When I was nine years old I rode Rex in a 4-H Horse Show in Batavia, New York. He was a fat firm beautiful Quarter Horse gelding standing 16 and a half hands high, chestnut coat with a gorgeous golden red sheen when the sun lit his whithers just right.
I will always remember my riding coach Jean shouting out to me as I rode around the corral with my circle of dressage competitors: "You are in the wrong lead, Phillip!"
As I had been taught, I halted Rex and started him in his gallop again. I remember the judge telling me later at the ribbon ceremony, "I would have preferred you to rein him hard left then hard right, rather than stop him, to change his lead."
I also remember an extended, lengthy and completely confusing answer Jean once tried multiple ways to explain to me about just what a "gelding" was ... which I never completely grasped. The balls and breeding were still just a bit beyond me at that age. Of *course* Rex couldn't have babies ... he was a boy horse!
I had my own horse in 1965 only because my mother loved horses and wished to pass that on to me. I do not know exactly how she came to love horses, and I have lost every family member who could tell me why.
She grew up an Ohio farmgirl in the depth of the Great Depression. When my mother was nine years old, she heard every day in school how Hitler's Blitzkrieg was rolling over Poland. She had a schoolgirl friend, Jackie, whose family kept a corral and barn where they raised and trained horses on a couple of acres at the corner of Osborne and Station. I remember clearly an old black and white photograph in our family pictures no longer available to me. It showed a docile old horse out in a field, looking into the camera, his ears sticking through a floppy straw farmer's hat while sitting back on its' haunches in a comically large chair. Smiling, his teeth bared, lips in a nicker.
I never even began to interpret the depth of her love until I studied Greek twenty years later and learned to translate "Φίλιππος "
* * * * *
My dad was a rich miser who saw no value in such stupidly wasteful things ... horses were only a sentimental indulgence. Negative on the balance sheet - a huge debit with nothing in the asset column. I remember many arguments between them over the costs. He never did get it.
He sold Rex when we left upstate New York and moved to the Nevada desert in 1968. I was heartbroken and never rode a horse again. Oh, well.
* * * * *
When my first hitch in the Coast Guard ended in 1980, I returned home to Reno for college on the G.I. Bill. My parents' had just divorced after 32 years of marriage. He had proved to be an overwhelming bully, and after he left my mother Mona tried to express herself authentically, unencumbered by his heavy influence for the first time in her life.
She went to college, and I actually joined her once in some basic classes. It was an odd time for both of us. As our academic paths separated moving into upper level work, she also developed a rare form of ovarian cancer.
I held her hand in a large variety of doctor and hospital offices, until her surgeon finally came in one day to deliver his prognosis:
"Mrs. Wolf ... your cancer is a very slow metastasizing form, and we believe your hysterectomy has removed the majority, if not all of it. We see no signs of spread in your lymphatic system now.
It seems to me you have a pretty clear choice:
You can sit home and wait for signs your cancer has spread; or, you can go on living your own life."
* * * * *
The following year, my mother studied overseas at the University of Wien, Austria. She was a psychology major with a minor in German, and desired to trace the path of Freud, I am guessing. She would find it a charming coincidence that I unwittingly wrote this from the murky depths of the unconscious mind early in the morning of Sigmund's 160th birthday.
She was the first in the Wolf family to ever travel back to Europe. She wrote letters to me detailing her adventure. There were no electronic means of email or text back in 1983. She wrote excitedly about buying a gown to attend the Vienna Philharmonic performing Strauss on New Years' Eve, and, later, of observing the Lippizaner Stallions perform at the Spanish Riding School.
* * * * *
Months later, she tried to describe to me just how it felt to stand naked inside a paper gown in a very sparse Vienna doctor's office being diagnosed with a return of cancer. The struggled descriptions she wrote of waiting alone in a bare room for a Eurocare physician, who did not speak English very well, trying with her rudimentary German to communicate ... were not pretty.
Reading her torturous words written longhand to me, I was reminded of nothing more than Gregor Samsa attempting to understand why he had woken up one day to discover he was nothing but a bug, and no one could hear him speak.
I emphatically convinced her it was time to come home to America.
I would walk her through this.
* * * * *
I lost my mother less than a year later in 1985 at the far too early age of 55. Survivor's guilt today at my own age of 59 increases with tons of weight on every page of the calendar.
My mother, faced with her own very real mortality, showed the strength and courage to chase her lifelong dreams virtually alone.
I am as joyful as I hope she was knowing she waltzed to the Blue Danube played in Vienna, had watched and heard and smelled the beautiful Lippizaners prance, stomp and leap in the remembered rhythm of her early childhood dreams.
I also remember every year that my name is Phillip
