Sunday, 23 November 2008
|
June 2008 • VOLUME 34 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
"I just had to write and tell you how very much I have enjoyed you Torchlight series each month in Horses for Life. Thank you so much for sharing all those trials, tribulations and joys!"
Riding By Torchlight
Pay It Forward “It’s like that movie, Pay It Forward!” my friend Caren said. And it kind of is. In the movie, a young boy comes up with the concept of “Pay It Forward” in which a person is charged with doing three good deeds, in return for which the recipients of those good deeds are simply asked to do three good deeds themselves. And so on. Caren and I were talking about the comings and goings of horses in our lives, or more particularly and most recently, in my life. But really, as I sit here at my desk and look at a picture of myself from years ago, riding my beloved Tempo bareback through a pond, I find the root of my personal “Pay It Forward” story goes way back to my teens.
When I was 16, my dearest and most fervently held dream came true. My mother came into some money and bought me a horse. We were living in Zimbabwe at the time, and keeping a horse was relatively inexpensive. Had we been in Denmark still, it never could have happened. Sir Tempest, or Tempo, was a black bay Thoroughbred off the track, but he had already spent some 18 months recuperating, trailriding and hanging out in a pasture, and was ready to move on. He was my first experience in starting a horse over from scratch all by myself, and thanks to his kind and willing temperament, it was a wonderful adventure. Within a few years we had won trophies and national championships, and were even granted a special compensation to ride for the Zimbabwean National Team in their first ever participation in the FEI/Samsung International Dressage Competition, which we won for our team and for the individual medal for Zone 4. Sounds like big potatoes, but to be brutally honest, mostly we were simply big fish in a small pond. With my background in the then classical type dressage taught in the Danish riding school I attended, I quite simply had an advantage. This never diminished the many gifts Tempo gave me, though, and thinking of him never ceases to infuse me with gratitude and wonder at his generosity of spirit. But for all that grandeur, out of all the photos on my wall of us receiving our trophies and the victor’s blanket, my favorite is still the one of us plowing through thigh high water, his ears up, water spraying, our heads turned in unison, united in the pursuit of fun in the sun - and water. A few years passed, and my time in Africa was up. There was no possibility of Tempo returning to Denmark with me, and to the sound of my breaking heart, he was eventually sold to a young girl in South Africa. She went on to experience the same resounding success with him, albeit a success that was cut tragically short when only a few months later, a routine penicillin shot, preparing him for a long trip home from a national competition (where once again, his score won the medal for the team) killed him on the spot. He died with his head in the young girl’s lap, only 10 years old. Unaware of this turn of events, my mother and I called to check on him a few months later. The young girl couldn’t make it to the phone and we all sobbed as her mother cried her way through the story. I still can’t write this without choking up, realizing once again, what an impact Tempo had not only on my life, but on this family’s life, and in such a short time. Tempo never has left my heart, and as I grew, as an individual and as a rider, I came often to reflect upon the many mistakes I made with him, and how he forgave me and kept trying nonetheless. Mistakes in pride, in judgment, in haste and in ambition. Mistakes I find it hard to forgive myself, however young and foolish I may know I was. So some 10 years ago, I came up with a plan for redemption…. My dream became to buy a Thoroughbred foal and raise it in Tempos name, if not literally. But I wanted to honor Tempos gifts to me by giving another thoroughbred a shot at life without first going through the hardships of the track. By then I had also worked with enough OTTb’s to know they weren’t all as straightforward and easygoing as Tempo, and the dream of raising an unspoiled TB for myself grew alongside my desire to repay my self-imposed debt to my long gone horse. My opportunity came
|
|||||||
|
An Equestrian Legacy