Was This the Greatest Horse Race Ever?

By the video, you’d think that Journalism winning the Preakness was the greatest horse race ever and while it was indeed a finish for the ages, the greatest horse race ever was one that I was involved in.

And … they’re off!

The day I ran away from my ex-husband was a traumatic one – a hell of a traumatic one but as I look back on that day now, some sixteen years later, the most memorable thing that happened that day happened at a racetrack of all places.

I had all my stuff in a moving van that I could barely afford, my two daughters, ages 4 and 3 at that time sitting on my lap and and we were driving through a city here in the north on the way to my home city where I was going to drop them off with my parents and go seek employment in bkk the next day. Meaning, this was going to be the last time I’d be a mother to my two babies for quite a while, I didn’t know at the time that it was going to be a decade until I saw them again.

Suddenly, if I was translating it to English for you, my oldest daughter of four yelled out “Mommy, mommy – horses!!!”

I looked out the rain drenched window and sure enough, at a racetrack that I never knew existed until that very moment were horses being led out onto the track.

I figured, if I spent my last dollar in my purse making my daughters happy that somewhere down the line I’d be rewarded back in kind and so I told the driver to make a detour into the racetrack to see what could be done. I was in tears when I was talking to the stablemaster and maybe he sympathized with me from the bruises on my face but he said with a sigh that while 3 years old is too young to go on a horse – unless I rode with her, my 4 year old could go for a lap around the track on one of the small horses. I’d never been on a horse and it had been a traumatic day so I settled for letting my oldest daughter go for a lap to appease her.

So off she went and gosh she looked like a natural, sitting up so straight, reigns in her hand, feet dangling at the horse’s side, I was proud of her as I watched her get smaller and smaller disappearing up the far straightaway.

Ten minutes later I was amazed even more that her posture was just as straight as her and her horse made its way slowly around the near curve to the place she had begun. Only, as she got closer, I had this sense that something was wrong because she wasn’t smiling or returning my waves to her, she was as still as a flagpole.

She’s … she’s asleep! I cried out. Sure enough, she was in a deep sleep but yet, perfectly balanced high atop her horse’s back, until that is, she got within about 50 meters of us when ever so slowly I saw her body start to slump over to the right.

Though it was ankle deep mud between me and her, I hurdled the guard rail and did a super muddy Chariots of Fire dash as fast as I could run in the slop and I felt like I was in that dolly zoom scene in Jaws that made Chief Brody move away from the water’s edge – because the harder I ran the further that horse seemed to be from me.

Had there been a film camera there it would have caught a perfect moment of timing because with arms stretched out she fell just as I arrived, head-first almost right into my arms and somehow I managed to not fall under the horse and into the muddy track below.

That’s the only thing that I remember from that awful, awful day – just that I had arrived just in the nick of time and that other than a dragon, I’d never put my daughter on the back of another animal again.

W. Beneath