With few exceptions, draft breeds are the last of the horses that are still expected, across the board, to work for a living. Work, not as in a typical sport horse’s day: go into an arena for an hour a day and pop over fences, or a cowhorse’s day: move some cattle on what is essentially an all-day trail ride with some fun displays of dominance over another species. Draft breeds work. And to be clear, I suppose in one way I define hard work as being required to do your job on hard pavement. We scream and cry about the footing at showgrounds, racetracks, even hidey-hole corners where we sneak away to longe in private, and yet even at the Magic Kingdom, Belgians and Clydesdales wear steel shoes as they plod up and down the asphalt paving of Main Street U.S.A., posing for pictures during the Main Street Trolley Show and having little princess’s hands waved away by their drivers – “He might bite you, honey!”

Someone once told me Clydesdales don't GROW tails!

Elsewhere, if they aren’t working very hard at entertaining people, draft horses are the darlings of their breed registrations, and look simply beautiful decked out in horse brasses and traditional ribbon braids – what a shame that it’s still a requirement to dock their tails for many classes.

Lucky and still unusual are the draft horses living the pleasure horse’s life. Every now and then, you spot one lumbering over a low fence, or plowing cheerfully through a dressage test. I’ve actually seen a Clydesdale perform a very reasonable half-pass.

And then of course you have the flashy, lightweight ones, like Friesians and those spotty Gypsy Vanners, coasting through life because they’re pretty. I have nothing against them – they’re the lucky ones. It’s the traditional workers of the world – the Belgians, the Clydesdales and their kissing cousins the Shires – who need to unite and strike for fair working conditions. Why shouldn’t we live a life of sport and ease, they should be asking.

In New York City, perhaps more so than anywhere else, the draft horse still leads a hard, hard life. And if Manhattan was hard on drays and carriage horses one hundred years ago, when Broadway was a solid jammed mass of wagons, carriages, stagecoaches, and, alarmingly, pedestrians, all beneath the roaring, sparking terror of the elevated trains – well, the mayhem is slightly more controlled now, but it’s still not a place where most humans wish to spend their days. Imagine how a horse must feel.

Where would you feel more out of place, if you were a horse, then tramping through Midtown, beneath fifty-story skyscrapers and above trembling asphalt roads, shaking as the subways roar just beneath, ears assaulted by the horns of jostling cabs and nostrils burning with the fumes of diesel buses?

One of my first memories of living on the Upper West Side, that green leafy village that lies to the west of Central Park, is sitting in the subway station just below Central Park West, listening to horse hooves clop overhead. It was like hearing the ghost of Old New York. The sound was rapidly blocked, however, by a noise exactly like listening to a space shuttle launch from close by the launch pad – the express train rushing past.

 I’m not against horses living in the city, as you well know. I am against straight stalls – and until recently, although I haven’t verified this with my own eyes – New York’s carriage horses have lived in straight stalls. And I am against horses in Midtown. For some graphic and disturbing images that explain why, just click here.

The New York Times has reported several new laws for the NYC carriage horses. They need them – the current laws do not go much further than filling the water troughs that the ASPCA began providing for them in the nineteenth century. And while it is a pretty photo-op to see the horses dripping water from their whiskers on Central Park South, imagine if you will that these horses are permitted to work for up to nine hours a day.

(British Horse Society standards, on the other hand, call for livery horses to work for no more than four. Granted, that is under saddle – but it makes no provisions. A horse might only walk and trot, like the carriage horses, for just four hours per day. And do it, one imagines, on better footing than asphalt.)

Dima Gavrysh for The New York Times

Also frustratingly weird is the provision that basically allows an operator to work a horse until it dies: the horses used may only be between the ages of five and 26. Twenty-six? If a horse’s average lifespan is until 25-30, does that make their retirement age the grave? Although, arguably, like so many horses, the prospects for a retirement in a paddock are so slim, they may as well drop in the traces. Literally.

But speaking of paddocks, they receive five weeks’ paddock vacation per year. I can think of a lot of show horses that once received paddock breaks, before showing became year-round, and I’ll bet they’re wishing they were as lucky as the carriage horses, in this case.

And most importantly, they must be stabled in stalls large enough to lie down in. Now, that does not appear to have been mandated. But I believe the industry standard for draft horses is fourteen by fourteen? That would be a considerable improvement from straight stalls.

