My Little Pony

There's a scene in a Seinfeld episode where Jerry and Elaine go to a 50th anniversary dinner for a distant relative of his.  Over the course of the dinner, the group starts talking about horses, and the conversation quickly turns to ponies, at which time Jerry states that he hated anyone who had a pony when they were growing up.  Of course, the script was written by the king of foot-in-mouth-remarks, Larry David, and the guest of honor at the party, Manya, is insulted:  "When I was a little girl in Poland, we all had ponies. My sister had pony, my cousin had pony... So, what's wrong with that?" (credit to "The Pony Remark" on Wikipedia).  She ends up getting so upset that she leaves the table...and dies soon thereafter, because Larry David needs to take it to the extreme.

It's a cliche, these kids who have ponies.  Probably every little girl (and probably lots of little boys, too) has had the fleeting thought that it would be awesome to have a pony. I wonder how many times the mall Santa has heard this request from a little girl, who really maybe just wants a realistic-looking pony stuffed animal, but decides that it's Santa, so what the hell, go for broke.  I'm not sure if kids these days are into asking for unrealistic animals for Christmas; I should ask my five- and six-year-old nieces.  My brother might be irked for planting the seed, but that's what he gets for sitting on me when I was little and playing typewriter on my chest.

Girls were obviously into Barbies when I was growing up in the 80's, but there were much cooler toys to be had.  I experienced the advent of Care Bears and Pound Puppies and Purries.  I was generally obsessed with stuffed animals, but my favorite toys of all were My Little Ponies.  Those pastel horses with their soft plastic bodies and neon hair and tattooed rumps were the best, man.  One Christmas I got the My Little Pony castle which nearly sent me into cardiac arrest.  My friends loved My Little Ponies, too, so we would get together and create a whole world of these things, getting them into dangerous and/or amorous situations, all accompanied by high-pitched whinnying.  At home, though, this was a lone pursuit as my older brother and cousin were much more into Transformers, He-Man, and Star Wars.  I'd get in on that, too, but always got stuck with Battle Cat while my brother got Optimus Prime (we mixed all the toys together in a game called "Secret Wars").  No, I could never convince the boys to play My Little Ponies with me, the sexist jerks.

We also lived sort of out in the country, meaning we had land, but we also had neighbors all around us.  Country-Suburban?  Subountry?  Anyway, we had enough land behind our house to build a big enclosure for, that's right, horses.  My mom, hearkening back to her own childhood where she lived in the legit country and had horses, bought a big brown Quarterhorse-mix named Brandy and, not long after, got another, slightly smaller brown horse with a black mane and tail named Rusty for my brother to ride.  Despite my love for the My Little Ponies, Brandy and Rusty were terrifying.  I never wanted to ride them, preferring instead to pet their ears and feed them carrots until one time Brandy inadvertently nipped my hand and I then avoided him.

I had a job with the horses, and that was to collect strings of twine from the ground that had been cut from the bales of hay.  I'd get paid a nickel a string, and one time, I fibbed and paid myself an extra twenty-five cents (my parents, not really giving a crap, took my word on whatever I said I picked up).  So I'd do that job, but I never reaped any real rewards from having the horses.  In fact, on several occasions, they'd get loose, which would unleash a flurry of frantic chasing and general melee that left me feeling anxious and exhausted.

My main fear of the horses was how tall they were.  I was afraid of heights ever since I fell down a flight of stairs as a toddler and my dad, hearing the bumping and rushing to catch me, broke my fall enough so I didn't crack my head open on the basement floor but didn't actually totally prevent me from hitting it.  I never let him pick me up after that, and heights freaked me out.  Despite this, I was jealous of the horses and that my fearless older brother would go ride with my mom and I was left at home. It stood to reason that I would perhaps like a horse, but maybe one that wasn't so tall.

So, a pony.

As the fates would have it, my brother had a friend who had just the pony, a small gray mare named Flicka.  I met Flicka and loved her, and my mother, happy to grant my wish, bought her for me.  I have to kind of blame her, though, for what happened next as she didn't take the most logical first step: have me ride Flicka before she bought her.

I was thrilled; upon Flicka's arrival, I busted out the curry comb and gave her a good brush down, fed her some hay and water, and was ready to ride. Mom saddled her up and got me up there, and as we ambled through the empty lot next to our house, the saddle slipped over to the side and I fell, very slowly, off my pony, reliving a primal trauma of the stairs incident, but in slow motion.

Friends, that was it for me.  I was fine, of course, and it was no fault of Flicka's, but I did NOT get back on that horse.  We walked her back and I told my mom and myself that I needed to gather my wits and we'd try again the next day.

Of course, the next day never came.  Well, it literally did, but my days of horse riding were over after the slow-motion slide-off of Flicka.  My mom would encourage me, my brother would tease me (my dad said nothing--he took a hard pass on anything having to do with these beasts, being raised in a house with a father who said all animals belonged in the barn), but get back on that pony I would not.  I don't know how long we kept Flicka, but it must not have been for more than a couple of months before she was sold, and I didn't even feel bad about it.  I had more affection for my hermit crab.

I hadn't been on the back of a horse since Flicka.  Why tempt fate?  I don't need a horse to get around; plus, it's not like I've had convenient access to one...until I did.  As a grown adult finally moving back to my hometown, I hooked back up with some friends from high school, notably a gal who was still obsessed with horses long after I moved on from My Little Ponies and started wearing men's polyester shirts and thinking it was cool to simultaneously smoke clove cigarettes and eat pork fried rice out of the carton.  This friend made her obsession her living, managing a horse barn in our little hometown.  She lived right upstairs from the stables, so when we'd get together, we met the horses.  I decided that it would be a fun activity for my boyfriend and I to do together, to ride horses, and set a date.

I wish there was a hilarious-in-hindsight story to tell about my adult experience of horse riding because that would make for a great climax here, but I'm afraid it was simply fine.  I wasn't bucked off, and I didn't experience a sense of revelation, having made it past a childhood trauma.  It was fun, though, kind of like being on vacation and riding a jet ski for the first time might be fun, but my mind did not get blown.  I didn't feel like a badass, but I did feel like a woman on a horse who wasn't freaked out by it.  I gave it a go, kind of like when I gave oil painting Bob Ross-style a go, but I didn't fool myself into thinking I was going to then buy a set of paints.  Sometimes you do things just to say you've done them, period.  It's taken me growing up to realize that it doesn't mean the next logical step is a Flicka in my backyard.