Off to the races, again

Satwa Sunrise, on her way to the rond de présentation

With Christmas in the middle, there has hardly been time to write about the last race, and thinking about the next race, I could barely concentrate on Christmas. The tree finally got decorated, after sitting in the house for a week, on Christmas Eve. My husband's right; I do live life as a series of passions. Only, he is also a little bit wrong; some of them stick.

The race on December 21, the winter solstice, was my first time ever at the racetrack. Before last Wednesday, my experience of the races was limited to books, like The Black Stallion series, and to television for the major race events, like Goldikova's final race in the 2011 Breeders' Cup at Churchill Downs. It's a strange thing when you tiptoe up to your long held fascinations, preparing to see them for the first time, and horse racing and the tracks are among the strangest, for me.

The "Sport of Kings", you hear, and, yet, there is a slice of every aspect of life at the racecourses. The entire court, as it were, from the scullery maids and lowliest of the stable lads to the kings and sheiks themselves, sweeping up the currents of the noblesse de robe -- the nouveau riche -- and the old money and privilege from around the world along the way to the backside and the grandstand, the private dining rooms and the owners' and trainers' salle. Everyone finds his or her place at the races.

The grandstand, however, this December day, was empty. A far cry from the photos of Deauville in July and August, full of parisiens and vacationers, arms and faces and long legs glowing in hues of bronze and gold, trees in full leaf blowing in the gentle breezes off the English Channel. There were more pigeons than spectators, but the total money placed on the races has only risen, if the numbers at the racecourses around the world are dropping, as a general rule. With television channels like France's Equidia, providing the prognostics, horse by horse, and broadcasting nearly every race in the year, information immediately available on the Internet, and the PMU on the street corner, where you can lean your elbows on the zinc and have an easy drink with friends, why would you show up at the races if you can spare yourself the prix du carburant and the tolls, unless you own or train a horse, and know those from the backside privileged to gain access to the private rooms of the tribune?

I thought about all this as I followed Gina Rarick through the racing procedure, and benefited from her network of professional connections, receiving a warm smile and a nod, being, as I was, in her wake. Had I come on my own, I'd not only have had to figure out where to park and enter the hippodrome, I would have had to discover if an entry fee is required, and I would have been limited to the grandstand seats facing the track, pigeons wading in winter puddles between the spur and the outer turf track, or inside the all-weather track. I would have been very nearly alone. I might have visited the restaurant on the top floor, and wandered to discover a bar, where coffee or drinks are offered, along with the company of strangers. I might have dared to see if a pass were required to walk along between the boxes, organized around exercise circles, camera in hand, perhaps being taken for an habituée. A smile and a nod at others, who do not recognize you, always helps.

I watched Sunrise walk around the exercise circle in her blanket, GR on the lower back corner, and I thought, "She won't embarrass anyone today, this filly."

She looked right at home, after a two-month break from racing in which she traveled from the racetracks of England and the sales at Newmarket to her new home in France, a Meshaheer fille de France returned to race in her native country, complete with the bonus for French-bred horses. Stepping down from the van and walking briskly alongside Mark to her box, you could tell she knew where she was, and why she was there. A professional, with her 7 races under her belt. Her music wasn't bad, 3p Ap 3p 6p 8p 9p 7p. She had shown a steady progression and placed in 2 of 7. No, she didn't shamble, like some of the others, who looked a little like they'd have rather stayed at home. She held her head high and looked with a keen eye all around her, particularly each time she passed anyone from her yards; she knew her people.

There was one other horse, walking around the exercise circle, who caught my eye.

"That's the favorite," Gina told me, "with his trainer. He's good."

I wondered if she meant the horse or the trainer. Both looked intense.

Lucky Harry is a 4-year-old Equerry gelding, and looked as professional, alert, proud and thoroughly at home at Deauville as Sunrise. No wonder he's the favorite, I thought. He has won twice, and Equerry is owned by Godolphin, and if in real estate the golden rule is "location, location, location", in thoroughbred racing, it's "papers, papers, papers".

After her visit to the track vet, since this was her first race in France, her walk, rest, carrots, and getting dressed up in her owner Annie Casteu's colors, and another walk, it was nearly a half hour to post time. We'd been there for 3 hours. She returned to her box for a last quiet moment, received her racing blanket and Mark led her to the rond de présentation.

Annie had already gone to the owners' area of the grandstand with her friend to await the start of the race. I hurried along after Sunrise, Mark, Sebastien, and Gina, clicking photographs and making note of the events around me. The jockeys were there. Fabien materialized in the inside of the presentation ring, and he received information on Sunrise and directions from Gina. Only, being the first time Gina had raced Sunrise, there was not a lot of certainty in the directions. We were all here to learn. Fabien exited the inner area to mount Sunrise, Mark led them off to the track, and Gina and I headed up to the owners' and trainers' area to find Annie and watch the race.

Gina and Satwa Sunrise

A race, I learned, is over in the blink of an eye. Everything is possible in the training center, the van, the box and the presentation ring, but in the end, everything is decided by the events of a particular race: the track condition, the field of horses and how the jockey rides the horse. My eyes are still inexperienced. I can lose the horse I am following in the pack of horses straining to get ahead, for the lead. I hear the murmurs around me, the gasps, the encouragements, and the criticisms. We watched on the screen, and I saw when Sunrise was fully visible just behind and between two horses.

But, why wasn't she going? Was Fabien asking her to go? And then they were coming out of the last turn and into the straight, and the field broke into two distinct ranks, stretching the full breadth of the track. Eyes glued to the screen, I realized the consequences of what I was seeing; Sunrise was shouldered out of the front line and relegated to the second. Gina sucked in a breath and then groaned; her horse was stuck in the second line of horses with no eye to thread until just several lengths before the post. The only horses with a real chance came from the front line, although she was still passing horses on her way to and past the finish, and didn't hardly break a sweat.

Neither Sunrise nor Lucky Harry won, nor placed. I am learning that more often than not (at least it seems), the favorite doesn't win, and the finish to this race was a bit of a mess. Approaching the final straight, Sunrise's jockey, Fabien Lefebvre, pulled her up; she had been clipped in the rear hoof by another horse, and then the field of horses formed rank and closed her out.

Coming off the track

Sunrise finished 9th, classing, and Lucky Harry, at 7.2/1, finished 14th. It was clear that she could have done better. Should Fabien have checked himself from checking her? She wanted to go; she was pulling for it; and the hole was there, right in front of her. She raced in a country where you go from the start, like the States, and might not have understood that she'd have another chance to go for it, that she'd be asked to. Only this time, the only real opportunity closed in front of her and Fabien. And, what about the whip? I have heard the great woman jockey, Patty Barton, say in the PBS documentary Thoroughbred: Born to Run that mares don't like to be told what to do; show them the crop, but don't use it on them or they'll refuse. I have to make a mental note to ask Gina her opinion before Sunrise races again in a claimer Monday.

The claim that she was a bleeder didn't seem to hold much truth, either, as she didn't so much as clear her throat after the race, let alone cough, while her neighbor appeared to be practically drowning afterwards. A bleeder for sure. You wanted desperately to help the poor thing clear her lungs out. She couldn't even drink.

Still, like Gina said, Sunrise showed everyone a lot. She classed; she ran easily and well; and she recovered fast. I still like her. A lot.

In the meantime, we'll see what Deep will do tomorrow. He'll be running at 3:50 pm in the 6th, the Prix de Berd'huis, a 2400 meter handicap against a field of 4-year-olds and older. Deep's used to running in Marseille, so the competition will be stiffer than he has seen, but he's pretty full of it right now with some energy to spend.
....

Colors

Deep, Magic and Milly

It is time to choose my colors. I know nothing about how this works in other countries, including my country of origin, but I am learning how it works here, how one goes about becoming an owner in the France Galop system. Like all things about which one starts by knowing nothing, it is not pour autant a secret. The site tells one how to go about it, in both French and English.

