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Good grooming makes a difference..
By Curtis Seltzer
I’ve twice been a groom to the same woman. The first time was 24 years ago, when I showed up at Melissa’s wedding. She promised neither to submit nor obey, and I didn’t drop the ring. I considered the ceremony a success, even though the guy playing the hammer dulcimer got the willies as we walked down the aisle, turning “Simple Gifts” into “Great Balls of Fire.”
Anything was an improvement over Melissa’s reaction to my proposal as we drove back to Washington late one afternoon. I said that I wasn’t going to move to a farm in Highland County by myself. She figured out that I was proposing and said: “Pull over. I’m going to upchuck!”
Here was a woman who directly expressed her opinions. She’s now our county’s prosecutor, having perfected her skills on me. Horse was never mentioned in our prenuptials, not even horsing around.
My second go as a groom came at our county fair in early September when she entered her first horse show on her black, six-year-old Tennessee Walker, Spirit. Melissa, I’ve discovered, is one of those women who is disabled with bridle passion. Horses can do no wrong; husbands can rarely do anything right.
I have nothing against Spirit. I pat his rump and scratch under his chin. I think he has mistaken my intentions (of which there were none). He now nibbles my wrists and gums my forearms. Men hope that one day they will be sex objects. Unfortunately, I seem to be coveted by a 1,300-pound eunuch with four feet and pointy ears.
In her Charlotte childhood, she says that she asked for a horse at every opportunity—Christmas, birthday, Manufactured Housing Day, you name it. To no avail. She lavished her frustrated horse love on wooly hamsters.
Being a second-time groom was more work than the original. In past years when Melissa made me go to the horse show, I sat for as many as 15 hours straight watching horses and riders go around in circles, usually together.
It reminded me of being in fourth grade again at our local roller-skating rink on Saturday afternoon watching the Hokey-Pokey. Except the girls here were dressed for Halloween, like either the Dutchess of Cornwall (nee Parker Bowles) or Dale Evans on Buttermilk.
This year I spent a sunny Saturday loading, lifting, toting, mucking, praising, picking, polishing, scratching, sweating, holding, boosting, feeding, watering, buttoning, brushing, moving, photographing, whining and eating fourteen pounds of high-cal, high-carb, high-fat, high-fry things that adult males can manage only once a year even with Viagra.
I also sat on the granite-like plank seats of the bleachers until rigor stiffness set in. Periodically, I was expected to pop up like a prairie dog when Melissa passed on Spirit and shout something sportsmanlike, such as, “Hey Judge. 53’s the best in the class, and if you don’t give her a first me and my crew will snaffle your fetlocks after the show.”
Spirit, who’s mainly a trail horse, rode to the occasion. With baby oil on his hoofs (applied by the groom on all fours), he walked and easy gaited around the ring as if he had been born to the oval. A neighbor asked Melissa during a break: “Is that the black horse you keep behind the barn?”
I will be the first to say that Melissa looked like a million bucks. (I better be the first, right?) She sat well (a quality I’ve always valued in a woman) and rode easily with a big smile.
And then crunch time.
A young rider lost control of her horse who at that moment decided he was a 500-horsepower NASCAR entrant. He rocketed around the ring, totally out of control. A broken chain let him take the bit in his teeth.
I was at the rail taking a picture as Melissa and Spirit walked collectedly toward me. Through my viewfinder, I saw this banshee coming up fast on my unsuspecting wife, between Spirit and the rail.
Time slowed. The wreck appeared in my mind’s eye. I couldn’t get there fast enough to do anything—even if I had known what to do when I would have gotten there, which I didn’t. Eyes rolling, ears flattened, crazy horse thundered through, missing the rail on one side by an inch and Melissa by less than that.
Neither she nor Spirit even blinked. They stopped: I breathed.
Having lapped the field twice, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., drove into the rail headfirst.
He was uninjured. The rider was knocked cold, shaken and battered, but okay after one of our local docs was fetched from slathering mayonnaise on patties de cluck and took her to the clinic for x-rays and patches.
What better performance in a crisis from Spirit could I have asked for than doing nothing? Every horse and rider in that ring should have been given a gold trophy. When in another class, Melissa won the first of her two blues (and three reds), the announcer had all the riders line up in center ring and called out: “First place, Number 53.”
No one moved. Then dawn broke. Melissa yelled: “That’s me!” She thrust her fist in the air. The crowd laughed. I hoped she wouldn’t upchuck. Melissa says her first horse show was the best day of her life. (Which says something about the last 24 years, even though I always have given her first in show.)
Melissa graciously acknowledges that I did okay as a groom. I think she expected a more servile attitude. I should have whistled while I worked. Now behind the barn again, Spirit’s eyes brighten when he sees my forearms. To him, the show was just another ho-hum day…at the races.
Maybe he was concentrating on me when Big Trouble whizzed past. We will have to talk this out, man to (sort of) man. Off limits is the subject of baby oil.
Curtis Seltzer is not a horse person. He's author of How To Be a DIRT-SMART Buyer of Country Property and contributed "When Looking for a Horse Farm - No Jumping" in the January, 2008 Equus. |
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