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Surprise 2: My Little Pony
27 April 2012 11:05 pmSo after starting out with Surprise 1, a philosophical disquisition on how much you can learn about a person from the things that surprise them, I'm going to backtrack and do a really simple old-fashioned straight-forward "Surprise!" for Surprise 2.
For a big chunk of my childhood we lived out in the country -- the real country, with the quarter-mile-long driveway and the nearest neighbor a mile away -- first in New York surrounded by woods and hills, and later in the midwest surrounded by cornfields and wheatfields. My brother and I spent a lot of time playing in the river or the barn or the abandoned chicken-house, the latter being an adventure which would probably give today's over-cautious parents a bad case of OH MY GOD NO THE DISEEEEASES, but which just gave us a high tolerance for funny smells and probably germs (I attribute my general excellent health to childhood experiences like this).
Anyway, it was big old barn, a lot of fun to play in, but for quite a few years we didn't have anything in it except mice and cats (in inverse proportions, usually) and of course ourselves. Until Christmas morning when I was eleven, and suddenly the barn had...
(That just seemed to cry out for glitter letters, don't you think?) Yep, a real live honest-to-god pony. For ME! Now, the thrill of surprise was slightly mitigated by the fact that (despite my aforementioned general good health) I had come down with a violent case of the stomach flu on Christmas Eve and every time I diverged from the horizontal, the results were rather spectacularly unpleasant. So I didn't get to actually TOUCH my pony until the 26th. But regardless, I still get to say that I got the ultimate Christmas surprise every little girl dreams of: a pony for Christmas!!
Epilogue: I had Duke for a couple of years and then traded up to Missy, a quarter horse (I was so short and she was so tall that if I got off her anywhere other than the barn I had to lead her to the nearest tree so I could climb up it and drop onto her back like some sort of "Death from Above" ambush). Sadly, we eventually moved to The Big City and there were no more ponies or horses for me. I still miss it sometimes. As Will Rogers said, "There's something about the outside of a horse that's good for the inside of a man."
For a big chunk of my childhood we lived out in the country -- the real country, with the quarter-mile-long driveway and the nearest neighbor a mile away -- first in New York surrounded by woods and hills, and later in the midwest surrounded by cornfields and wheatfields. My brother and I spent a lot of time playing in the river or the barn or the abandoned chicken-house, the latter being an adventure which would probably give today's over-cautious parents a bad case of OH MY GOD NO THE DISEEEEASES, but which just gave us a high tolerance for funny smells and probably germs (I attribute my general excellent health to childhood experiences like this).
Anyway, it was big old barn, a lot of fun to play in, but for quite a few years we didn't have anything in it except mice and cats (in inverse proportions, usually) and of course ourselves. Until Christmas morning when I was eleven, and suddenly the barn had...
(That just seemed to cry out for glitter letters, don't you think?) Yep, a real live honest-to-god pony. For ME! Now, the thrill of surprise was slightly mitigated by the fact that (despite my aforementioned general good health) I had come down with a violent case of the stomach flu on Christmas Eve and every time I diverged from the horizontal, the results were rather spectacularly unpleasant. So I didn't get to actually TOUCH my pony until the 26th. But regardless, I still get to say that I got the ultimate Christmas surprise every little girl dreams of: a pony for Christmas!!
Epilogue: I had Duke for a couple of years and then traded up to Missy, a quarter horse (I was so short and she was so tall that if I got off her anywhere other than the barn I had to lead her to the nearest tree so I could climb up it and drop onto her back like some sort of "Death from Above" ambush). Sadly, we eventually moved to The Big City and there were no more ponies or horses for me. I still miss it sometimes. As Will Rogers said, "There's something about the outside of a horse that's good for the inside of a man."