You do not need to be a resident of France, nor do you need to know anything about horse racing, although that is probably helpful, if you would like to recuperate any portion of your expenditure. 

You do need an income or assets, not necessarily wealth, although that is always definitely helpful (and appreciated), to pay the horse's keep and racing costs, or a part of them if you are an associé, or part owner with a leg, or two or three. 

You must also be a person of some moral decency, which will, in the course of things, be determined by the police and the Ministry of the Interior. 

You do not need taste, when it comes to picking out your colors, but it's always nice for everyone else, and your horse and his or her trainer.

And, you do, of course, need a trainer, but that's how I got myself into this, after all.

The colors and the patterns

France Galop offers you a palette of authorized colors from which to chose, as well as a tool to select different combinations of principal and accent colors and motifs. You are limited to two colors, but you may have three, exceptionnellement. Nothing, however, tells you anywhere what constitutes the grounds of the exception allowed. Perhaps you simply submit your choice and see what they say. If they are in a good mood, you get the exception granted.

This is la France, après tout.

As you work with the color tool, selecting various combinations, the system will tell you if the combination has already been attributed to an owner, and if so, who owns it and from what date. It will also tell you if the colors have been subject to a succession, if such is the case. I found that the combinations of red and black that remain available are severely limited. On the other hand, any combination of orange and grenat, or garnet, is. My chosen trainer is not partial to orange, however, whereas I am, and even painted an entire (small) guest room in  it, with the exception of one wall, and I would do it again. I do want my trainer happy, though, and I am left to suppose that she is not the only one in France who is left cold by the color orange.

I'll have to give Gina the other guest room, if ever she leaves Maisons-Laffitte to stay in MSX. For the moment, it is occupied by my stepson, anyway.

I believe I have made my choice, however, although I will not share it until the silks are made up, and my first jockey is riding out on my first horse -- or leg or two of one -- in them. My wish was for them to be simple, elegant, visible and to go with the coat of any horse I might ever be privileged to race and possibly see win, or place. I discovered, playing with the tool, that you know the right, or next best (you must submit three possibilities to France Galop), combination when you see it, and you can't help secretly hoping that those silks might one day be made famous by a horse of exception, which is extremely unlikely, although since the part of chance is always present in thoroughbred racing, never out of the question Like when the seventy-something-year-old retired high school principal Tom McCarthy's $17,000 horse General Quarters ran in the 2009 Kentucky Derby and came in 10th to Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of Godolphin Racing's $2.1 million horse, Desert Party, who finished 14th in a 19-horse field. 

A note: Sheik Mohammed spends upwards of $45 million a year on horses. Tom McCarthy has precisely 1 horse in his stables on a 13-acre farm in suburban Louisville.

Gina is more along the lines of Tom McCarthy, a small outfit in a major training center. Her's is a "boutique" stable of fewer than 10 horses at the moment, focusing on the owners' experience and making the world of horse racing accessible to the biggest dreamers with not always with wallets to match, who came to their passion like nearly anyone with a taste for reading born after 1941, through The Black Stallion series. Talking the other morning with my stepdaughter and another pitchfork wielding owner at the yards, I listened to how he came to horse racing, and I was hearing my own story, separated by only a handful of years and an ocean. A little boy, growing up in France just before this little girl did in the United States, read about Alec Ramsay and Henry Dailey, come out of retirement to train a horse he knows is exceptional. 

A warning: Be careful what you read when you are a child, you might just live some aspect of it one day. Like my fairy tales, I married my French prince (désargenté, hélas), live in the French countryside with our black labs, and have frogs in a basin in front of the living room French door. I threaten regularly to kiss them. 


L'on peut toujours rêver de plus.

I wouldn't necessarily bet on a horse, but I will support a yard and a trainer's work, learning until I might (or might not) have the means to participate in the choice of the horse whose jockey will wear my colors and no one else's and win in them. For now, Gina goes to Newmarket and returns with 2, 3 and 4-year-olds, who, while they won't be candidates for the Qatar Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp, can win and place regularly enough in smaller stakes races, and in order to do that, a trainer needs the support of owners who believe in the quality of her work and dedication to her horses and their owners, who get to simultaneously live their secret ambitions to be a first groom, or at least a lad, and take care of theirs and the other owners' horses.

It's a little scary, though. I know the value of money, the money I have earned, as well as the money anyone else earns, and I am learning about the risks of the thoroughbred stables: colic, viruses, and cracked foot bones that will put a horse out of racing for a race, several weeks, or even several months. If it's the "other owner's" horse, you feel sympathy for him, or her, or them, and for the trainer. If it's your horse, you take a big breath. There goes several weeks' or months' of fees, without any possibility to earn them back on the track, and maybe make a little something for your next horse, vacation or the entry addition to the house.

With all the best of intentions and practices, someone's horse won't be racing for some period of time at nearly any given time. There are no magic solutions or incantations, no silver bullets against illness or injury. One day, a given horse is fine, and you are looking to race her the next week at Deauville. The next day, you walk into her stable, and she is standing on 3 legs. When you move, you notice she hops on all three to shift position and you realize, "Oh shit, she can't put that fourth hoof on the floor," and you call the vet. An earnest roller after a work-out, she has slammed her hoof into the concrete block wall and fractured the third bone. A clean fracture the length of the bone without any displacement, anyway; she'll run again, and sooner than later, but she's out 4 months. That's Magic's story.


Time to open a Baskin 'n Robbins in Maisons-Laffitte.

It wouldn't matter if you had padded the walls; she'd likely have shredded the padding and hurt herself worse, possibly on a metal support beyond, like Hi Shinko did. It wouldn't matter if you have made the stables of rubber, which was the case when another horse, waking from the anesthesia after its gelding, somehow died in his box. Like Gina says, for such strong creatures, horses are fragile, "they will be walking and trip and break something, or walk into a tree and break something." A curious combination not only of strength and fragility, but of intelligence and silliness. 

If you are going to send your owner's application into France Galop, you have to be ready to take it all on, and know your limits. It's a little scary, but how will you ever know where you could have gone if you never begin?
....

Maisons-Laffitte, la piste noire

A Brown Christmas and Sunrise on the Solstice

It almost felt like Christmas

Frost. There was frost on the field, on the fallen and unraked leaves, and on the tips of the Cape May Daisies that are still blossoming on the eve of the winter solstice. I meant to write about the discovery of the amaryllis blooming in the first week of December, but I never made the time. But, there is no more frost, just rain and sodden ground that squishes under your waterproof boots. The songs on the CD player sing of snow falling and Christmas "in the air", and I am remembering when this was true and Christmas felt snug and warm, anticipating the , last minute shopping and a hasty trip to FedEx before it closed, wrapping presents and midnight mass (not necessarily in that order) and the sand bag lanterns along the driveways and suburban cul de sacs to guide Santa's reindeer, flying through the night skies to land on the roofs of the houses, covered thickly in new-fallen snow.

This is not helping to get the tree decorated.

...

...

Nor, either, is having my mind on Sunrise on the Solstice, tomorrow at Deauville, helping get the tree decorated. Tomorrow will be my first race, ever, in person, and not only my first race ever, but I'll be "backstage" with the trainers and the owners. And, not only will I be "backstage", I will be riding up in the horse van with Satwa Sunrise and her trainer, Gina Rarick. Sunrise will run in the seventh race, a claimer, The Prix des Perrets at 4:20 pm, and she'll be ridden by Fabien Lefebvre, who has ridden for Gina before. I have checked on the dress code; no trainers -- "or what we Americans used to call tennis shoes", not horse trainers (of which there will be lots), and no blue jeans. Black jeans are alright. I fear I am going to have to dress up, though, despite the weather forecast, which means the required rain gear would hide the color of everyone's jeans, since all my jeans are blue.

We'll have to see if my stepdaughter's stomach virus will have passed so that she can come, too, as planned. It's either the candy or the fish at her friend's house the other evening. If not, she needs to recover for the end of the week, because once Sunrise will have gotten some of her oats out on the track tomorrow, she's on to ride her in exercise.

