I’m a fan of shortcuts. Not in my job, but in everything else, to make more time for my job. Daughter Francesca calls me Sally Shortcut, but it only makes me swell with pride. I don’t know who raised that child.
Most of the time, I get away with taking a shortcut. This morning, however, my shortcut required the calling of squad cars, the stopping of traffic on a major road, and me running for five miles with a bucket of carrots.
Let me explain.
Remember Buddy, My Little Pony? He’s a brown-and-white paint, and I ride him for fun. Actually, I walk him for fun. He’s twenty-five years old and he goes no faster than a herky-jerky stutter-step. He’s the Walter Brennan of ponies.
In fact, I doubted that Buddy still had a gallop in him, until this morning. When he morphed into Secretariat.
I ride with a group of other women, which means we sit on our butts and yap while the horses do all the work. Buddy is the oldest, smallest, and fattest of all the horses, usually the Steady Eddie on our trail rides, which go around cornfields and through woods, ending when we’re tired of yammering.
I mean, exercising.
You may recall that I take shortcuts clipping Buddy, which he accepts with the grudging resignation of Eeyore. I had clipped him before the winter, and when the first nice day of spring arrived, I decided to go for a ride. I slipped off his blanket, but to my dismay, Buddy had returned to his mastodon self. I had no time to clip him, and I thought, I can take a shortcut.
I headed out for a ride with friend Paula, who has a gentle giant Percheron named Dave. Dave and Buddy are paints with the same coloring, like Mutt and Jeff, only horses. By the way, I hope you’re following my references. Young or sane people may have to use Google.
So Paula and I were on horseback, walking along in the sunshine, chatting away, when I noticed that Buddy was shaking his head more than usual. As furry as he was, he looked like one of those automatic shoeshine brushes they have in hotels.
“I guess he’s a little itchy,” I said. “I didn’t have time to clip him.”
“He looks cute, all furry,” Paula said, which is only one of the many things I like about her. But in the next minute, her eyes widened and she shouted, “Watch out, he’s gonna roll!”
And before I knew what was happening, Buddy was sinking onto his knees and rolling onto the grass to scratch his back. The only problem was, I was still in the saddle.
Now I’m no horsewoman, as you’re about to find out, because I didn’t even realize what was happening until Paula told me and I remembered some faint instruction that you should never stay on the back of a rolling horse, unless you like the sensation of 1500 pounds landing on your pelvis, knee, and ankle. In other words, I jumped off like a crazy person and let out a scream. It freaked Buddy out, and he looked back, showing the whites of his eyes and so terrified that he leapt up and galloped away. He tore across the cornfield, and in no time, became a fuzzy black dot, like a period with hair.
I couldn’t believe it. I blinked and blinked. Paula and Dave blinked and blinked. And then I had to do something because Buddy was galloping toward the busiest street in the neighborhood. Either he would dent a truck or a truck would dent him. So I started screaming and running and calling 911 all at once.
“Your emergency please?” the dispatcher asked, and I kept running through the cornfield, screaming for Buddy and telling the story, like this:
“I always take shortcuts but maybe it isn’t such a good idea all the time!”
“Pardon?”
Amazingly enough, five minutes later there were three police cars blocking traffic, five armed cops, Paula, Dave, and six volunteers from a nearby horse farm, who brought a plastic bucket of carrots, intended to entice runaway ponies. We chased Buddy everywhere, and he ignored us, tearing all over the cornfield in curlicues and loop-the-loops, until I was pretty sure that he was spelling something or making crop circles.
We chased him until we were exhausted and he finally trapped himself behind a fence, just short of the road and certain death.
And so it ended happily, thanks to Paula, Dave, Good Samaritans, and the local constabulary.
Except for one thing: daughter Francesca was right.
Again.