Tuesday, July 1, 2014

honor roll

Tonight is the hottest night of the year so far. Even at 9:00 the heat of the day is still heavy like a wool blanket, and no breeze anywhere to help ease the oppression. But… it’s the first night in a week that I have had time to myself to reflect on the last few days. So with the help of a good smoke and a pint of Jack Daniels I’m sitting by a hotel pool in Perry, GA USA doing my best to think back on Bob.

I really don’t understand why when you want to remember someone its so hard, but when your not expecting to think about them their face, and voice won’t seem to leave your head. Maybe something about a place years ago lines up with the place where you are now. Maybe the light at sunset; maybe a small smell of something, maybe something else can take a person back 15 or 20 years. Maybe if I had some fence paint …   Who knows???

Apparently not me

Anyway, I’m trying to conjure an old teacher of mine, and for what ever reason tonight its seems hard to do. But I do remember a weekend in Conyers GA rather well.  The horse park there was still new and the reining horse folks in Georgia were just beginning to get their feet underneath them. The weather was much like this, typical southern oppression.  I was probably just a freshman and college and more of a punk kid than anything else.

Nothing happened at that show that I could be proud of really happened personally. In fact quite the opposite happened. I don’t remember exactly but I neglected some sort of care that the my horse  needed. I think maybe I didn’t cool her down well enough on a hot day or something of the sort and some of the folks in the barn took time to tell me about it.  And it seems the lesson took; I’m still thinking about it 12 years latter.  Probably at the time I was able to laugh it off the way kids do when they don’t fully understand the opportunity that has been handed to them. Now it seems sad.

Thanks for the Memories Melisa

That show was the first time I got to see Bob show a horse too. I think he might have been riding horse named Happy Jack, but I’m not sure. AND it doesn't really matter what horse it was. What matters was Bob Anthony owed Conyers GA for about 2 and a half minutes. Everybody stopped what they were doing to watch an artist paint. And he and that horse did not disappoint. 

Every stride and every breath that horse took was mirror of how the best should look in my minds eye. From where I watched, the pattern was silhouette and the sun shown through the dust creating a Hollywood glow throughout the arena. For a moment in time all the gods watched Bob and that horse. It was something to behold. I wish now that Faulkner had been there to watch. He could have written a prose that would do it justice. I’m afraid I can’t find the words to describe a perfect union such as that.

Here is what I do know:  part of what I am now is owed to that weekend and others like it. 

So here’s to you Bob. Sorry I never got to say thanks for all you did for me.



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