Just Chalk It Up to Menopause...

The sweetest dreams of all are those that are made a reality when you are grown up and thought your dreaming days were mainly in the past. I know, because at the tender age of 38 I took up horseback riding. When I finally got my own horse, I didn't sleep for three nights because I was too high to settle down. As the years went by, and my riding skills increased, all common sense flew out the window, probably never to return. There is no other way to explain why a middle-aged wife and mother of three kids would voluntarily sit astride a large, frisky creature with a mind of its own and attempt to pierce the air with it over man-made obstacles placed in a dirt arena for just such a purpose. My addiction took on such proportions that I spent three or four hours a day on horseback, and all day on weekends. My friendships were forged on horseback--when did I have time to meet anybody but horse lovers? I had fortunately given birth all the times I planned to, because with my schedule I didn't have time to conceive, much less become pregnant. My friends and I became the wonder and horror of parties, since we clumped together like souring milk and talked horses for hours on end, once in a while taking a break to refresh a drink or grab a snack so as to return with vigor anew to the conversation. It didn't seem to faze me that I fell or was thrown off, run away with in the countryside, in danger of falling off a cliff during one memorable ride, or that I crashed over obstacles, got stepped on by my own horse, watched other people break ribs, collar bones, and femurs, and developed a violent allergy to horse dander. And my friends and I were not the wealthy, high-society, let-someone-else-do-all-the-work riders, either. We were never happier than when we were covered in dirt and sweat and reliving our ride through the countryside, where two horses rolled in a plowed field and their riders came up looking like pieces of fried chicken, or when a Swiss businessman during our lunch break stood on his head while squirting red wine into his mouth from a Spanish "bota". He even sang at the same time! We could dismount after a ride of seven hours at a sitting trot on an English saddle, our knees buckling, our backsides resembling a Nazi doctor's treatment for hemorrhoids--but our souls were intact and fulfilled.

My insanity reached its height, though, when I decided that the only way my life would be complete would be in knowing how to shoe my horse. So off I went to the Oklahoma Horseshoeing School.

My family by this time had decided there was no point in opposing these delusions. They just hoped the condition would wear off with time. But I began to get an inkling of the severity of the problem as I sat in the Mexico City airport waiting to board my plane. What in God's name was I doing? There I was, barely five feet tall, weighing in at around 110 pounds, a woman of my age about to learn how to shoe horses? It's true that the school pamphlets had pictures of women and elderly men sweating happily over the forge, but in the background of those pictures you could see huge cowboys with biceps like a work of fiction and shoulders so broad you could use them to post political propaganda. It made you wonder about the people in the foreground. Was it all a lie?

The airport taxi deposited me with my suitcases on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, in front of a huge barn-like structure. I climbed the rickety outside wooden stairs to the second floor, pushed open a screen door, and found myself in a dining area occupied by long trestle tables around with sprawled large young men in informal attire. Not a sound was heard: they beheld me with the astonishment of people viewing King Tut's tomb for the first time. I don't know if it was because they thought I was as old as King Tut or if it was all too evident that I came from a different world.

Suddenly there galloped into view a young woman of imposing appearance. She wore jeans, steel-toed boots, and it would have been easier to jump over her than go around. She greeted me with the joy and affection of a long-lost sister. It seems she was going to be my roommate.

Andie (for thus I will call her here in order to protect the innocent) helped me get my gear into our room, chattering happily all the while. The room itself was a small, windowless space occupied by two sets of bunkbeds, the mattresses of which were in such a state that they could probably stand and walk unaided by human intervention. The closet consisted of a rough-hewn wardrobe (by rough-hewn, I mean the wood had not even been sanded, much less varnished) studded with horseshoes that served as clothes hooks. Our tiny bathroom was shared with one of the mens' bedrooms, so Andie had locked the adjoining door on our side in order to afford us a little privacy. I became obsessed with the functioning of the smoke alarms; I visualized me and Andie reduced to barbecue in our claustrophobic room.

