Magical Wisdom: A Christmas Story
 February 25, 2020

    I don't remember many details from that Christmas.  I can reconstruct some of them from Mom's telling of the story, and from the few pictures we have.  My grandmother, Madeline, my dad's mother, is in the pictures, so she must have flown in from northern California.  And I know my dad's brother, Beau, was there with his wife, Linda, and their infant daughter, Amanda – because Mom always mentions how it was Beau who helped her figure out how to put Smokey's cart harness on him for the first time that Christmas morning.  She says they laid the harness pieces out on the ground to try to puzzle out how they should go on Smokey, and then how they should attach to the cart itself.  She always says there was some latch or strap or hook she forgot to fasten somewhere and how it was a good thing we didn't have a minor accident.

    I don't remember any other presents I got that Christmas, or when we opened them, or when or whether we had a big Christmas dinner at some point that day.  I don't even remember my mom and Beau slipping away and being strangely absent for a while.  They must have given us some reason for why they were leaving, but I don't remember being suspicious.  Maybe I was occupied with some of my new Christmas loot.

    Someone must have told me at some point to get warm clothes on and put on my coat and go outside.  It must have been pretty cold that morning, because we're all bundled pretty heavily in the pictures.  And it must have been at least mid- to late-morning by this time because the sun is high and bright. 

    The moment my memory kicks in is when I'm walking around the side of the house, and I glimpse my mom coming up the road in front of our house in the little red cart, pulled by Smokey.  She's still a good hundred yards off at least – far enough away that there was enough time for that image to imprint itself deeply on my six-year-old brain.  I was getting a pony for Christmas!  And there he was, trotting up the road with my mom in tow.  

    We took rides around the neighborhood (we lived on the edge of town, but definitely in town).  Reed and I were both small enough that we could squeeze together in the cart with Mom.  Someone took pictures.  We showed Smokey and the cart off to our neighbor lady, Lucille.  It was cold.  Smokey's full winter Shetland coat had grown in thick and shaggy already.  He looked like an oddly shaped, overgrown Pyrenees.  

     It was magical.  

     And it was that magic, largely, that carried me through childhood.

    My parents would separate not long after this Christmas, and they officially divorced a few years later.  It was necessary, and probably the best thing for everyone involved.  But it meant that  my mom would raise my brother and me alone.  My dad had things to sort through and would not be able to help us financially for many years to come, more than a decade, in fact.  So growing up on a single teacher's salary was tough.  We turned the heat way down in the winter and opened up the windows in summer instead of running the air conditioner.  There were times toward the end of a month when we had to get creative about meals, because Mom wouldn't get paid for another week (teachers only got paid once a month), so we couldn't go to the grocery store for that week. We ate a lot of hot dogs, peanut butter, and fish sticks.  

    Most other parents would have sold or given away the pony under these circumstances.  That would have been a rational and prudent thing to do.  Everyone would have understood a move like that.  In fact, I think some people counseled my mom to do just that.  And she may have even considered it, in some of the hardest spells.  But in the end, she was having none of that nonsense. 

    You see, my mom is a magical thinker – in the best sense of that phrase.  And she is also stubbornly persistent.  Those are two of her most fundamental characteristics: she stubbornly persists in thinking with and about the magic of childhood – her own, mine, that of her music students.  And now she is working her magic with my kids as well.

     You see, she, too, is a "shit-'n'-pony kinda gal."  There's no doubt that's who I got it from.  And you can bet no self-respecting "shit-'n'-pony kinda gal" is ever gonna get rid of the pony once she's found him. 

     And it's a good thing she didn't.  Though she probably wouldn't have articulated it quite like this (or at all) at the time, she seems to have intuited that I would need some magic to get me through to adulthood.  And Smokey the pony was just the beginning.  By the time I was in fifth grade, I had outgrown Smokey, so Mom bought me a full-sized horse, an Arabian gelding named Shzad, who had been trained as a cattle horse and became my best friend.  "Shazzy," I called him. I made that horse do everything under the sun.  And a little over a year later, when I wanted to expand my range at the saddle club horse shows, Mom bought me another Arabian, this time a red chestnut mare with flaxen mane and tail named Jayya Jamana.

    In some sense, we had no business foolin' around with these horses.  They were a financial drain on an already financially tenuous household.  They meant there were a lot of other things my brother and I would go without.  They meant a lot of hot dogs, peanut butter, and fish sticks. 

    But they also kept me sane, focused, grounded, both in touch and in love with the physical world.  I would spend much of the next decade and a half of my life with those horses: the weekly riding lessons and monthly horse shows eventually turned into teaching riding lessons and leading trail rides at the summer camp where I worked until I was 21.  They meant summers spent not only mucking stalls, but also cleaning out the water troughs and then using them as substitute swimming pools.  They meant winter mornings chopping ice and freezing fingers and toes riding in the annual Christmas parade downtown.  They meant long solo training rides with Shzad in my teenage years under a rising full moon in the back pasture at Fullerton's Farm, where we boarded the horses less than a half mile from our house.  They meant bareback sprints across the north pasture that nearly gave my mother a heart attack.  They meant a trip to wine country in northern California when I was fourteen, for a few lessons with French dressage master, Dominique Barbier, whose barn was nestled in the middle of his vineyard, and who set me on one of his elegant Andalusians, and that's how I learned that riding a horse could be like conducting the gathering of a storm. 

    It might not have been a rational move on my mother's part, or a prudent one.  But it was how she made space for magic in my childhood.  It was how she, against the clamoring voices of reason and financial responsibility, preserved the possibility for magic to bubble up and pop! into my life at unexpected times and in unexpected places.  It might not have been a rational or prudent move, but this magic-making was wise.  

    And it all started with that little white pony trotting up the road toward me with his little red cart on that cold Christmas morning.  Abracadabra!