Dave's Take on "Dream Pony"

Upon reading my brother Tom’s recollection of the day our pastor brought a “prize pony” to our church, I couldn’t help but share my slightly different perspective on that day and that time in our lives. This is an slightly revised version of the draft I sent him.

The first set of hymns had already been sung, and Pastor was talking about some stuff in general, which was usually my cue to stare down at the tile patterns in the floor between the pews. Just then he announced some “fantastic news for every kid in the auditorium.” In my head I was hoping that they had cancelled the youth choir practice for that evening and that we could all stay home and enjoy Bonanza. I liked Bonanza, especially when the entire family was sitting around the old black-and-white TV. Tom would fix popcorn, he was the official popcorn maker. He, and only he, knew just how long to keep the kernals on the stove without the slightest hint of being burned. Sunday evening always seemed like the best evening of the week on those rare occasions when circumstance allowed us to stay home [or more often at Grandma's house] to enjoy it.

(Whenever the slightest hope of not going to Sunday evening church arose, there was always a twinge of guilt hanging over us because Dad was a deacon and we had to get back for the evening activities. Sunday evenings were always ruined by the hustling and bustling of trying [trying to enjoy the "day of rest" to the fullest and then racing off to church. Our three or four hour ordeal started with youth choir practice, then “Young Peoples” meeting, and then a sermon from either the bus minstry guy or one of our young upstart preacher boys.)

Pastor Sedalia was still talking, as everyone’s eyes were drawn to the platform, “This beautiful pony will be going home with one of you next week—to keep. “That’s right. This pony is the grand prize for whoever brings the most people to next weeks revival meetings.Our speaker [Bill Rice III] is coming here from his ranch next Sunday, and he’s eager to see who will be taking this pony home.”

I looked over at Tom who was squirming with delight in his seat. My older brother Paul didn’t seem to hear what the pastor had said. Mom just sat motionless in the choir loft silently thinking about who she needed to talk to after the service. My dad, folded his arms and put one finger over his mouth. He gently tapped his lips and raised one eyebrow. I could see what he was thinking. He knew he would never have to worry about taking that pony home unless one of his children performed a miracle.

The pastor continued, “ Our speaker will also be giving free sign language classes to all who would like to join. So that way we can further the Gospel to our deaf friends.”

Oh, great, I thought just one more thing Mom will have us doing. I just knew it was going to wreck my time schedule. I actually had no schedule for my life and that was the best schedule a kid could have. You just sorta go through every day enjoying the day as it magically unfolds before you.

The pastor continued, “Who would like to be a part of the free sign language classes? They will be held every evening an hour before the revival service starts.”

I stared at my mom who had turned her head to the lady next to her. I knew what was coming. It was as though my eyes zoomed in on her mouth and I could hear her voice whispering in my head, “I have a deaf cousin,” she was saying, “and you know, I can sign the whole deaf alphabet to him, but I’d love to learn more.”

I watched in disbelief, as her hand shot into the air in response to the preacher’s question.

Time seemed to stand still. She waved it for all to see then gave me a smile and mouthed, “You are really going to like this.” My heart sank into my stomach. Mother was always trying to get us involved in something that we actually had no business doing. It really didn’t matter, I suppose, because we tended to miss the first half of the anything Mom attended with us. (Something she did improve upon later on in life—I guess it really is never too late.) Being chronically late was usually frustrating, but whenever we got stuck going to some church thing we didn’t really want to do, there was always that faint ray of hope—if we were lucky, Mom was in charge of getting us there.

Back to the pony.

By this time, the pony had been led up the stairs and onto the stage. He was being tugged by a small framed, red-headed fellow who had been hired by the church to fill a “catch all job.” It’s not that he wasn’t a hard worker, it’s just that I sometimes feared he was being taken advantage of by everyone who meandered in and out of the building. When your job description is vague and your list of bosses long, life can be rough. At this moment, however, he seemed proud of the fact that he’d been given the odious task of coaxing the small stallion up onto the stage. This was his “fifteen minutes of fame.”

The pastor made some gesture to quite the crowd and just as he opened his mouth to speak, the silence was broken by a sound—a sound which is familiar to every fifth-grade boy who is able to place the palm of his hand in the pit of his arm. It sounded like a large balloon that was losing air. It was elegant and yet it was some how barely perceptible. The sound was slightly deadened by the clump of gray hair which hung from the pony’s posterior, but I knew everyone heard it. I knew that sound. If this were a locker room full of boys they would have erupted in laughter. But this was no locker room. This was a sanctuary where baptisms and alter calls took place. It was an omen of things to come, but we didn’t know that. I looked across the aisle at my friend and he held his fingers over his nose and wrinkled his face. I really had never heard a horse flatulate before. I would have been embarrassed. The pony, however, seemed so nonchalant about the whole thing. I was impressed by his composure.

My brother Tom seemed to be frozen in time as he watched the pony prancing near the preacher on the stage. He jerked his head back against the halter and gave his shaggy main a tired toss. I studied the animal and realized that there was no way that this pony, in his present physical state, could carry my weight. He was no match for Trigger. Trigger was the beloved horse of one of my television heros. He probobly wouldn’t look as cool as a palimino raring up on his hind legs in all of it’s splendor. It’s huge powerful muscles rippling as it threw it’s hooves into the air. No, this was quite a different picture. This pony which had sleep dripping from both eyes, a belly which hung nearly to the floor, and knees that were as swollen as an old lady’s knuckles was quite tired.

Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I thought I might like to have the pony. However, the longer I studied the situation the more I realized that I had about as much of a chance of winning that pony as I had of actually getting store bought milk at home. Which is another story in itself. We never had store-bought milk. Dad bought powdered milk and we had to mix it with water. If you were really a “good milk mixer” you could add a little extra water and make it go further. Why mixed milk you ask? “Well, after all it is six cents a gallon cheaper,” was dad’s reply. [Maybe he meant the Sanilac brand of dry milk was about six cents cheaper than the Carnation stuff. Either way, I sometimes found the rationale as hard to swallow as the mixed milk.]
And so, deep in my heart, I knew that that pony would never see the inside of our backyard. This is why, I began to rationalize why I didn’t need the pony. So, while I sat there, watching this story unfold, I came up with a few really good reasons why participating in the contest was probably not a good idea and should, at any cost, be avoided by anyone in our family.

The first good reason was a girl name Debbie Kay. She was very competitive. In all the years that I had attended church she had somehow managed to win every contest that was ever held. There was the yearly “bus route” contest, the “memory verseses” contest, and the “Bible School” contests [and when she got older, the Campbell’s Soup lables contest]. Needless to say, I and my sibblings would always get the same lecture from dad on the way home in the old Plymouth Fury.

“You know,” he would start, “Debbie deserves a lot of credit. She works very hard, and she’s going to make it in this world.” Then he would look in the rear view mirror at me and our eyes would meet. I’m not sure what the look was for. The older I got the more I could tell when he was steering me toward a “nice girl.” For being so good with details, Dad seemed to overlook some things about the girls he hinted at for me—like the time he recommended I ask out a rather stout framed “beauty” with a well defined mustache who had been riding our church bus since age thirteen. I fortet her name but remember getting punched by her a couple of times. She packed a really hard punch.

The second reason I knew my family should never own that pony was Alex. Alex was our pet parakeet. In reality he was less of a pet and more like a prisoner of war. The difference between Alex and a prisoner of war was that a prisoner of war was fed at regular inetervals, at least once a week. We got alex in the early fall of 1958. He had escaped from someones cage and thought he had it good when he landed on my dad’s old Bell Telephone truck. Dad kept the telephone truck parked on the side of our house when he came home for lunch. My dad was a very logical man. He’s the one who came up with naming the found parakeet “Alexander Grahm Bell” in honor of the old green truck and the inventor of the phone.

When I think back on Alex he was not a very friendly bird. In fact, he hated everyone. Every night he planned his escape while we slept. Given the chance he would attack any part of your flesh that accidently or intentionally made it’s way pass the bars of his cage. I always knew that given the chance he would immediately go for the eyes. On several occasions he gouged my hand with his beak while trying to put food in his cage. He always pretended to be asleep. The clue that you were about to be attacked was when he cocked his head at an angle and glared at you with his one good eye. Suddenly, it was as if you heard that strident violin stroke from the shower scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The attack that followed was nothing short of sharks in a feeding frenzy. And when he got out of his cell, he didn’t land on your head or shoulder like most parakeets. Oh, no, he swooped and pecked like his cousins in that other Hitchcock classic.

It got to the point where we didn’t know what to do with this vicious bird because of his surly attitude. Mom decided to put his cage in the basement, which was like a pitch-dark dungeon 95% of the time. And that’s where he served the rest of his life sentence and met his demise. As the saying goes, “out of sight out of mind.” Once in a while we ventured into the basement. Someone would say, “Hey there’s good ol’ Alex. Has anyone fed him latley?” The reply was usually, “I think it was my turn last month. Whose turn is it this month?” Unfortunatley, if it was my turn I never checked the schedule. Sometimes poor alex would go for weeks with out being fed. Tom did not mention Alex in his retelling of that pony dream, but this no doubt influenced that bizaar twist in his dream. “Oh, that’s right we have a parakeet” was not a dream.

[Some time later, when Alex had his first stroke, I thought he had learned a new trick and was literally lying in wait to attack, but he’d actually suffered a stroke—that was dad’s diagnosis. I figured we’d end up feeding him through a straw… but within the first day, he learned to drag himself around by his beak. “Amazing!” I thought, “he will still be able to feed and water himself after all.” It would be the first time we could actually put him on our shoulder with out having him fly off and play hard to get. A week later Alex suffered his second stroke and died. We burried him in a shoe box out near the old tomato plants.]

The third reason we couldn’t have a pony was Duke. Don’t get me wrong. Duke was a great dog. He wormed his way into the hardest of hearts. He was a watchdog “extrordinare” in that he would litterally WATCH strangers come into the yard, pillage our prized posessions form the garage, and not move a muscle. My ten-speed was stolen without so much as a bark. It got to the point where he too, like Alex, had had several strokes. It was sad. He could barely move his back legs. Some said we should “put him down,” but he’d had been with us for about fifteen years. That’s one of the hardest decisions a family faces—my point is… with Alex in the basement and Duke moping around the back yard, it would have been inhumane to take on another “pet.”

So for those three reasons, I knew my family should stay out of this contest, but I remember looking down the pew at my little brother. He had a goofy grin on his face, and I knew that behind his glazed eyes he was thinking of a trillion and one things that he would train the pony to do. Me? I was content with not having the darned ol’ thing. I was confident that Debbie Kay would once again win the contest and all would be well with the world: Dad would give me that look in the rear view mirror; Kathy and Paul would be in control of the TV set at home; Mom would never be on time for sign language classes; and as long as I left my homework at school… in my mind, it never existed.

Yes, life was good.



Tom’s brother Dave, guest writer to Patterns of Ink.