No one in my family has ever been particularly drawn to horses. I was since birth and have no idea why.
Yet, the horse business isn’t exactly a new career path for us Olivers (my maiden name). As a kid, my father developed polio. It left him with one functional leg and one leg that has to be in a brace. It’s a medieval looking brace too — lots of hardware and leather and ratchety things that control whether his knee bends or straightens. It’s rigged to his boot at the bottom and has a big thick leather cuff that fits around his thigh. Honestly, I’ve never thought much about his polio or his brace. It’s always just been a part of him.
I did ask him the other day, after spending some time on crutches and after seeing Jeff struggle on crutches last year — what the heck ever possessed him to build a two-storey house? He said, “I was too dumb to know I was crippled. I just thought it took me longer to get anywhere.”
The closest thing to concessions my grandparents made for my father was to buy him a donkey so that during their times in the coastal range of Oregon, Dad had a way to get around.
We are conditioned to imagine a scenario where a challenged little boy bonds with a sweet, doting donkey. They go everywhere together. The donkey pines for his little boy when he’s gone, and runs to greet him at the bus stop in the afternoons. The parents regularly find their son — who nearly died in their arms — curled up in the straw, napping next to his kind donkey. Maybe the donkey was rescued from a life of starvation and torture and frequently expresses his gratitude by frolicking gaily in the green meadows of the farm, picking daisies with his teeth and leaving them at the pasture gate as a token of his appreciation.
From Dad’s stories, the donkey was about 30% assistive and 70% dangerous… and 0% doting. Abe, as a therapy animal, employed the “tough love” approach and largely ignored the “love” part of the equation. The only thing that kept Abe alive was dad’s equal measure of stubbornness. I guess in that regard you could call it a “rescue” situation. Abe didn’t have a lot of options beyond abusing a 10 year old.
Abe’s form of therapy included slamming on the brakes while running downhill, thereby pitching my father ass-over-teakettle into bushes, poison oak, ditches, rocks, and any other number of potentially deadly hazards. Dad fixed this behavior by grabbing onto Abe’s ears on the way over.
Abe was the equivalent of having a homicidal wheelchair. It’s little wonder that when I started to express an interest in equines my father’s eye began to twitch.
As a youngster, dad wanted a paper route. It’s what kids did, usually on their bicycles or walking, to make a little money. Dad couldn’t ride a bicycle with his bum leg, and walking a delivery route would take him so long the papers would be a day old before he got them all delivered. (Though, I will say, in dad’s younger years I remember him being plenty fast to outrun us kids trying to evade his discipline!) Dad employed ol’ Abe as his delivery vehicle. At 4 a.m. every day he’d swing up on Abe and trit-trot down to the store to pick up his pack of newspapers. Then off they’d go down the street, Dad flinging newspapers off the back of Abe. I can just imagine that little donkey’s tail twitching and those big ears bobbing as he and Dad delivered papers.
I like to think Dad’s donkey-powered paper route may be my tiny, faint connection to having a horse-business of my own. It’s a stretch, I’ll admit.
Dad had Abe for years, and frequently rode him to school. In 1959, Roseburg High School held “Oregon Centennial Days” and dad’s costume was complete — he slapped a stovepipe hat on and rode Abe to school, looking the part of an early settler. It wasn’t much of a stretch.
Abe didn’t take much pleasure out of anything that didn’t involve inflicting pain on a human. The only time he seemed truly happy at no one else’s expense was riding in the back of the pickup truck. Anytime dad and my grandparents went logging or working in the mountains around Roseburg, they loaded Abe up in the back of the pickup truck. Abe just hopped in like an old dog and hung his head over the top of the cab or the side-rails on the bed. Sometimes dad would look in the rear-view mirror and Abe had his head out in the wind, his big donkey lips flapping as they rattled down the highway.
Dad celebrated his birthday last month. I’m not sure if Dad’s stubbornness is because of, in spite of, or unrelated to his childhood with Abe the donkey, but he still has it. He may’ve passed it on to us kids, too.
Happy Belated Birthday, Dad, and Thanks!
