A True Story: part 7

 

“People will come up to you,” Cosmo’s owner told me. “He draws a crowd.”

We were a bit of a freak show. Almost always taller than any other horse at whichever event we were attending, Cosmo drew more than his share of looks. I was fifteen and looked eleven, like a child at the end of his lead rope as he walked and snorted around the barns at the Horse Park, reacquainting himself with his old show grounds.

“How big is he?” was the question I heard most as I took him for walks before and between classes.

“How old are you?”

“Where’d you get him?”

“What level are you riding?”

“Who do you ride with?”

The outwardly curious  were not bashful about asking anything and everything about him. Others gave looks – everything from disbelieving to amused. I’m sure there were many who thought someone my age and my size had no business on a horse his size, and really, I didn’t. I would never recommend an eighteen hand, sensitive show horse as a mount for a dressage newbie. But Cosmo wasn’t picked for me – he came to us, needing to be saved, and in return, he was happy to teach me. I was glowing to think that here he was, fat and shiny, healthy and happy, fit and sound, but others were sizing up the competition. Competition? It was laughable.

Worse were the accusations that I was just lucky, that it “wasn’t fair” I had the chance to ride a horse of Cosmo’s caliber. So many people had watched Cozzy come into the barn like a corpse and were our biggest cheerleaders when it came time to take him back to the show ring, but as in all things in life, there are those unhappy with their own accomplishments who begrudge the successes of others. To them, I was “lucky”, and that’s all there was to it.

In truth, I was lucky. Lucky that of all the farms she could have chosen, Cosmo’s owner brought him to us. Lucky that she saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself, and entrusted her horse to me. Lucky for the chance to know him.

But the people who called me lucky weren’t there that first day, when he dropped his head into the halter for me. They didn’t skip school so they could carry him bucketfuls of lunch and sit outside his paddock. They didn’t put on a paper dust mask and give him an iodine bath. Rolled their eyes when I took him for walks. Didn’t have the patience to call one trot lap around the arena a good workout for the day. Their shoulders weren’t where Cosmo tucked his head when the vet came for vaccinations twice a year and the big baby was frightened. They didn’t spend forty-eight hours a week cleaning stalls and sweeping aisles so they could afford to feed the elephant that he was. And they weren’t there the last year of his life, when he wasn’t able to be ridden, when lymphangitis had turned his left hind leg to a tree trunk: when I cold-hosed and wrapped, applied poultice and sweats, medicated him twice a day and again, skipped school so I could sit outside his stall in a lawn chair because he felt so bad and just wanted to put his head in my lap. They weren’t there his last night when the vet stopped his heart.

I know exactly how lucky I was – too lucky for words – but I didn’t work so hard, didn’t give so much time and energy, for accolades. I am not, nor have ever been, competitive. And on an achingly bright spring afternoon at the Horse Park, when my Big Realization hit, it had absolutely nothing to do with ribbons or personal glory.

Cosmo and I waited, watching the three simultaneous tests being ridden inside the Conyers stadium, and I was hit with a sudden revelation. This was the same stadium where Cosmo’s father took the bronze in ’96. And here we were, awaiting our turn, Cosmo braided and bathed and gleaming like a new penny. He was the son of an Olympian who’d shaken hands with death, who’d been given up on by everyone else, and yet here he stood, back where it all started.

As small as I am, I felt even smaller. Who was I? I was nobody. I was a girl with a red pony and a boxed up collection of Breyer horse models in the attic. I was a geeky barn rat with no sense of adventure.

But I had touched greatness.

Cosmo did not go to the Olympics. He didn’t win the Derby. Didn’t save anyone’s life in a war. But that was the kind of heart he had. I was not remarkable, but he was, and he let me be his person. He carried me into the stadium that day and we walked away with two blues and the high scoring Trakehner ribbon for the entire competition. And I was humbled, in a way I haven’t been since, to know that I got to be a part of his story. It is a rare and special thing to know someone who truly inspires you.

Even if that someone is a horse.

Dedication plaque in the front of my barn