Forty Years Ago Today

We reluctantly closed the west side of the barn tonight due to predicted rain, shutting the old quarter horse away from the outside paddock by his stall. He did not want to come inside, but he is an easy old man so I didn't have to get a halter. I just took a small bit of his mane in my hand and he walked into his stall beside me. There are some very sweet things about old horses.

As I drove away from the barn I pulled off the road to look at a towering black array of clouds in the west. I considered going back to close up the sheltered side of the barn as well. I decided not to, that I was seeing more dark than immediate danger, but it was impressive.

Something on the drive home made me remember one of the odder experiences of my college years. In the spring of my sophomore year, I ended up traveling to Montreal with a small busload of young men from the college Wesleyan group to see the show "Hair". I no longer recall how I met this bunch, let alone how I ended up seeing this play with them. They explained at the time that they wanted to see it to help them understand the part of the world that fell outside of their ordered view. But frankly, they wanted to be shocked.

As it turned out, we didn't have pricey enough seats for a really good bout of righteousness. The famous nude scene was done mostly under filmy material with the lights very low, so the only chance at seeing anything was a brief instant when they turned up the lights at the end of the scene. You had to look quickly. For most of the time, the lights were so dim that only the first two rows could have seen anything other than vague forms and some movement of the fabric.

By the next semester I had long since found that I was not a fit for their white pressed shirts and two piece suits. But they did make interesting company to see "Hair". And unlike many of my later companions in trips to Montreal, we didn't have to worry about what was in the car when we came back across the border.

That was about 40 years ago now - probably the same year that the old quarter horse was born. In fact it may have been within weeks of today. It is possible that this remarkable old man was just beginning to learn to run on wobbly legs, with the knobby knees of a foal, when I was seeing "Hair" with a bunch of shocked young Wesleyan students. This would make a nice story for the old man if horses cared about such coincidences, but they don't.