Andie and I were the only females on the floor (the other women were housed in an apartment nearer town), which consisted of the glassed-in office, the bedrooms, and the kitchen-dining-classroom space containing the aforementioned trestle tables. There were two big refrigerators, a sink, and two microwave ovens. The schedule was as follows: up at 5 a.m. in order to fight for microwave time and be able to eat breakfast before the 7 a.m. class, which took place in the same room. At nine we were hustled out to the barn, where we were taught how to remove horseshoes, trim the hoof, shape cold pre-manufactures shoes on the anvil, place them on the horse, nail them on, and how to cure a nail puncture of the hoof's live tissue--an event that was taken for granted by the instructors. These practices took place on horses brought to the school by people who were then charged much less for the service, since the farriers they were getting were of spotty quality.

I noticed the men didn't say a word to me or Andie. I thought maybe they were just shy, morose, taciturn, or insecure. But I didn't care, the instructors were superb, the work exciting and new, so what the heck. The situation began to come unglued, however, when we got to the barn.

I was shown how to remove a shoe and given this mountainous animal to practice on. He patiently shook me off like a fly, again and again. I only managed to remove four nails. A guy assigned to the same horse had to finish up. I went to see how Andie was doing.

Andie had been given a tiny, fat horse, barely out of the Shetland pony class, that God surely had meant for me until some human screwed up the assignments. Andie was desperate; the horse was so small and she so vast that she couldn't get her rear end under the horse to work on the back hoof. Every time she heaved herself under the animal, it rose several inches off the ground and uttered a grunt as the air went out of it. The Heimlich maneuver for horses was being invented here. She struggled and sweated valiently, becoming increasingly disappointed with each failure. Finally it was noon and time for an hour's rest and lunch, so we all stampeded back to the dining room to see who was going to have a hot lunch and who was going to eat his frozen meal without the benefit of microwave oven because he didn't get up the stairs before the rest of the mob.

At one o'clock we went back to the barn for a demonstration of forge work. Our instructor took a straightened piece of steel cut from an automobile shock absorber, heated it in the forge, pounded on it for a couple of seconds at the anvil, and produced a horseshoe and two punches. We were then sent off to the forges in the center of the barn, weighed down with a leather apron and farrier tool belt, goggles, and gloves. Dressed nattily in my gear, I was dragging the ground from every angle. I had disappeared beneath the apron, my tool belt was cutting a farrow in the sandy floor, and if it hadn't been for my hair and arms, the whole get-up would have seemed like a collection of inanimate objects possessed by demons. Nevertheless, in spite of having hands already so sore from trying to shape cold shoes that I couldn't turn on the faucet in our bathroom, I loved the forge work. Since I had worked with stoneware and a potter's wheel at one time, I knew how to handle and shape materials; I managed to flatten the bar of steel and get it more or less into horseshoe shape.

Andie, however, was having a terrible time. No matter how hard she tried, she could not produce anything except something that looked like a snake having a painful gas attack. As night came, we dragged our aching bodies back to the dining room to do our written homework, but Andie went straight to our room and lay down. I told her I would go with her later to the forge to show her where to hit the hot steel on which part of the anvil to get the shape she wanted. I realized later it was an offer that rubbed salt into her wounded pride.

Andie was a married girl from West Virginia. She and her husband had used all their savings for her plane trip to Oklahoma, getting a special fare with non-alterable dates. She had a horseshoeing job waiting for her upon her return, and her high hopes were dashed as she found herself unable to do things at which she hoped to excel. Maybe if she had not been paired with someone so obviously different, someone who at least to her appeared to be better educated and certainly not working class, she might have been less disillusioned. But here I was, whipping through the written work, having less trouble at the forge and shaping cold shoes, and as an added insult I was offering to show her how to do the work. Unable to accept what were very normal failures for the very first day of a two-week course, she became deeply depressed.

I found her in our room bathed in tears. Nothing I said and no help I offered assuaged her misery. She was sure she was a failure. After several hours of futile effort, I finally collapsed onto my bed and fell asleep in exhaustion.