Looking at the photo again, I realize I need to add one more thing to my list of things to do: rake. Christmas, and I am facing a carpet of wet, dead leaves. If the frost returns, it will have to do.

....

Riding racehorses

On Strictly Rhythm

Saturday morning at Gina's yards in Maisons-Laffitte was one of those moments when you stop and realize not how far you have to go still, but how far you have come. In so many ways. But it is like that, when everything is a way to everything else.

Two years ago last July, my stepdaughter got on a pony for the first time, a Shetland, like all the kids do to start. Saturday, she mounted Strictly Rhythm, a 3-year-old thoroughbred racehorse, a filly by Hawk Wing and Esteemed Lady out of Mark of Esteem, who has placed in 7 of her 13 races over these two years. For the last year and more, she has been riding double ponies and jumping 60-70cm, although she has jumped more on occasion. In her two and a half years riding, she has gone from beginner to working toward her Galop 5. There are 9 altogether. To give you an idea, at Galop 5, you can join the mounted division of the gendarmes or the police. At Galop 7, you may qualify to teach, if I am not mistaken.

For anyone who doesn't ride and who may be excused for not realizing this, she has already progressed very rapidly, but to go from a double pony in a pony club, even a really good one, to a thoroughbred racehorse is like going from a Deux Chevaux to a Ferrari; you don't just show up at a trainer's yards and hop up into the saddle, and it's not for everyone. Nor do you earn your opportunity by mucking stables and greasing tack; you have to find a way to show the trainer that there is an excellent chance you can handle the horse, and yourself. First, there's the danger to you. Then, and very possibly more important to the trainer, there's the possibility of injury for the horse, a horse who earns money running, not recovering in its box.

For my stepdaughter, or ma belle-fille (it's so much nicer in French), the wait was relatively painlessly short and the way smoothed by a bit of good fortune. Gina was going to the farm in Normandy, the farm where Strictly Rhythm was vacationing, to hand a horse she was retiring over to her new owner, and we just happen to live a few kilometers from the highway to Orbec. Gina and I made an appointment to meet near the exit ramp of the highway, and we headed to la ferme de Madame Guibert, stopping along the way for Gina's usual "service station lunch".

It was only when we arrived near the farm at precisely the appointed hour and Gina called the girl to guide her the rest of the way, figuring she had to be nearly there and about to get lost, that we discovered that they were nowhere near. Her parents had hired a horse transport service, she and the driver had driven across half la France, and the driver had just stopped well over an hour away in Gaillon, at the appointed hour to meet in Orbec, for lunch, or to casser la croute.

"Je vais juste casser la croute," he said to Gina, perfectly nonplussed, "et puis on reprendra la route."

This is France. Nothing gets in the way of lunch, at lunchtime.

Just casser la croute and drive more than an hour and a half? It was 1 pm. They wouldn't be there for another 2 or 3 hours, and Gina was due back at 5:30 pm for evening stable. Seven horses would be waiting for her, so what the hell did he think he was doing, stopping for lunch an hour and a half away at the very hour they were supposed to be there? But there was more. The girl said that truck wasn't equipped for a horse. It was a stock transport truck.
"Stock?" Gina said. "Mais on parle d'un pur sang qui vient de terminer son entrainement de course!" A thoroughbred racehorse, who had just come off training. "Je ne peux pas le mettre dans un camion de stock."

The girl was in tears, stuck heaven's knew where for lunch with a driver who had just learned his empty truck would be turning around and driving back across France to somewhere nearly in Germany. I was imagining her sitting next to him in that cab for seven hours. Seven alternately silent and grumbling hours.

"Don't worry too much," said Gina, "kids today know better than ever before how to distance themselves. They all have iPods."

I imagined her slumped against the passenger door, pretending to sleep, music in her ears. It would have taken a lot more than an iPod for me to survive that at 18, even at well over 18, but we went to see Strictly Rhythm in her box and then out to see Clare, who is in foal, and we got back well ahead of time for me to go get my belle-fille from the pony club. Time enough, it turned out, for Gina to come up with me and see the place and say she'd like to see her ride right as Julie, the director, was walking by, said "Bien sur", and told my belle-fille to go get a helmet from the tack room. There was a lesson in the covered manege, and she could get on any of the ponies.

Well, you'd have thought she'd have jumped, squealing for joy, at the occasion, but that wasn't quite the way it went. I was ready to tan her hide; Julie ordered her; and, the girls in the lesson started to call to her to get herself in there and on a pony tout de suite. Here she wanted, hoped to ride for Gina, and she was dragging her heels. I was puzzled. I was vexed. Gina and I stood in the tribune next to Julie, and there she was trudging across the manege as though to the gallows, when a friend jumped off a pony and handed her the reins. She mounted. Gina watched, and she and Julie exchanged observations.

"Elle n'a pas la force de monter un pur sang cheval de course," said Julie. She doesn't have the strength to ride a thoroughbred racehorse.

"Il ne faux pas de la force, mais la main douce." You don't need strength, said Gina, but soft hands.

"Elle a la main vraiment douce," allowed Julie. She has very soft hands.

"Une plume comme cela pourrait être très utile," said Gina, watching all 38 kg of my feather of a belle-fille ride around the manege. "Ca va! C'est bien," she called out to her.

She'd ride for Gina, eventually, but it couldn't have turned out more perfectly. Alexandra might not have had her new mare in the truck on the way back across France, but my belle-fille had gotten a serendipitous audition.

Alone, later that evening, she looked at me and said, "Tu sais, j'ai monté le poney le plus facile."

"C'est pas grave, mais pourquoi tu as fais ça?"

"Parce qu'Alice avait besoin de faire pipi, alors j'ai pris Gladys. Et elle m'a dit que je suis folle; elle aurait sauté sur l'occasion de monter pour quelqu'un comme Gina pour la chance de montrer ce qu'elle sait faire."

I shook my head. Alice has more sense in hers. She probably made up the excuse of needing to run to the bathroom to get my belle-fille up on a pony as fast as humanly possible, and, was she crazy? She, she told my belle-fille, would have jumped at the chance to ride for someone like Gina and show her what she could do, all for a chance to ride thoroughbreds.

But, if soft hands are enough, it also takes assurance, maturity and confidence, but one way to develop all of that, and in spades, is to get up on that horse with blood and ride it, and Gina decided last week that Saturday would be the day. She asked me not to tell her, and we all kept the secret, the happiest of secrets to keep. My husband, too. I hoped it wouldn't give it away, asking her if she had her helmet and chaps leaving the house, but, I reminded myself, I have asked her the past three Saturday pre-dawn mornings.

At breakfast, she was willing to eat a scrambled egg with her cereal without milk.

"J'ai fais un rêve ce matin," she said.

"Un mauvais ou un bon?"

She had been in a miserable mood when I woke her up, smothered in the heat from the electric heater she'd turned up and left on full-blast, and she'd fallen back to sleep and then brought me up short for "interrogating" her upon awakening, for the second time in a half hour, when I asked her a question. Chastised, I had left her room again, hoping for the best on the morning she was to ride for the first time. I suspected a bad dream.

"Mauvais à la fin, mais j'ai rêvé que Gina m'a tendu Hard Way, et j'ai été sur lui, et il y avait beaucoup de monde. Lisa était là sur Vedette."

I smiled. She had dreamed that Gina handed her Hard Way, her favorite in Gina's yards, to ride, and there were many people there watching. Lisa, her friend from the pony club, was on Vedette, the Welsh pony she has begun to ride in competition. She didn't mention the bad end.

"C'est drôle les rêves," I replied, "Quelques fois on rêve le futur, son destin, l'où on va et ce qu'on veut. Toi, tu vas vers les purs sangs de courses, et tes amies sont toujours montées en poney."

She returned to her eggs and orange juice, and we headed out the door to her future, come as quickly as she could dream it. We cleaned boxes like every Saturday, and she brushed horses and greased hooves to get them ready to saddle; spread fresh straw; fetched hay and clean water, and then Gina came up to us where we stood near Hard Way, about to go out for his exercise.

