Derby Hats, Horses and Mint Juleps

All eyes were on Churchill Downs Racetrack on Saturday including those belonging to most of us living on my continuum care campus. We had a Kentucky Derby hat making contest and picnic followed by a viewing party where we sipped mint juleps. I'm always up for anything artsy-fartsy so I of course I entered the contest, although I must admit that I resented spending money on something I'd only wear once. After seeing some of the other entries I knew I didn't have a chance of winning. But that was okay. I decided that I could add a long ribbon to my hat after the contest and the resulting hat now hangs on my door as summer decor. Resentment mitigated. 

When the contest was being discussed one night over dinner, the Art Professor asked why we had to vote on the best hat and award first, second and third place prizes. "Just the experience of creating the hats should be enough." I was quick to reply with, "Speak for yourself! We're too old for participation trophies." Everyone laughed and that shot her idea down without another word from anyone. I'll admit it, I'm competitive when it comes to arts and crafts---and mahjong. I wanted to win but I thought the better hats took their rightful places in the contest. (Photos below.) The woman in charge of the contest gave us all a small plastic horse for entering so we did get 'participation trophies' of sorts. You've got to love the humor around a place like this. 

If you're a long time reader here, you might remember two Christmas's ago when the Art Professor caused a controversy with her entry in the gingerbread house contest. It was a bombed-out house in the Gaza Strip that needed and came with a written explanation of what we were looking at. Some people thought it had no place in a Christmas themed event. Some thought it was god-awful ugly and I thought it was poorly executed but there is a reason for that: the art professor is going blind. I give her a lot of credit, though, she keeps making art and participates in anything creative around here. Her current project is crocheting mushrooms that she wants to display on a rotting log. Big ones, little ones. A couple of them look like penises that had us all laughing our guts out at lunch one day. She couldn't see the resemblance or didn't care which made it even funnier. She loves it when her art creates a buss.  

Back on topic: This week I started watching a documentary on the owners of derby race horses and I quit half way through. What a pretentious, egotistical, money sucking business to be in. I suppose if you have that kind of money to throw around the ego and pretension comes with the territory. The seven richest horse owners are worth in the billions, not millions and most of those owners didn't seem to love horses, they just liked what the horses could do for them. Race horses aren't like other horses. They are investments that are trained, pampered, spit-shined and polished to perfection and sold off or discarded to the breeding farms when they fail to bring home the trophies.

Side note here: Did you know that, Black Beauty---a book written like an autobiography of a horse that passes through many owners---is credited with bringing about an awareness that animals have feelings and it started a movement to treat animals more humanly? I didn't. One reviewer put it this way: "Anna Sewell's only book changed the world, alike to Charles Dickens 'Oliver Twist' to child labor, or Charlotte Brontë's 'Shirley' to feminism and the 'women-question.'" I thought it was just a book most people in my age bracket read in childhood. One thing for sure, it had an impact on my favorite sister-in-law who had a lot of Derby watch parties. She loved the Kentucky Derby for the horses and the hats, the upper class pageantry of it all. 

My only real interest in the Derby comes from one of my all-time favorite books and movies, Seabiscuit. It's the true story of a once neurotic horse that turned into a sports icon, a horse that became the single biggest news generator in 1938 topping Hitler, Mussolini and FDR. And of course, I'll admit to once being romanced by the sight of all the beautiful horse farms one sees when traveling through Kentucky. One of my upstairs neighbors is from Kentucky and volunteers daily at an equestrian therapy ranch near-by. She misses having her own horses and is willing to muck out stalls just to be near some. In my experience all little girls have a love affair with horses at one point in time---even if they're in the form of unicorns. She just never out grew hers. Mine came attached to a crush I had on a trail guide who worked at a riding stable near our cottage. He was a friend of my brother's and we often could ride for free if there weren't any paying customers. But every time any bare skin of mine touched a horse I broke out in hives. So after the second summer of doctoring my hives Calamine Lotion and cold tea my mom made me quit riding. That was okay with me because by then my crush was crushing on another girl who he ended up marrying.

The party was fun. After the judging we all wore our hats and others not in the contest wore assorted styles of hats, too, even some of the guys dressed up in hats and sport coats. But if I never have another mint julep it will be too soon. They were so strong I didn't think I'd be able to walk the 150 feet to my front door...had I actually drank the whole thing. ©

Until Next Wednesday....