At some point around one o'clock in the morning, Andie woke me shouting with desperation. She had spent hours trying to phone her husband to tell him she planned to return immediately and rescue their savings while she still could; but he hadn't answered the phone until the early morning hours. He had been in the hospital with her father, who had black lung disease and had become critically ill suddenly. She had then called the airline, only to find out she had to buy a return ticket and would be reimbursed later. Yelling and crying, poor Andie dashed round the halls, not knowing what to do.

I began to realize that things were going to get out of hand. All those good 0l' cowboys were holed up in the bedrooms, terrified, as Andie banged on their doors with God knows what end in mind. Twice she phoned the owner of the school, who tried to tell her that he would be happy to give her a refund, which she had to have in order to purchase a plane ticket, but no banks were open at that hour and no planes were leaving either. He said he would be there first thing in the morning to help her. That was all it took to push Andie right over the edge, and she took me with her.

The more she thought about the owner's reluctance to show up at the school immediately, the angrier she became. She made another round of banging on doors, shouting incoherently. A young man, Tim, also from West Virginia, not much bigger than but with brass you-know-whats, came out to help me settle Andie down, but she got wilder and wilder in her opinion of the school owner, and finally she decided that something had to be done. Her first idea was to take the fire extinguisher closest at hand and throw it through the glass of the little office. The more she thought about it, the better the idea seemed. Tim and I came up with some really off-the-wall reasons for not doing it--things that ranged from possible damage to the indispensible fire extinguisher to getting glass shards in a microwave, thus blowing up our collective meal supplies or freezing our digestive tracts. These reasons seemed to bear little weight with Andie.

A better idea illuminated her. With a mad glow of inspiration in her eye, she informed us that on second thought, she had decided to burn the place down. Now I really began to worry. I pictured those cowboys huddled at the head of their beds, covers pulled up over their eyes in terror, getting cooked to a nice turn in that tinderbox of a school. Tim sat horrified, convinced she was capable of carrying out her threat. And then, in a moment of what I was sure was inspired genius, I came up with a reason that I was certain would stop her ranting.

"Listen, Andie," I stated in my most maternal, reasonable voice, "if you do anything to the school, the only thing that is going to happen is that you'll get arrested and put in jail. If that happens, you won't get home in time to see your father alive. And how will that make you feel?"

"I don't care," she moaned, "I've been in jail before! I grabbed a doctor who called my dad an ol' worthless drunk and I threw him through a plate glass window!"

It is the absolute truth that the only thing that went through my mind then, over and over again like a mantra, was "Thank God she likes me! Thank God she likes me!"

From three a.m. until seven the next morning, Tim and I talked to Andie non-stop. I haven't a clue as to what we said; my mind had gone into automatic. But I remember Andie, sitting on the edge of her bed, rocking back and forth and saying the same phrases over and over again, crying miserably. I helped her pack and get her purse in order, since she was nonfunctional by this time. She received her refund and went off in a taxi to the airport.

I went to bed and managed to sleep until ten. I dragged myself off to the barn, where to my amazement, I was the heroine of the hour, probably due to Tim's version of the evening's enterainment. The boys couldn't do enough for me. They shaped my cold shoes, they shod my horses, they did my forge work, they accompanied me for lunch, and they talked to me until the sun set. In those few hours, I got to know where they were from and how they lived, and I loved them all. They came from places as disparate as Canada, Massachussetts, Australia, and New Mexico. They were answering a calling, trying something new, or out and work and searching for a better life. They wanted to know who I was and why I was there. I don't know what they thought about me, but I found them fascinating. Later in life, when too often I find myself surrounded by people so uptight they could make suppositories a thing of the past, I remember with fondness and pleasure my four days spent at the horseshoeing school, where I was immersed in a sea of real people living real lives.

Yes, only four days. By that time, the load of Mexican parasites I was carrying had put my digestive system out of whack; I was emotionally exhausted and too tired to do the work, so I went home, complete with leather apron, tool box, horseshoes, a portable forge and a huge tome on horseshoeing. I spent many happy hours helping to shoe my Andalusian stallion, tagging along with the vets as they attended hoof problems, and generally having a good time.

I often think of Andie and wonder what turn her life has taken. I worry about her. She was a good-hearted, generous girl to whom life had given little except obstacles. And I think of Tim. Are you out there, Tim? I love you.