"Ce matin, j'ai besoin de ton aide. Tu vas monter. Pas Hard Way. Il met son poids dans les mains, mais tu monteras Strictly Rhythm. Elle est gentille. Ca te vas?"

My eyes didn't leave my belle-fille's face. I wanted for all the world to have my camera in hand the moment Gina told her, but it would have been a dead give-away. Instead, I watched her. Her eyes opened wide and softened, she continued breathing, but a smile started to trace its way across her left cheek. She nodded.

"Tu as tes chaps et ta bombe, oui?" She nodded again. "OK, vas te préparer."

She headed into the tack room for her stuff, and I heard her call out to me, "Tu le savais, n'est-ce pas?" You knew, didn't you?

"Ahhhhh...!"

"Tu mens super mal!"

Gina looked at me over Hard Way and raised an eyebrow.

"Je n'ai pas menti! Comment j'ai pu mentir quand je n'ai rien dit?"

But, she didn't mean that I had lied before, of course. She meant I couldn't lie right then, about not having known, when there was no way I could hide the pleasure I took in being caught out, or the pleasure I took in watching her step up into the saddle.

"Tu es fière d'elle," I heard Thierry, one of the owners who lends a hand around the yard, say. Looking over, I saw him smiling from ear to ear. He's a father. I turned and glanced at the young woman from the International Racing Board, who had come out to see Maisons-Laffitte, and who had been riding her parents' race horses in England -- in her Wellies, no less -- "forever".

"Je suis heureuse," I said, turning to Thierry, and returning his smile, watching his eyes turn back to Capucine across the yards, "Heureuse qu'elle ait eu cette chance."

The young woman smiled, and we all turned back to watch her ride away out beyond the stables and out the gate with Gina.

"It went well, I think," said Gina while we were finishing up.

Later, in the car, I interrogated her for real, and she cooperated this time.

"Alors, qu'est-ce que vous avez fait?"

We rode into the park at a walk, and we trotted, and then Strictly Rhythm broke into a little canter, and Gina said she was trying to wake me up, and then we cantered, and she got away from me.

I knew that. She had already told me. When I asked her if she had gotten her back under control, she'd flipped at me, cool as a cucumber, "Well, I wouldn't be here if I hadn't, would I?" Cheek. So, it was good for her.

"Alors, dis-moi. Comment l'as-tu rattrapée?"

I pulled my shoulders back and stuck my feet out forward, toes straight up, like Gina told me, and I remembered, just in time, to lower the reins to the neck, like Gina always says you must. Never raise the reins, they'll go faster! Gina laughed. 

Phew, I thought.

I didn't ask if she wanted to ride again. That wasn't necessary to ask, but next Saturday, it might be off to the races at Deauville to see 2-year-old Surrey Storm, a Montjeu filly, run her first race in France, if she doesn't get eliminated. She has run four times in England and placed in three of those outings, two third places and a fourth, finishing at worst in eighth place. I might even put a fiver on her if she goes.


....

A mint chip milkshake for Magic

That's Magic in the 5th position

She's right behind number 12, the 5-year-old Glorieux Gaulois at the outside fighting for second, and nose to nose with the number 17 horse, the 5-year-old Sabantuy. Her jockey is wearing the blue silks with the white shoulders and white helmet cover.

I was like the mother of a 6-year-old at a soccer game, right after her child has learned where the ball is supposed to go, but still hoping for that first goal. The start time, 4:10 pm, approached, and I grabbed my camera.

I do nothing important without my camera in hand. It might not or ever have existed if there are no pictures to show it.

The commentators on Equidia told us all about the horses considered to be favorites, while Magic quietly took her place in the the stalls. I saw her go in on the TV. No fuss. No bother. I waited while the others took their places, and then there was the moment of preparedness before the gates opened and the horses burst out onto the track. I had accomplished nothing all day, aside from careful perusal of the race lists and the prognostics by the experts on the different betting sites, who was favored, and maybe why, and then how they actually did. I discovered that the favorites weren't close to winning most of the races; the outsiders were taking the victories, and the horses placing were as often as not not even on the list of those with a solid chance, "if this" or "if that", like "if the truth were to win out over fiction".

That reorganized my thinking about Galixi fast enough, but who then? Who had a chance in this race? I didn't know enough to begin to guess it, but the way things were going, the horses winning and placing were in the 15/1 - 20/1 odds range. They weren't favorites, but they weren't long shots either.

The stall doors opened, and the 20 horses on the field for this 8th and last race of the day at Lyon-Parilly were on the track. It was happening. Just like that. The event I had been awaiting all day had begun, and it wasn't going to be long before Gina, Agatha, her jockey, Frédéric Spanu, and Magic's owners knew what she could do on this day, at this moment in her life, and at this point in her own particular career, with her papers, what she could do on this terrain heavy as lead, pénible by all accounts, on a gray day in late November, the end of the year.

But, there she was, with the leaders. Commentators who it seemed did not think they would be needing to say "Magical Flower" much, if at all, were suddenly saying her name often, "Et Magical Flower est là avec les chevaux en tête... Magical Flower est toujours là...".

She was. I saw it through my camera lens. She was right behind the first three, pounding down the track next to the horse nose to nose for 5th, until the surge in the final straightaway. More than two thirds of the race, even three quarters up with the leaders. I let the camera slip and gasped. And then she started to lose ground. The horses right behind her surged forward and past her, one and then two, three, four, five. "Magic! Allez, Magic!"

There was no point, though. They were bearing down on the post, and she had lost her position. She wasn't getting it back now, and it looked like she had decided to hold the door open. The leaders fell behind, and at the finish line, it was all 8-year-olds: Arwad, with 15/1 odds, Forza Atina at 13/1, Jolinoor at 14/1, and Space Tune, a 7-year-old mare, considered a solid chance for a win at 7.2/1, and then a 5-year-old, Sabantuy, a British horse at a long shot for the win at 48/1. Galixi, the favorite for the win, didn't even place.

Just look at the records of those first five horses, with 45 and more races for the older ones to Magic's 5 races before yesterday, with a place. Two words: experience and strength, and in those wet, heavy soil conditions on a grass track, both count.

Still, I wished she liked mint chip Baskin 'n Robbins milkshakes, and that I could stop and get her one on the way home, like I used to do with my son after soccer, to celebrate or to cheer up, except it wasn't Magical Flower who was disappointed; I was. Just like the mom I am. I realized I am going to have to rethink a few things if I am going to invest in "a leg or two". One is that you don't always get to win. Most times out, you probably won't. You'll see the legs you own on a beautiful creature walk up into a van and make the trip to Deauville, to Lyon, to Cagnes sur Mer, to Chantilly, Longchamp and Saint-Cloud, and possibly head to the shower before heading up the ramp to the van and on home to a clean box, without so much as a place. Another is that maybe you will have to acknowledge that your horse isn't going to have enough of a career, for one reason or another, to keep at it. Better to call it a day, offer him another life, and move on as much as you want to win.

But we all want to win. We all want to see our horses, like our children, bring home the glory and the ribbons and the trophies, exult with them and everyone who had a part in the training, the driving, the cold and the wet, when they win, but there will be colds and coughs, colics and splints, bad track conditions and long distances to travel, decisions to geld or to wait, hope and work and disappointment in the preparation for victory. And like all else, one has to imagine oneself, like Sisyphus, happy, and love the horses and the work, suffer the cold sunrises and the scorching June afternoons, and learn and build one's stables.

Gina saw that I noticed the ages of the horses who won and placed yesterday and chuckled. A "newbie", she said, wouldn't necessarily see that. She noticed it, too. I wondered about the young ones racing against the veterans, and she wrote and said it herself, "I'd rather keep them in their age category as long as I can -- usually until late in their four-year-old season. But at the end of the year, we take what we can get."

Like we all do at the end of the day.

