Smokey the Pony:  An Origin Story
February 24, 2020

     In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention here that I actually got a pony when I was a kid.  For Christmas.  When I was six.  And I did not have to dig through manure in my bedroom to find him.  (Feel free to hate me a little right now.  I get it.)

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     His name was Smokey.  He was a little white Shetland pony whose gray legs faded in color up toward his barrel (the equine equivalent of a torso) like wisps of smoke.  Or, at least they did until they faded to white altogether.  He was one of those white ponies that was born black and faded to white by about age five, like a miniature Lipizzaner.  And it was a darn good thing he was not an actual Lipizzaner, because he was a mean little cuss who liked to nip.  Got my brother on the butt when my brother was about four years old, and that was the end of horsin' around for Reed.  Somebody would have lost a chunk of flesh or a digit or two if Smokey had been a full-sized horse.

    Penchant for biting notwithstanding, Smokey was a dream come true.  For me, yes – no more riding the dog around in the backyard.  But even more so for my mother.  A whiff of little-girl horse craziness in me was all it took for her to decide it was time to fulfill her own childhood dream of having a horse.  She was raised in central Missouri, in an area known for its beautiful Saddlebred show horses.  Saddlebreds are those tall, elegant horses known – at one time, at least – for their flashy, high-steppin' gait between a walk and a trot, which made for an incredibly smooth ride (albeit somewhat artifically induced – the conventional training techniques could be quite brutal and likely wouldn't pass a test of humaneness today).  They were originally bred as war horses for generals and other high-ranking military officials who, in pre-Civil War days, needed  horses whose gait made long weeks or months in the saddle a bit more tolerable, and whose presence also exuded pure pomp-and-circumstance.  In the decades after the Civil War, the horses became a form of American bling, especially as horses generally became less a necessity and more a luxury in the early decades of the 20th century, and horse shows became a thing.  A Saddlebred became the equine equivalent of a Bentley.

  

    And my mother grew up in the heart of Saddlebred country, with a major training barn just blocks from her childhood home in Mexico, Missouri.  Walking back and forth to school everyday, she got to watch all the pretty horses.

    She longed for a horse.  Yearned.  Pined.  Wished.  Dreamed.  She asked her parents for horse.  Begged them for a horse.  Pled, reasoned, and bargained with them for a horse.  Sensible, newly middle-class people, they told her no, and gave her a set of small toy horses when she was in the fifth grade.  She was devastated.

     And she carried that deep disappointment with her for decades, until I came along and proceeded to ride the dog in the backyard. 

     That was all it took.  That was all the prompting she needed to start looking around for a pony for her six-year-old daughter to ride.   

    And that's how (or why) she found Smokey, at the home of an older couple who had purchased him a couple of years earlier for their grandkids, who had promptly lost interest.  I remember when we went to look at him for the first time.  He was still pretty young on that bright fall day in late 1985 – less than five years old – and he bounded up to the gate of his little pasture with a whinny and a buck and a toss of his head.  I was still small enough that I looked up to him a little bit, but he was pretty small himself, about as tall as a large Great Dane.  I was in love.  And for $200.00 – which was pretty steep at that time for my mother, a school teacher – we could have him, plus his little red cart.  He hadn't had much saddle training, but he knew how to pull that little two-person wrought-iron red cart. 

     We didn't leave with Smokey that day.  I don't remember what my mom told me to keep me at bay, but whatever it was, it must have been just the right mix of hint-of-promise and non-committal so as to not give away her plans and still not crush my spirit.  She had work to do to pull this off.