It also keeps the horses above 34th Street. I personally have never seen horses south of 34th Street. But 34th Street – that’s Macy’s, Penn Station, and Madison Square Garden – is such a miserable lost-tourist traffic nightmare that it’s entirely possible that I’ve passed through that area and actually not seen the horses for the hordes surrounding them. If it were me, I’d keep the horses in the relative quiet of Central Park, a space so green and leafy I have actually gotten lost in the woods there. (True story.) Horses do not belong in the ugly wastelands of office towers just below Central Park. People don’t belong there. There is nothing there but financial institutions in skyscrapers and large chain hotels for people who did not do their homework when booking. Presumably, the sorts of people who take a carriage ride down Seventh Avenue.

But they’re kind of leaning in that general direction.

Although no move has been made to offer Freedom Ride a new five year lease to extend the current one, which ends in 2011, the Orlando Sentinel reported that “at least three of the six city commissioners agree that Freedom Ride should stay.” Mayor Buddy Dyer appears to be leaning in that direction as well. But no talks are scheduled, and it’s possible that the city government will take the easy way out – ignore the issue until the contract runs out.

Starting from scratch isn't cheap

It’s hard to imagine a worse publicity journey than the one which Mayor Dyer embarked upon a few months ago when he decided that the therapeutic riding center in Metro Orlando would be of better use as fallow fields, awaiting funding in the undefined future to become still more soccer fields. As every SUV within one hundred miles of Orlando has at least one soccer-related decal affixed to it, I fail to see why the city feels honor-bound to provide so many playing fields that it can’t spare ten acres for children, adults, and veterans with everything from multiple sclerosis to ADHD, whose lives are changed daily by visits to the horses of Freedom Ride. It appears, to me, anyway, that everyone in Orlando is already playing soccer somewhere.

The president of Freedom Ride’s board of directors, Sam Dunaway, told the Sentinel that starting from scratch, on a new piece of land, would cost more than $500,000 – they would require new barns, new arenas, new paddocks, new everything. To say nothing, of course, of the cost to the users of the program. It might be an hour’s commute from East Orange County to Freedom Ride now. If they ended, say, west of town, in Lake County, where the land is almost, vaguely, sort of, still affordable, it would be more than two hours. Prohibitive in time, to say nothing of gas, inching back again towards three dollars a gallon, and the interminable toll roads which are the only way to get around Orlando.

In 2000, when Orlando was trying to decide what to do with Ben White Raceway, bids were submitted that included creating a showground. Imagine if Orlando, always second best in equine terms to Ocala, Wellington, and Tampa, might have rivaled Tampa’s fairgrounds, the eventual building of HITS Post Time in Ocala or Jacksonville Equestrian Center. If money had been the object, profitable measures were there for the taking, that could have been good for Orlando’s struggling equestrian industry and the city. But the city decided on Freedom Ride, allowed them to build a beautiful facility, and if charity and a sense of decency aren’t enough to allow the group to stay, then a sense of responsibility ought to be.

Here’s a lovely new study by the Equine Welfare Alliance, which followed eighteen slaughter-bound racehorses from the day they were administered bute (remember, it’s reported to the racing officials on race day, and filed) to the day they went to the kill. Oh the delicious, toxic meat. Bute, we should know by now, is a carcinogen, which manifests itself in bone marrow. It is toxic to the point that there are no safe levels permitted in food at all.

We might all be ill-advised to eat cattle, pigs, and chickens. But we’re flipping insane to eat racehorses.

In Alex Brown’s article, “Keeping Bute Out of the Food Chain,” he cites the Daily Racing Form’s statistic that in 2009, “99% of horses that ran in California pre-raced on Bute (7391 out of 7443).”

And these are the legally slaughtered horses.

Meanwhile, in South Florida, the legislators are writing bills creating felony charges for illegal slaughter – you know, when people find a horse they like, tie it to a tree, and butcher it while it is still alive. Evidently, they believe that this practice is limited to polo ponies, so Representative Luis Garcia (D. – Miami-Dade) assured a Miami blogger that they’ve amended the bill criminalizing illegal slaughter to include the transport of polo ponies. Which is interesting, considering the poster child for illegal horse butchering is a paint named Geronimo.