Magic didn't break a sweat, though, and she could have blown out the candles on my father-in-law's birthday cake. When the horses behind her began to overtake her, it was like she saw them coming, held the door open for them and said, as Gina put it, because of course she and Frédéric saw it, too, "Well, go ahead then, if it means that much to you...". That means a change of strategy, longer distances and starting out front and asking her to stay there. Please.

Next up, Satwa Sunrise, a horse in which I will be taking a couple of legs, if France Galop and my husband are cooperative, at Deauville on December 7th. But with 134 other horses in the list, she's a candidate for an elimination. If she is, the 8th is a possibility. And this time, I will move heaven and earth to be at the rail.


....

Race Day

Magical Flower and Satwa Sunrise at canter

It's race day at Lyon-Parilly for Magic. She'll be wearing the number 10 and the start for her race, the Prix de Pont de Vivaux, is at 4:10 pm. Right now, she's in the van, on her way down the A6 from Maisons-Laffitte to Lyon, with her trainer, Gina Rarick, the only American woman trainer working in France. The jockey, Frédéric Spanu, is already there. He'll be racing the number 10 Chopouest, given 20/1 as an outsider against the favorite Kolokol at 5.6/1, in the Prix la Flèche, the third race of the day. Today is the first time ever that I will watch a race and know the horse and her trainer.

I am learning. Like with anything, there is a lot to know about racing and each particular horse before one can open one's mouth and say anything pertinent, let alone intelligent. If I had more time, I'd look up every horse in the field, a big one with 20 starting, but I'll start with Magic and the race favorite, Galixi, a 6-year-old mare from the stables of Jehan Bertran de Balanda.

Magic is a 3-year-old filly by Oasis Dream out of Fancy Rose. Oasis Dream is one of the best stallions in Europe. She has her chance. Geny.com likes her overall, but at small stakes. She placed 5th at Argentan in early October, in a slightly longer race on about the same track conditions as the last report for Parilly's grass gallop track. Her trainer hoped for a little more training time, but Magic didn't get scratched like she expected she would, and off they go.

She's currently at 23/1 at the PMU, but I am not giving up on her. She's young, racing her second year, and in her 12 races to Galixi's 62 she has 5 places, while Galixi has 8 wins and 27 places in her 5-year career, but there's always a first time. Magic's a beginner with promise, learning her trade, next to Galixi's glory.

I have organized my day around this event (and my back, which I threw out again last week), even though she is neither my horse, nor a horse in whom I have as much as "a leg". But I know her, and I know her trainer and her exercise jockey, Agatha, and that's just as much.
....

Magic

Sunrise

Satwa Sunrise

It's cold in late November at sunrise in Maisons-Laffitte. Almost as cold as sunrise in Argentière in January or February. Vapor billows around the horses nostrils and heads and off their flanks after their workout, and the low, golden sunlight makes it visible.

The work begins before first light and finishes at the lunch table, at home or at Le Pur Sang, full well before 1 pm, when a full work day is over. With 80-something lunches served before the hour was out, I missed the Lemon Ricotta Cheese Cake.

Oh well. I'll just have to go back.

This was our second week driving down the highway towards Paris, through Poissy and Maisons-Laffitte in the last dark of the night. I love getting up early with a purpose, being among the early risers, the first up and out. When we arrive, the rectangles of light from the box windows tell us we are not the first. We know we won't be, since we arrive at 7:30 am, an hour or a half hour after the lights are first turned on and the boxes opened. Curious heads poke out to see who has arrived. Vlad, the stable lab, trots over to say hello, and friendly voices add their own.

The horses have already gotten their first bags of hay, and Gina and Agatha are saddling up the first two to go out for their exercise. There are boxes to do, leather to be waxed, corners to be swept and mouse traps to be reset after I accidentally spring them with my broom, one after another, like popcorn popping. They all come up empty. Vlad has been efficient, but the evidence of their past presence is clear from the neat, round holes in the good wool blankets.

I pitch some soiled straw from the cleaned out boxes out behind the stables, and a small form darts into a hall in a particularly urine saturated pile that seems not to have been touched by the truck that comes to haul the old straw bedding away. A mouse. Gina tells me all the holes in the concrete block walls of the pit are mouse nests. I thought they were birds. Let the mice stay here, far from the good English wool saddle blankets and covers.

I think I am the only one who likes the dark, and the chance to watch the sunrise through the thickening morning fog and the horses' breath. Gina counts the days until December 21, and I tell myself Wait. Perhaps the charms are so many more once it is full light at the start of he work day in the racing stables.

Or, perhaps this charm wears off quickly.

Today, we saw Really Hurley and his jockey again. His jockey remembers us. He likes the camera, and I take more pictures and look up his racing performance when I have a moment the next day. I have some doubts about his being a crack, exactly. I recognize that I still need to ask everyone else's opinion on the matter. He is 6 already, although I have read that Steeplechase, or National Hunt in England and Ireland, horses are geldings and retire at an older age, so perhaps his best is to come. Really Hurley has run 36 races, with 3 victories and 9 places. In Quinté+, where the first five horses place, he has run 10, won 1 and placed 4 times. That actually gives him a pretty decent overall performance, winning or placing in a third of his races, and in half of the Quinté+ in which he has run.

I am starting to want better camera equipment. I had better find a winner to back, like Sunrise.


....

Gina Rarick's yard at Maisons-Laffitte

Satwa Sunrise and her neighbors

Ever since I was a child, I have been crazy for horses. Like every other kid, I read all the books, Misty of Chincoteague, and everything else by Marguerite Henry, Black Beauty, My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara, and dreamed she was my friend, and The Black Stallion series by Walter Farley. It was Alec and Henry and their black stallion who captured my imagination more than any of them. I lived the races with them, and I dreamed of the racecourses down which the black stallion beat out his winning rhythm.

My grandparents lived outside a small city on the Saint Lawrence River in far northern New York State. Up the road were two farms. One in which my uncle stacked hay in the hayloft; the other more majestic. It was just  a little farther up the road and on the other side. The Carlisle's farm. They had horses, paddocks and a ring. My  uncle put a cushion on the crossbar of his red Schwinn bicycle and rode me up to the farm to play in the hay and maybe help me a little, but it was the Carlisle's farm of which I dreamed. We rarely went there.

I remember once, and I don't know how or why, being there with our mother with my sister. We each got to get up on a horse, our first time. I couldn't have been older than 8, my sister 5. I sat on that horse, facing the horse barn, and my mother said, "It's your sister who is a natural, not you." I was stung, but I did not want anyone to know. I don't remember anyone else being there to hear her words or to see my disappointment, but someone must have been holding the lead. That, or it was the gentlest, tamest old horse in the barn.

I supposed it was fair. I loved skiing and waited all the warmer months for the snow to fall, going down to the basement to look at all the ski equipment hanging from and leaning against the concrete block walls. My sister didn't. If she hadn't already, she would soon go out one morning, a blizzard blowing freezing air and heavy snow across the region, the Lake Effect, God love it, and declare to our father, "No. I am not going to ski," and she didn't. She turned around and went back into the lodge, where we found her for lunch. That was her last time to the slopes with us. So, perhaps it was fair that horseback riding was for her, but neither of us got to do any of it, anyway. It was inaccessibly far and expensive, and we each relegated horses to our dreams and met them in our books.

It was a couple years ago, when my stepdaughter was going through a first rough patch, that I asked her if she wanted to ride. Her eyes grew three sizes and her whole face opened in excitement. She nodded yes.

"Mais, Papa ne voudra pas."

"On s'en fou. Tu me laisse gérer Papa. Je veux bien pour toi."


Papa won't want me to ride. 


We don't care a fig about that. Let me take care of Papa. I want that for you. 


Her first session, that July 2009, she was timid, reserved, and absolutely delighted. They learned basic care of the ponies and led them to the paddock. Mounted them, and learned to sit, to hold the reins, to start and stop. To try to change direction. I had no idea where we were going and whether she wouldn't finally decide it wasn't for her; whether she wasn't too timid, afraid, finally. Several months later, during the winter, she had her first galop of the 9, like your first star in skiing, and Julie, the director of the pony club, told me very simply that she was gifted. her father was more restrained.

