Beautiful, Beautiful Dopey

When I was a sophomore in college, my roommate, Linda, owned two horses. One was a spectacular stallion whose name I can’t recall and the other was a smaller buckskin gelding named Dopey.

Linda was a very tough blond from a tiny town in northwest lower Michigan. As a teenager, she worked for her dad driving a semi truck for his oil distributorship. Her dad had been a Flying Tiger in WWII and my friend had big doses of his recklessness and bravery.

Linda loved her stallion. He was a “handful” she would say and I saw that for myself when I went home with her for a weekend. That’s when she introduced me to Dopey. Dopey was sweet and mellow and quite beautiful if secondary to his more striking companion.

When Linda said she was bringing her stallion to our college town so she could ride him more often, I asked her about Dopey. What would it cost to bring Dopey so I would have a horse to ride as well? It turned out to be $10 or $20 a week and so I got a job being a receptionist at a campus clinic for kids with difficult parents or the other way around. All I remember is the one-way glass.

So Linda went home and loaded up the two horses and brought them to a farm near campus. We would hitch a ride out to the farm every few days and then ride the horses through the farmer’s harvested cornfields and down country roads and it felt like the most daring and wonderful thing I had ever done.

So now, many , many years later, I am yearning for how I felt when I rode Dopey over those cornfields. I loved the wildness of it, the feel of the reins in my hand, the smoothness of the saddle horn, the muscle of a horse’s neck, its feel under my hand. I loved the height and the going and seeing far from my perch and hearing all the horse’s steps, especially that.

It isn’t just people or things you miss when you get older. Sometimes, you miss yourself.

_____________________

Photo by Rebecca Matthews on Unsplash

Originally published in 2021.