In reading the bill (which cites, in part, that a reason for criminalizing illegal horse slaughter is to “protect Florida’s natural beauty,” since unsightly horse carcasses have been found on previously pastoral roadsides), it appears that previously, it was only illegal to slaughter registered horses. The language reads that it will now “expand the classification of protection for registered breeds of horses to include any animal of the genus Equus (horse.)” Now grade horses are safe, too!

All joking aside, I find it striking that the horse slaughter debate continues to skirt the issue of food safety. You can spare me the arguments that the horse is not livestock, that civilization itself was built on the backs of horses and it is inappropriate to eat such a noble beast. As it happens, I believe all those arguments, too. But there are just as many people who will never be convinced of the social and philosophical reasons why horses are not food.

The real point to be made is that horses are simply not fit to be eaten. In a country which is repeatedly gripped by various medical panics – contaminated vegetables, bacteria-ridden meat, irradiated milk – no one is saying much about the most compelling reason of all not to slaughter horses: they simply aren’t safe to eat.

The dark Irish stout has long been a traditional feed additive for Irish horse trainers – and their proteges of all nationalities. Trainer Derek Ryan, originally of County Tipperary, Ireland, told the New York Times that Musket Man, then a Derby Hopeful, “gets one can every day. It helps his appetite. He’s not a finicky eater, but it does him good. The food is their fuel and if they’re not eating well you are in trouble.”

Musket Man followed through for Ryan’s conditioning program with a third-place finish in the Derby, a third in the Preakness (to Rachel Alexandra and Mine That Bird, so a pretty honest placing), then made his 2010 comeback in a big way at the Super Stakes (Tampa), and, presumably still on a diet of Guinness, worked 4 furlongs in 46.8 on March 27th. Proving that a pint a day does indeed do you good.

Zenyatta - well her father is Irish, anyway.

He’s not the only horse to like his beer dark. How about Zenyatta, being poured a pint by trainer John Shirreffs? The incomparable Irish-bred steeplechaser Arkle famously had two pints daily to soak his oats.

What could the health benefits truly be? While Ryan cites the yeast as a key appetite stimulant, there are other nutrients in the stout: “Guinness also contains small quantities of iron, calcium, phosphates, some vitamins (including vitamin B) and fiber, according to Guinness Master Brewer, Fergal Murray.” (source:vx50.com)

Besides spurring racehorses on to victory, Guinness is also put to use in show barns around the country for anhydrosis, or non-sweating, which has left so many horses shut in box stalls, with multiple fans blowing on them, because they’ve lost the ability to sweat. A pint of Guinness a day, often in addition to the supplement One-AC, is the most common treatment – even if the vets shake their heads.

Courtesy Santa Anita press

Step back for a second and consider whether or not you’d just fearlessly walk up to a 17 hand, fighting-fit Thoroughbred racehorse.

And then imagine the 5 year-old boy who does so.

Jack, who has autism and lives, as his father says, “in a distant world,” loves Zenyatta. A lot of us love Zenyatta – but it’s unlikely that she’d allow anyone else the closeness that she affords Jack – not knowing how to pet her, trainer John Shirreffs explains, Jack pokes his finger into her side and screams to express his happiness.

Jack’s father says that just mentioning Zenyatta makes the distant child “glow with happiness and jump up and down.”

Nationally, the North American Riding for the Handicapped Association (NARHA) has more than 6,300 equines on its rosters, from minis to mules and every sort of breed in between, and in 2009 NARHA organizations assisted more than 40,000 participants. Interestingly, autism was the number one special need served by NARHA centers. Rapidly growing in diagnosis and still a mystery in its many forms, children with autism seem especially attuned to horses – and horses to them.

Zenyatta’s acceptance of this little boy in her life is just one more example of that old saying: horses know.

All I ever wanted was a good racing story, that might explain to me the very adult world of horse racing, always with its door closed to children. We were relegated to velvet hunt caps, tasteful make-up, and “natural” obstacles. I wanted rainbow silks, dirt in my face, and a clear path to the wire.

The books I had were the classics, and I memorized them even as I bemoaned either their age (Black Gold and Come on, Seabiscuit! were amazing history lessons, but I wanted to know what racing life was like now!) I was always a skeptical child, and knew the Jockey Club would never have permitted the Black to race, and certainly not to enter the Stud Book. (One might say the same thing of The Pie.) I wanted reality, I wanted some glimpse of the real thing, that storied world I wasn’t allowed to enter, not more history, not more fantasy, and certainly not more boys. Surely Velvet Brown wasn’t the only girl that dreamed of galloping a fast horse?