"On verra."

"Mais tu ne l'as pas vu monter et Julie a vu passer des tas d'enfants; quel serait son intérêt de dire une telle chose si ce n'était pas vrai?"

We'll see.


But you haven't seen her ride and Julie has seen tons of kids; what would be her interest in saying something like that if it were not true? 

Still, he demurred, and his daughter continued to pass her galops "au galop". The second, the third, the first part of the fourth last winter, a year and a half after she had first gotton on Frimeur's sturdy back. She as jumping, and she had competed in her first unofficial competitions without ever losing a huge smile on her face. Jumps, speed, nothing made her afraid. It delighted her. I brought her father to see Julie with me, and she told him, "Votre fille est douée."

Your daughter is gifted.

The French respect what they consider expert opinion, even if we were not seated in front of the director of the national team. At this level, it was enough. He started to come to see her jump, and he realized: she rides beautifully, with grace, composure, assurance and joy.

If I were never going to ride, she would ride as far as her talent and ambition, and our means, stretched, could take her. Not that she didn't want me to ride; when she started, she offered me a crop. It sits at the bottom of the stairs, with the unused backgammon set, a box of bills and my stable boots. I got those a long time ago for walking the dogs, working outdoors and general wearing when I don't particularly care about my elegance, or most of the time. I have made progress, though. I now where Ugg boots for that.

Two weeks ago, Julie scheduled her to finish her galop 4. It was way past time, and not liking dressage is not reason not to pass it, and a little before then, just before the Breeder's Cup, I saw the New York Times was starting their blog, The Rail, again and looked it over, including the contributors. Imagine my surprise when I learn that one of them is a woman, a professional thoroughbred racehorse trainer at the Maisons-Laffitte international training center, just outside Paris, and that she is from the United States. Her name is Gina Rarick, and I sent her an email through her blog on her site, GallopFrance.com, and, she replied. We were welcome to come to visit her and the yard, and, better still, she had had a number of girls my stepdaughter's age work with them and it had always worked out beautifully.

We went to see Gina and the horses and everyone who works with her last Saturday morning, but that's another story, for another post.

Meanwhile, I have been back to help muck out the boxes, clean up the hay and straw storage rooms for a delivery -- I got rid of as much cough and respiratory problem-inducing dust as was humanly possible; horses are meant to run, not stay home with a cough --, and feed and give water to these gorgeous creatures: Satwa Sunrise ("Sunrise"), Magical Flower ("Magic"), King Driver ("King"), Deep Ocean, Triple Tonic, Hard Boy and Surrey Storm ("Milly"). And I acquitted myself decently.

My stepdaughter will be returning every Saturday morning to help out, and eventually to exercise the horses, if she is ready. I am in training for the 5:30 am weekly Saturday morning alarm, in addition to the ones that will ring Sundays for competitions.

Right now, I need to hurry up and get ready to meet Gina over near the highway to Horse Breeding land, Normandy. We're going to the farm where she rests her horses to meet a young woman coming to take one she had to retire and is giving away in exchange for a good home for her.

As for me, I might not ride, but, who knows, perhaps I will invest in a share in a thoroughbred.
....

I lost him

At the vet's

He didn't make it through the evening. I didn't think the vet thought he would die, and so I settled him back into the clementine crate with the hand towel and a bottle of hot water, to keep him warm. I stoked the fire, like I have been doing for him, and I left to get some groceries and dry the clothes.

When we returned, I had a feeling. The fire was burning brightly in the wood stove, my husband was watching the trotters, and I could see his small form in the corner of the little crate where I had left him to let the antibiotics take their first effect. But, I had a bad feeling.

I crossed the room and knelt down in front of the fireplace, and I could tell already that he was dead.

How do we know these things before we even touch? I took him to the vet because I felt him failing today, but I thought he would pull through. I imagined him getting better, learning to take his antibiotics from the little syringe Dr. Zumsteg went to find for me because it work better in his small mouth that the one that came with the bottle of powder I won't need now. I imagined him learning to trust me. I didn't flatter myself to think that his relaxing in my hands today meant he trusted me already. I knew it meant he was failing.

I waited too long, and only because I was afraid the veterinary office would laugh at me, the animal lady, with my dogs and my cats, with the cat we saved, and the toad, Eugénie G. Toad, I saved from the pool pump basket, just in the nick of time I think we'd both say, and the birds and the duck I tried to save. I always fail with the birds. Birds are hard. And, now, I failed again. If I had taken the little hedgehog in right away, he'd not have gotten so sick, and he'd not, perhaps, have died.

I reached my hand down, not wanting to know what I'd find, but already there was no sound, no movement of his sides, no breathing that I could see. He felt hard. I lifted him out, and there was no softness. His body curled in the position in which he had lain there.

"Il est mort," I said.

"Non. Il ne peut pas être mort," said my husband. "Il bougeait il y a quelques minutes."

"Il est mort. Il est rigide. Il est mort depuis un petit moment déjà."

He said he had heard him moving, like he does, you know, in his little nest bed, just a half hour or so earlier. Then, I said, he died shortly after. Had I known, had I not felt relieved, safe in the knowledge that he had just been to the vet, I would have stayed.

"Ca n'aurait rien fait," he tried to reassure me. It wouldn't have made a difference. He was sick. "Tu as fais ton mieux," he said.

"Non, si j'avais fait mon mieux, il serait probablement toujours en vie car il aurait eu l'antibiotic déjà depuis quelques jours, et il aurait été en train de guérir. Mais je ne voulais pas qu'on me trouve ridicule."

No. If I had done my best, he'd still probably be alive because he'd have had his antibiotic and deworming since days ago, he'd have been getting better already. But I was afraid to appear ridiculous.

He'd have been eating better and drinking more. I knew he wasn't drinking enough. I realized too late that I was being ridiculous by not taking him. How can it be ridiculous to care about a small animal?

Nothing is sadder than a body from which the life is gone. Baccarat, Chloé, when we found her where she had gone to die, under a car in the restaurant parking lot just up the street, Nuts after we had him put down. People I have known, and others I wished I had had a chance to know.

"Au moins," said my husband, coming to give me a kiss, where I sat, typing this, "il est mort aimé et pas tout seul dans le froid."

Somehow, I don't know if from wherever he is now he sees things quite that way, that he knows that he died loved and cared for, rather than alone in the cold. Maybe it was worse on him. Maybe it was the stress. I hope not. I hope the Hedgehog Preservation group is right, and that it is better to take them in and to try.

I will bury him tomorrow, poor little hedgehog. This evening, I feel very sad, and I miss him.
....

The hedgehog goes to the vet

In the clementine crate in the car

First of all, she's a boy. Dr. Zumsteg showed me its little zizi. I thought that was an hedgehog outie bellybutton. 

Second, he is too little to release back into nature, and he is sick. For the moment, at all of 440 gr, our little hedgehog child must remain with us to have a chance to survive the winter, or we track down some association of which he has heard, somewhere near Beauvais. 

He had a treatment for worms and other intestinal parasites, which might be causing the blood in his stools, and he had his first antibiotic treatment by injection. I have a little bottle of antibiotic powder to mix with water and an oral syringe to give him 3 drops, morning and evening. For a week or so, I suppose. 

In three weeks, he gets another deworming. A drop from the little pipette on his skin, between the spines.

Dr. Zumsteg pronounced him rather parasite free, at least on the surface. I didn't mention that I had just removed another tic that must have been too small to see when we found him, at the counter, and the technician kindly passed me a trash basket into which to drop its rotund with blood disgustingness, tiny little legs milling in the air.

Meanwhile, I need to keep his Fanta bottle full of nice warm water and hope his appetite returns.

And, no one laughed.
....

X gets his antibiotic shot

The little hedgehog

Unwell

I only have a few moments before we leave for the veterinary clinic. I finally summoned up the courage to call our clinic nearby and confess that I had recovered another animal, a very young hedgehog, probably too young to hibernate successfully, and who seemed sick when I brought him home a week ago last night.