  My is the hat is in the photo at the top of this post.

Won 3rd prize and the hat I voted for.

 

The hat on the top took 2nd prize.

The black hat took first place and it looks better in person than in the photo.

Is There Any Subject I Won't Write About?

I woke up this morning thinking that I had to pee like a Russian race horse. I haven’t been around horses enough since my teens to remember how they pee but it’s phrase my husband used all the time. I hadn’t thought about that idiom in years and I’ve never tried to track down its origin before today. 

My husband was brought up on a farm that used work horses to plow the fields before 1955 when his father bought their first tractor. A brand new blue Ford that I had to sell after Don died in this century. I tried to get him to agree to sell it after his stroke when we had an auction at the pole barn where we stored his heavy equipment but I was afraid it would give him another stroke if I sold it without his agreement. So I had it moved to a small storage unit where it sat eating up money until he died. Well, not really. The antique value of the tractor off-set the twelve years of storage fees. Tip for the day: Never try to have an argument with a stubborn stroke survivor with only a 25 word vocabulary. Sympathy will make you lose most of the time, especially when his face gets beet red and he’s holding on to your hand for dear life and repeating the word, “Please” over and over again.

I could not find a source that I totally trusted for an explanation for the ‘pee like a Russian race horse’ idiom but someone on a Reddit forum said it came about when Americans started betting on race horses only the phrase was “pissing like a rushin’ horse.” Another forum user wrote: “Some claim that the expression is negative because Russian trainers (or the Russian mafia) cheated by feeding their horses a lot of water…and somehow prevented them from urinating thus making them nervous and faster. People saw the horses nervously peeing before a race. If a horse did this before the race it was an advantage since it could lose up to 10 pounds. In the ‘70s trainers started giving a drug called "lasix" to their horses.”

Another Reddit user from Southern Indiana wrote this: I've always said, "I have to pee like a rushin' racehorse". Meaning that the horse was in such a hurry (or rushing) to get to the finish line, because he had to Pee so bad. That's how all the people around me interpret it. I can see how Rushin' can get mixed up with Russian.”

None of this gives me a clue how and where my husband picked up the idiom. My best guess is he heard it at basic training. Anyway, today was the first time in my life I remember comparing myself to a Russian race horse and I hope it’s the last. But it does occur to me that I’m being drugged like a race horse to pee on queue. I take a pill at night that cuts down on me waking up to mild bladder urges so that I can get a better quality of sleep---and no, I don’t wet the bed taking them. I get 'false' urges when my bladder isn’t full. Isn’t that amazing. They have pills to make you quit peeing and pills to make you pee.

Getting enough sleep has been an ongoing problem since I moved to the continuum care campus. First it was the bright parking lot lights that lit up my bedroom like its daytime, messing with the circadian rhythms that ques us to when to sleep. After six months of complaining about that the management agreed to buy us all black out shades to address the problem. Then I got into the habit of watching two hours of TV in bed before I turn it off. Actually, I’ve been watching TV in bed for the better part of my life but the TV in my bedroom, now, is smarter than my old bedroom TV that is now in my living room. The smart ones emits UV rays which also mess with your circadian rhythm. Don’t suggest I swap my TVs around. It wouldn’t work. We have no cable connection in our bedrooms here and to watch Netflix's in the living room I’d have to buy a new TV that can stream. If you’d ever dropped off a TV at the county electronics recycling center you’d understand the sick feeling I get when I think of getting rid of a TV that still works great with cable. I just can’t do it. My parents were Depression Era people who imprinted on me the habit of never throwing out things that still work and around here, The Salvation Army and Goodwill will not take TVs.

But for ten dollars I may have solved my screen-time-in-bed problem. I bought a pair of clear glasses that block the UV light. I put them on when I go to bed to watch TV. I thought it would take time to experience a difference in my ability to fall asleep---if it did at all. I’ve only had them five days and all five nights I got sleepy at 12:30 to 1:00  instead of 2:00! If this keeps up I’m going to have my next pair of prescription glasses made to block out the UV rays for all the hours I spend in front of my computer. In the meantime I've learned to use my Kindle safer by using the Blue Shade timer setting and that’s got to help too---assuming I remember to grab my Kindle instead of looking up random idioms on the computer in the evening hours.

