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.
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