I was on my way home, racing down the road from the ridge to our road in the old Fiat Uno, with the new Marco Simoncelli sticker on the back end, when the high beams caught a small, rounded figure not far from the center of the narrow road. I just had the time and space to slow and swerve left, continued on a bit, and then braked and put the car in reverse. It had to be a hedgehog, and we have all seen what becomes of hedgehogs left to their own devices on the road at night, particularly, it seems, at this time of the year, when the weather turns cold, and the asphalt holds the heat of the day's sunshine, attracting unsuspecting hedgehogs to their death under our wheels. 

I only backed up a short way before it occurred to me that one can as easily run over a hedgehog in reverse as one can in 5th, so, I stopped the car, put the warning lights on and walked back up the road, using my Blackberry for a flashlight. There is was, a little further across the road from where from front wheel had nearly done it in. I picked it up, and it curled into a tight ball around my fingers, spines sticking straight out. We headed back to the car, flashing in the dark, and I opened the rear end  -- and now that I think about it, I remember that it was the other car, or I would never have put it in the back end --, and settled it into a corner for the short trip home. 

The last time I had found a hedgehog in the street, a fall evening out walking Baccarat and Rapide, 4 years ago, I carried it home in my L.L. Bean anorak shell. It was covered in blood-gorged tics and fleas, and we only kept it inside a night before releasing it into the garden, where it promptly disappeared for good; we'd hardly had the time to name him Harry before he was history, and much to my husband's chagrin because he wanted a garden hedgehog in the worst way.

We both think they are adorable, and they eat insects.

Here was my chance to bring home our new garden hedgehog, only it was small and not exactly well. It made rasping sounds when it breathed, and when it pooped in my lap, it was tarry and black. A sign of blood in the feces, or internal bleeding of some sort.

It settled into the space behind the wood stove in the fireplace, and rasped on through the night. I hoped it was nerves that made its breathing so loud. My doctor husband suspected otherwise. I did, too, to be honest. A respiratory infection, and that would need antibiotics, which would require a vet, and I felt a little embarrassed about calling ours for another found creature.

The next morning, I came down to check on it, after awaking from a dream in which my husband had inexplicably cut the piping on the wood stove and disconnected all of the electroménager in the house while I was sleeping. This might have had something to do with the recent failure of our clothes dryer, in addition to the hedgehog's presence behind the wood stove, where it had curled to hide in safety and relative snug warmth. The towel where it had started the night was empty, but I could hear breathing coming from the wood stove. Louder than ever. I put my hand back behind it and felt nothing. I sat back on my heels and thought. This was impossible. It couldn't be in the stove, and it wasn't next to or behind the stove, but I could hear it.

I looked up into the space above, where the chimney tube disappears up through the ceiling the installers put in the chimney to close it off. Ridiculous. They might have claws, but they can't crawl up walls, even when they are made of horizontal rows of very thin brick, and jump across to... what?

Where was the hedgehog? 

I ran my hands along the skirt of the wood stove, around to the back to the middle, and there was a hole. A hole in the skirt. I had never seen the back of the unit, not really, so I didn't know there was a hole into which a hedgehog could crawl. Squeezing as far in alongside the wood stove as I could fit and reaching my hand through the opening as far as I could reach, I could just feel the tips of its spines. It moved further away. I tried not to panic, although I don't know it would have posed such a problem had it decided to stay. It would eventually come out, but I didn't think about that right away. 

I reached for the stick I use to poke the fire, maneuvered it carefully into the hole and alongside what I hoped were the hedgehog's flanks and pushed, hoping it wouldn't figure out a way to escape the stick and nestle further away. I edged it closer to the hole, and , without setting the stick down, I moved my hand down it until I felt the spines. It was right there. I could get my hand alongside and pull it out. 

It didn't look happy. 

I took two good-sized logs and blocked its access to the rear, at the level of the hole, sat it back down, and it crawled up onto the logs and went to sleep for the day. 

That was Monday, a week ago. Since then, we have removed its tics, determined that it is a little girl, listened to her breathing quiet a little, tried to feed her what the excellent British Hedgehog Preservation Society site told me she would like most (the British are phenomenal with everything wildlife, rescue and preservation) and I read up on young hedgehogs, the possibility of taming hedgehogs, when to release them, and at what minimal weigh, and the thing that stood out was that this little girl was too little to survive the winter. She is a what they call an "autumn juvenile", and even when you rescue them crossing a road and they appear in good health, it is best, they say, to take them to a hedgehog care giver because they are just too young to have a good chance of making it to the spring, and if they do, they come out of the winter months weakly, with less of a chance to survive.

And still she rasped on, but she ate a little of the chicken scallop I prepared for her, and the English digestive biscuits I got at the grocery store here near home, in France. And then she started to eat less.

Twice, she bit me. The first time, I got her teeth off before she broke the skin. The second time, I bled fairly freely. My husband thought maybe it was time for our small, prickly, adorable guest to go, as much as he hoped for a garden hedgehog and thought she was precious.

"Mais, je pensais que tu voulais essayer de l'apprivoiser, juste assez pour qu'elle fasse son chez elle dans notre jardin?"

"Oui," he wanted her to be tamed enough to make our garden her home base, "mais, pas si elle t'attaque." But, not if she attacked me.

That made sense. Still, he was the one who wanted a garden hedgehog, and I was not opposed, even if it does mean no snail pellets. And, she is cute.

Only, she is not doing well. I think she is failing, and it turns out that Dr. Zumsteg knows a lot about hedgehogs. I am hoping it's lungworms or a tiny little respiratory infection de rien de tout, and that a little antibiotic and deworming and a solution for the winter months will see her through.

Off we go.

....

Super Sic

For two weeks, I have watched videos, read tributes, looked at photos, and I have cried.

He was not my son. He was not my brother, my lover, my teammate or my friend. And, still I have cried.

Not a tear or two, but streams of tears. I have looked toward the sky, and I have asked why.

The day after he died, his mother came out of their home to comfort the dozens of fans gathered in mourning, and she said, "Non piangete, non piangete per lui. Marco non avrebbe mai voluto vedervi piangere."

Don't cry, don't cry for him. Marco would never have wanted to see you cry.

But, Marco never knew we'd see him die, at 24, coming out of a turn on the second lap at Sepang International Circuit. He couldn't have asked us to smile, like he always did, for everything, and he has seen many tears, tens of thousands of fans with tears in their eyes, quiet, silenced, crying.

Rosella, noi piangiamo per lui, per voi, per Paolo, per Martina, per Kate e per tutta la famiglia San Carlo Honda Gresini e MotoGP. Per Vale, e per Colin.

We cry because he was young, and he was joy. Because he had a talent and a drive to use it. He was criticized. He said he was learning, and that he would make mistakes. Jorge Lorenzo told him it was not a problem, until something happened. He said, "Then, I will be arrest," and he smiled that smile that sends problems out of the room, off the track, away from Marco.

And then, there was a problem, and he was not "arrest", he died. Jorge at least had a valid point.

"Maybe the other riders can tell when someone is going to die racing, like we can tell when someone is some guy is going to die on the road," my son mused. We, all of those who ride des deux roues. 

It came too soon, before Marco had a chance to learn more. Before we had a chance to see if you can drive the pace, race aggressively, thread the smallest hole, take the throttle to limits others place somewhere before them and then calibrate a distance from which to observe the consequences. His fans, the whole world of racing, suddenly, it seems, was holding its breath, waiting to see how close you may come to that limit, how real you may make MotoGP racing in the Catégorie Reine, the 800cc bikes, without a problem happening.

The kind of problem that would get you "arrest", or perhaps flirt mortally with your death.