Until Next Wednesday. ©

Photo Note: You haven't lived until you've let someone drag you to an antique tractor show, not once but every year for a decade. It was Don's dream to show his farm tractor one day. This show was in Sussex, UK. We didn't go there but they all look (and smell) the same. If my memory serves me right the idea with the steam powered tractors was to see how slow you could go before killing the engines or maybe it was the goal with the gasoline engines? Or both? Not sure and I'm too lazy to look it up.

The Red-Headed Rider

There’s a woman who moved into my building in late October and just lately she’s been showing up in the lobby and other public places on campus. She’s always dressed immaculately, usually in a white starched shirt with a black sweater over top, the shirt collar perfectly framing her face and head of short red hair. She wears beige riding pants and tall, black boots and does so with the grace and confidence of someone who doesn’t have an ounce of fat on her body. She’s eighty-six. I don’t know how she gets her shirts to look as stiff as cardboard and as white as newly fallen snow but I intend to find out. Who says old people can’t have goals. It takes something I don't have to have a signature look but I want to be that person with a style sense so uniquely me that it makes others smile. Instead my style is uniquely fashioned by whatever I can find that fits and isn’t stained at any given moment in time. (The yummy soups they serve here are killing my wardrobe.)

She and I happened to both be at the cafe` counter at the same time waiting for them to open and we struck up a conversation that carried us all the way into the dining area and was extended by email once we finished our long lunch. And get this, she was dressed like an equestrian because that’s what she used to do before moving here from Tennessee. She had a horse she had to give up---the hardest part about the move---but her veterinary adopted him and sends her photographs and updates her on how he’s doing which helps, knowing her horse has a good home.

The Red Rider for lack of a better name moved here with her husband to be close to their son but two weeks after the move her husband had a stroke, lingered in the hospital awhile then spent several weeks in the Hospice building here on campus before passing away which explains why she hasn’t been around this part of the campus much. Between unpacking and being with her husband  during the days, then packing his stuff back up again after the funeral she’s far behind the rest of us in the socializing and settling in department. 

We bonded over talking about the 'Heartland' series on Netflix. We are both binge-watching it. I’m on season nine of thirteen and she’s not far behind. For those who don’t know the show it’s filmed in Canada and centers around a horse ranch and a teenaged girl who is known as the Miracle Girl, a sort of Horse Whisperer. Each hour-long episode is about a horse with a problem that she helps its owner (her client) work out. Red Rider tells me the bond between horses and humans and the training sessions portrayed in the series are absolutely authentic and I shared with her the fact that when I was a teen I had a crush on a boy whose dad had horses for rent but my romance was a non-starter because every time we’d go on a trail ride the insides of my legs and thighs would break out in hives.

I told her that we have riding stables around here but she said at her age it was time to give up riding anyway but she’s like to find a volunteer situation that involves working with horses. Before moving I happened to have lived near a place that specializes in therapy equestrian riding. A big place that helps nearly 200 people a week from 2 to 100 ride for therapy. My niece on my husband’s side goes there and we’d seen her ride. She’s completely wheelchair bound with MS and she positively glows when they put her on a horse. It’s exactly the kind of place Red Rider was looking for and she has experience volunteering at a similar place back in Tennessee. 

If I was ten I would have gone home after lunch, flew through the back door, letting it slam shut which annoyed my mom like no other thing my ten year old self could do and I would have excitedly told her about the new friend I just made. I would have told her how we made easy conversation and have plans to meet for dinner on Saturday where I’ll show her the ropes of how to get seated at the table for singles eating alone. But the grown up me hopes she’ll stays my friend after she meets all the other ladies around here who are far more in her class of classy people. Have I mentioned that I’m the forth fattest person on campus? Okay, okay I know I should tell myself that being over weigh doesn’t cancel out being classy---exhibit A, look at Oprah---but January (when I started writing this) is when all fatty-two-by-fours beat themselves up. Fortunately January will be over by the time this post goes live and I will have moved on to obsessing about my dry skin. I'm as predictable has as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. ©