At last, The Sweet Running Filly is the book I was looking for.

First published in 1971, and set in southern Ohio, everything about this book rings true, right down to the very skillful country voice that the narration and dialogue is written in. Oh sure, there are stereotypical characters – the scar-faced trainer that specializes in cheap claimers, the African American groom that knows all the native flora and fauna and uses them in his secret remedies to keep the horses going, the wealthy farm owner, etc. But if Dick Francis wrote to a formula, I think we can excuse the authors theirs’. When the characters work, do you really care if you recognize them?

From the opener, at Fasig-Tipton Saratoga, where one very beautiful yearling spooks her way into the sales ring and rockets out again, a sales-topper of The Green Monkey proportions, to the Ohio antiques shop where Julie Jefferson holds up the counter for her father (a man of excellent wit, and their exchanges alone make the book worth your time) to the summer spent starting yearlings and learning to work horses, The Sweet Running Filly captivates – and manages to stay within the realm of reality, a gift for anyone tired of racing fantasy. Even the mystery, during which the main character reinvents herself as Julie Jefferson, Girl Detective, is fast-paced, entertaining, and not so convoluted that we couldn’t have expected her to have figured it out!

And despite the rollicking, quick story, despite the excellent voice and the witty dialogue, what really captures me are the truisms in this book that any horse-crazy girl will see herself in:

“The common belief was that you loved horses because you loved riding. But Julie’s emotions worked the other way. She loved riding because she loved horses. Sitting astride a horse was just one expression of the closeness of two spirits, no more and no less satisfying that playing together in a grassy pasture, nuzzling in a warm, dark stall, hand-walking after a bath to dry out, or grooming on a pair of crossties snapped across a stable aisle.”

The “Bonnie Books” continue with a half-dozen more titles, including the currently available A Horse Called Bonnie. A percentage of sales of these books will be going to Thoroughbred charities, working to improve the lives of retired racehorses. Find out more on Facebook – “The Bonnie Books.” Here it is at Barnes & Noble.com - for only nine dollars.

And – just because you might have missed this one in childhood – don’t miss it now.

The Sweet Running Filly

Barbara Van Tuyl & Pat Johnson

www.poppetpress.com

It wasn't the cover. But it was something.

This is just days after the so-called Big A-6 managed to cancel the first race at Aqueduct, boycotting with their six entries, and brought together the racing community at neighboring Belmont for a rally calling upon Albany to stop stalling and give the horsemen what they had been promised: a racino, the chance at renewed purses and breeders’ incentives, the knowledge that the business was not bankrupt and the Thoroughbreds could go on running.

The latest twist in the long plot of the Video Lottery Terminals (VLT) that have been coming to an Aqueduct near you for nine years… and just why do the words Video Lottery Terminals seem so magical to members of the racing industry?

Because they’ve worked before.

As Jay Hovdey points out in his blog at the Daily Racing Form (may require free reg.), the racino is not the silver bullet, and in some locations, the hugely successful casinos are trying to shoulder out the horses or dogs that brought them there in the first place. But they are a start. And with the example of New York’s Standardbred industry –  racetracks like Yonkers offering gaming to those looking for quicker pay-outs than what they’d receive from studying the past performances, the track conditions, and the Beyer figures, not to mention the many successful Thoroughbred tracks in the country, from Delaware to Mountaineer Park – the way to saving New York Thoroughbred racing seems clear enough.

And by and large, governments are turning to VLTs and racinos to save themselves from the huge budget shortfalls of the Great Recession. Just today, the New Hampshire Senate passed a bill allowing video lottery in six locations – including three racetracks – with the goal of earning enough to restore cut social services.

The possibility of not just saving the horsemen and the communities around them, but actually making back the money necessary to close New York’s budget gap, rescue NYRA’s signature tracks and races (the Belmont Stakes among them), and creating hundreds of additional jobs in New York City, ought to be too much for the legislators in Albany to turn down. If they can just stand to do something without giving all the deals to their friends, as in the case of the Aqueduct Entertainment Group.

Sen. Marty Golden, (R-Brooklyn) has proposed an open plan to allow an accounting firm to review bids and make a recommendation, and requires the state to review the recommendation publicly within ten days, making a final decision within fifteen days of the public hearing.