From outside, from a fan's place in front of the articles, all of the reaction on the Internet, the sides form: Marco Simoncelli was too aggressive, he was a problem waiting to happen, he -- maybe -- invited his own death; Jorge Lorenzo was prescient; or, Super Sic was the bright spot, the thrill, the color in a sport that is becoming risk adverse, almost to the point of demanding that the bikes be equipped, as one fan put it, with turn signal lights for passing and brake lights for braking before turns; he was the future of MotoGP's ultimate category, la catégorie reine; he was the natural heir, they said, to his friend Valentino Rossi.

It was "bad luck". It was an accident. Or, it wasn't maybe so much an accident; it was an accident waiting to happen because he flew too high, too fast, without regard for the truth of the consequences, to the thrill of the fans, to the admiration of the MotoGP riders who have retired and watch him from the paddock, and who saw in him one of the greatest future riders, like 1993 MotoGP 500cc World Champion Kevin Schwantz, who wrote the day after his death in Malaysia, "There were three standouts in the sport, and now there are two. I'm probably going to get under some people's skin saying this, but it's Maverick Vinales, Marc Marquez, and it was Simoncelli."

Marco won't have the future to show what experience in his class, the tempering of time and maturity, would have made of him, but his legions of fans, enough to fill Indy, have had a chance to show him what he meant to them.

Two weeks after he died, on the last race day of the season, the world of MotoGP made a fitting tribute to a young man with a perpetual smile and hair that bounced as joyfully around his head as he raced around a track and bounced through the paddocks and our lives.

Schwantz, his hero, mentor, supporter, and friend, rode Marco's Gresini Honda RCV212 at the head of the memorial lap at Valencia, followed by the riders of all three categories -- the first time all three categories have taken to the track at the same time -- and a minute of noise; his father said it would be more fitting to his boisterousness than a moment of silence. Vale Rossi had a helmet made, a mix of their two helmet designs, and carried Marco's flag. Loris Capirossi, his friend and his adversary on the track, racing the last race of his career, replaced the 65 on his bike with Marco's 58 and finished the race in tears behind his visor; one rider ending his career in retirement rode under the number of another who died racing two weeks earlier.

But, how to explain why this death hurts so much more than others? The combined effect of his and other deaths, like Shoya Tomizawa's last year and Daijiro Kato in 2003, along with the deaths of other people in our lives? I think of two young women, not yet 20 years of age, who came to the ER when my husband was on duty last year, at several months apart, both of whom complained of abdominal pain, and both of whom had cancers that would certainly end their lives before they got to be another year older. The first died in July. The second just one month ago. My black lab, Baccarat, who at 4 was far too young to die last summer of a tumor in her heart, and break ours.

Is it because of his smile, his infectious happiness that shone right through the television screen and made friends and family of all of us?

The accident was at 10:30 in the morning in France, during the Rugby World Cup. Normally, we would have watched the MotoGP races in the afternoon. For some reason, we did not that Sunday. In the evening, my husband turned his laptop toward me and asked if I remembered the face that grinned from the screen, the glorious mop of soft, curly brown hair as big as the smile.

"Oui."

"Il est mort aujourd'hui." Il est mort. Il est mort aujourd'hui. Mort.

"Comment cela?"

"Un accident vraiment violent dans le deuxième tour à Sepang, en Malaysie."

I don't remember the next moments, but I remember all of them since then, searching YouTube and MotoGP for video of the accident, of the press conference, of the funeral, and searching Twitter and the Internet for the comments of his fellow riders, his family, Valentino Rossi and Colin Edwards, both of whose motorcycles struck the upper body and head of Marco Simoncelli after he lost control in a turn and started to skid toward the sand at the outside of the track, hanging onto the bike laid out along the right side. He disappears from the video, and then, he and his bike veer back in frame, the rear tire of his motorcycle apparently having regained traction, sending him back across the track and directly into the path of Edwards and Rossi.

Why didn't he let go? Could he not let go? Was he somehow stuck? Was it, as some supposed, his indomitable spirit of competition that made him want to hang on and try to get control of his bike again and continue the race? Had something happened to him already, as others, completely at a loss to understand how this could have happened, have wondered?

An instant. Edwards and Rossi are fighting to position, coming out of the turn, Rossi on the inside, their bikes practically touching, and suddenly Marco and his bike skid into their path, Marco's back, from the buttocks up, exposed to Edwards' front tire, which hits Marco in the back, spinning him around between their bikes, and in the split second, Vale's front tire hits his head, an impact so sudden and violent that it tears Marco's helmet off and sends it flying, rolling, bouncing behind where Edwards and his bike, cartwheeling from the track and into the grass, come to a stop. It rocks, and it lies still. Marco's body, inert, skids along the asphalt and comes to a rest. His leg, slightly elevated, falls to its rest.

"His helmet never should have come off," my son said. "His face, it was on the asphalt --"

This, too. His face. The animated, beautiful part of him that never seemed to feel the slightest need to restrict your access to his joy in everything. It slid, bare and unprotected, along the rough asphalt. His skin on the rough asphalt. It felt like a sacrilege.

More questions. Why did his helmet come off? Eurosport's commentator Régis Laconi, ex-MotoGP rider, retired himself after a serious accident, reacted at the same time the public was watching live, "Comment ça se fait que son casque se soit enlevé, c'est pas possible? Un casque ne peut pas s'enlever pour un pilote." How is it that his helmet came off, how is that possible? A helmet can't come off a pilot.

Disbelief. These helmets are designed for race conditions, intended to withstand the worst shock in order to protect the head. That the helmet could be ripped from the rider's head is unthinkable. That Simoncelli's cheek should have to touch the asphalt, was the most shocking indication of the truth: the vulnerability of the riders in each race. Race after race, one or more riders go down, sliding with their bikes into the grass, the sand, and most often, they get up, rush to their bikes and try to get them back up, with the help of track staff, and try to make up their lost time, slapping their thigh in fury and frustration when it's not possible.

His vulnerability, his skin touching the asphalt, his body broken, his life leaving him, left him, alone on the track, with Colin Edwards equally alone and untouchable only meters away, bent double, holding his head in his hands in pain, disbelief and shock, the helicopter hovering, sending us these images, Shoya Tomizawa's body projected from his bike last year, hit by another bike and sent skidding down the track, spinning around and around and around before he came to a stop, like Marco now, this vulnerability like the simplicity of his joys, his availability to his fans, and his terrible youth made him vulnerable.

Marco was willing to be vulnerable, and we knew it, and we loved him.

He was only 4 years older than my son, who is the same age as Tomizawa was when he died last year. They are professionals at 16, world champions at 21, and younger. They are dead at 20, at 24; they know what comes next while we look skyward and wonder if they see us still, if they hear our thoughts for them.

If Marco does, then he has heard 91,000 on the MotoGP site's place for fan tributes. He is constantly hearing us and seeing us cry, for nearly everyone who has left a word for him speaks of their tears and of being "gutted" by the news of his death.

"Non piangete, non piangete per lui. Marco non avrebbe mai voluto vedervi piangere."

Marco has to see us cry because we can't help it. Io piango, noi piagiamo per lui, Rosella.

"Il était attachant, avec ses grands cheveux et son sourire," said my husband.

We watch the tributes together, the races now. He is sometimes critical of Super Sic's aggressive style, but maybe like a father. He, motard that he has been these 30 and more years, could never have let his son race like this for fear of losing him, but that is what Marco did, and his parents let him live his dreams.

I like the notion of him being the fastest angel, the fastest star in the heavens now; a perfect racetrack and bike under him, and Tomizawa and Kato, and everyone else who has died racing on a MotoGP circuit, rooting for his friends and colleagues and smiling, always smiling. Life was simple for Marco; it was a single wire, a conductor of happiness and warmth. Marco knows what comes next now, but the rest of us will have to live without him making the races exciting, our Sundays brighter for his grin, his sparkling, laughing, warm eyes, and wait to see for ourselves, with our quieter, tamer lives perhaps less lived, if longer.

RIP, Super Sic. We love you. 58 forever.

Marco Simoncelli highlights of 2011 | RIP 1987-2011 from Beau Nascimento on Vimeo.
...