken need for my dad?  Did he feel like he had wronged me in some way that a large unexpected gift would make up for?  (I sure hope not).  Did he just feel particularly generous?  Did some guy at “the plant” happen to offer, “Hey Shouse! I’ve got a pony for sale.  Bet that kid of yours would really like it”, and then dad thought “What the heck, why not?”   Or maybe (and this seems likely) we’d just been to the county fair, and perhaps he saw something in my eye as I gazed at the assembled stallions and mares and thought about cowboys.

But here’s the thing.   Given that the pony was not particularly enamored of being ridden, and that I did not have the patience or temperament to master the skills anyway, and given that he was 15 miles out of town and took a special effort to get to ride anyway, I soon lost interest in being part of the ponied crowd.

I don’t know how much longer I had that pony.  Not long.  I don’t remember the exact circumstances of how we came to rid ourselves of it.  One day we went to the farm to go fishing or something, and the pony was gone.  Just like that.  Now that I think about it, I don’t really want to know.

So now that I’m a dad myself, I can wonder this and understand the implications a bit of the sudden and unexpected gift of the pony, even if I don’t really know my dad’s exact motives.  Did the fact that I never really made it as a horseman disappoint my father?  Did he somehow see this all as a failure of mine?  Or of his?   Gosh I hope not.

In a fourth or fifth grade English Class, I was assigned to write a creative essay.  My mother kept that essay and laughed about it from time-to-time right up until she passed away.  It was entitled, “The Meanest Pony that Ever Lived”.   I don’t know what happened to it, but I sure wish I had a copy of that essay now.  Even though mom always laughed at my essay, (and about dad being thrown and losing his fancy Sheaffer pen), I don’t remember HIM laughing all that much.

However, I’ve said this before, and I have to say it again here.  He was the kindest, most generous and loving father a kid could hope for.  He had an amazingly quick wit, a sharp sense of the silly and sublime, and could always tell you a story to make you laugh.  He was so amazingly attentive to both mom and to me.   He always, always, always made time for me to make me feel special.

In Gary Chapman’s “The Five Love Languages”, the two modes of giving and receiving love that resonate most deeply with me are Quality Time, and Words of Affirmation.  When I think about my father, I guess I’m kind of amazed at how deeply he knew this about me, and that he was very intentional and intuitive about how he showed that love every day.  So, I can forgive him if sometimes on the spur of the moment, he ventured over into the “Gifts Given” realm.  And maybe I can forgive myself if I wasn’t as appreciative of the rather surprising gift of a pony as I might have been.

Still, there’s a little boy somewhere down deep inside struggling to channel my inner cowboy for the entire world to see.  Every time that little boy gets a hankerin’ to put on his chaps, the geeks that live a little higher up the food chain of my psyche are right there to give him a good beat-down.  Can’t help but think a pony might help.

 Ride like the wind, Bullseye!

love,
John