Yes, that’s allowing 25 days, assuming the legislation gets through, and bids are made in a timely manner. Fairly speedy, for government. Especially a government that has spent nine years doing – what, exactly? Nine years, nine foal crops, nine summers at Saratoga, a generation of children from kindergarten to high school – nine years of uncertainty for thousands of people in and around the racing business.

It was about the continued survival of a community.

Tens of thousands jobs are on the line, and as New  Jersey’s forward-thinking purse initiatives move to make the same sports thefts that have taken New York sports franchises in the past, Albany continues to refuse to make good upon a nine-year-old promise to assign an operator for the much-maligned, sadly hypothetical racino at Aqueduct.

The crowd gathered on the brick apron of Belmont Park, near the finish line of the third leg of the Triple Crown, was as diverse a group as any random population on a crowded city street. It was the eclectic mix that sums up racing life – all classes, clothing, countries. . . hotwalkers, grooms, riders, trainers, breeders. Urban and rural groups together, asking the government for the same thing – and shouldn’t have that made the decision easy? So why has the Aqueduct racino dragged on for nearly a decade, with no end in sight?

There were children in strollers, playing in the grass, bouncing balloons. There were well-dressed owners and trainers with their families. There were state legislators, community leaders, and racing association directors. Many of these people would only have come together because of the incredible diversity of the Thoroughbred industry. They represent in their diversity the many communities that they support.

As the Long Island Railroad trains rattled by beyond the backstretch and the airplanes slowly slid over on their approach to JFK, Matthew Veitch, county supervisor from Saratoga, reminded the crowd that the VLT issues were not strictly an urban, racing plant problem, “not an upstate, downstate problem,” but a whole state issue. Even as letting New York racing fade costs the state millions of dollars, he pointed out, it causes racing to lose both the purses and prestige that have made New York the horseman’s choice for a century and a half.

It also means that upstate, New York’s richest agribusiness is flailing. Joe McMahon (McMahon of Saratoga), spoke of mares bred declining by more than half. Yes, this means few New York-breds competing in three years. It also means that only half of the jobs in the breeding industry and the communities surrounding them will be available in the coming years. Diminished breeding means out of work grooms, blacksmiths, veterinarians, feed dealers, trainers, watchmen. Out-of-work people mean grocers, dry cleaners, restauranteurs, doctors, plumbers get less business. Children eat less, even go hungry. They fail at school. They drop out before they graduate. Generations slip under. When industries are allowed to fail, communities fail.

How many communities will fail if the Thoroughbred industry, from the upstate farms and the brief summers of hospitality at Saratoga, to New York City’s cast of thousands who support the city tracks, to the tens of thousands who depend on these workers’ patronage – how many communities will simply collapse?

All for want of a simple solution that was already promised to the horsemen and workers of New York? A relatively simple system, the development of a racino at a free-standing structure, complete with public transportation, in the nation’s most densely populated urban corridor – they managed it in Louisiana. It is shocking that they can’t manage something so basic in New York.

Rick Violette, president of the New York Thoroughbred Horsemens’ Association, expressed the fear and frustration of the communities at risk best with his one simple solution: to put the governor and the parties responsible for selecting a VLT in a locked room and to not let them out until a deal has been agreed upon.

The theme of the day was community. The chant of the day was “Real people, real jobs.” The mood of the day was frustration, with an undercurrent of worry, even fear. Real lives, entire communities at stake. And nothing for it but to stand together in one place, and shout, and hope that someone in charge is listening. It isn’t a bad practice; revolutions have been started and been won this way for centuries. The only question is, how many will shout, how loudly, and will it be soon enough to save New York’s racing community and heritage?

Anyway, that hat was a victim of hooves. Aren’t they all? Hooves or hard ground, the only question is in which order. I actually rode in it for entirely too long and when I finally did crack it – it’s amazing how they crack inside, like eggs, like skulls – I only wish I’d had on a motorcycle helmet, so that something would have protected my jaw. Yes, horses have two hooves, and sometimes they both hit you. It only hurts occasionally. And I still don’t like Quarter Horses, and I especially don’t like Quarter Horse mares, and I will under no circumstances canter one. You can’t make me. I know it will buck. I just know.

I think I am missing one or two, but here is one coming to me that may have met an early end in the shedrow at Classic Mile training center in Ocala one chilly morning in November. The day after the Breeders’ Cup, I think. A very nasty customer in the form of a dark bay or brown colt and you know what, I didn’t want to ride the sucker. So it wasn’t a shocker when he dumped me in the packed clay and left town. The trainer wasn’t thrilled. I was pretty embarrassed. That was an International, too, I do believe.

My current hard hat - highly recommended!

The most recent dear departed was an International ATH, and I loved its microsuede and its carbon fiber strip. I sold dozens of these helmets at my tack shop, especially the “Switch” with the removable color strips. What is it with little girls and pink? Just dying to live up to stereotypes, aren’t we girls? Anyway, Bonnie,  my lovely chestnut mare, spooked at a caterpillar or a spector or a Dementor or something in the  middle of a dressage arena on a cloudless sunny day. Bonnie is a world-class spooker. I went heels over head backwards. The dent in this helmet is impressive. I think it may have had something to do with the random rock in the orange clay of the dressage arena. Yes, kids, a rock. You never know!

I now ride in a Charles Owen J3 skullcap, and I love it.  I swear it has never touched the ground. I hang it up carefully between uses, or set it on the kitchen table. (I keep a lot of tack on the kitchen table. Seems like a good enough place.) I don’t know how long Chas will last. At this point, though, if I got on a horse without a hat, I’d panic. My falls have been random, unexpected, and largely unrelated to jumping, which is where so many people assume you’ll get hurt. In fact, I’ve never even had a fall cross-country, the one place where I’m required to not only wear a hard hat and vest but also a medical armband listening my blood type. I’ll be sure to update you, should a new hard hat be required. As I’m sure one will be, eventually.

As the dressage community, led by Heather Blitz, continues to cope with the realization that sometimes even being beautiful in a top hat and tails has to be sacrificed for safety’s sake, and that life-changing injuries can occur from spills even when you’re working on the flat, I have to recall the hard hats that have been sacrificed to keep my head intact.

The first one was luxurious, a velvet International show helmet, with brown leather harness. I was ten, and the riding instructor at my Fancy Hunter Barn was anxious to see me outfitted properly. (So was my mother.) The helmet was heavy and thick and hot on those summer afternoons in Florida, just one generation prior to the new thin-shell hats that were coming out on the market. You mean helmets didn’t have to weigh eight pounds and drag your head down? Who knew?

That helmet died several deaths. It probably should have been replaced several times over, but we didn’t realize at the time that helmets were one-time-use only! They seemed a bit expensive to be disposable. The first dispatch came when I was learning flying lead changes. My riding instructor taught flying lead changes as follows:

1) Canter horse on right lead.

2) Turn right across center of arena.

3) Wait until you get to the fence and turn left hard.

I’m sure there was more to it than that, as he is now training high school dressage on the west coast, so he surely has some working knowledge of flying lead changes, right? But that was all I computed, anyway, and so I swung Figment left, and the handy hunter turned on his haunches, and I went scraping along the fenceline. The gouge that was left in the velvet, straight down to the base of the hat, was legendary. The number of stitches that I would have required, had that gouge been in my head: dozens.

The velvet hat at last met its match against a solid wooden roll-top. First horse, my Quarter Horse Smuckers (as in, “with a name like…”) took exception to the big green monster. Not even the lovely “guide poles” placed on either side of the fence dissuaded him – it was a truly dirty move. 2010 me wishes I would have had on a Tipperairy vest as well, since the guide poles did quite a number on my back after I bounced head-first off the roll-top and onto them.

The second was an International Pro-Lite, the first generation of air-flow style hats. They had a remarkable design flaw that no one remarked upon until later – the holes were so large that if you fell into a pile of brush or tree limbs, you could be impaled through one of the air vents. Fortunately my hat’s death came in an indoor arena, when OTTB Number 1 did a very agile spin/leap/capriole/twist move. He was athletic. I was less so. I hit the ground, sadly, underneath him. One hoof on my elbow, one hoof on my hard hat. Again, legendary. There was literally a horseshoe mark on the helmet. And if you flipped it over and looked inside, the styrofoam was split in two. I was a superstar. My elbow, I got over in a couple of weeks. The hat, however, saved my life.

In case you’re keeping score, in this little narrative I’m now up to age 14 or 15 and I’m already lucky to be alive. And only one of those falls came over a fence. Not to mention all the unsung spills that I can’t remember (which may say something in and of itself!) I’ll have to think extra hard about the next few helmets. . . but there is a good reason why I had to get a new one from the Large Man in Red this past holiday season.