A Father, a Daughter, a Pony, and a Lesson in Dreams
In my novel, Alice Bliss, Alice’s primary relationship in the family is with her father, Matt. They are kindred spirits; their connection encompasses camping, gardening, swimming, hiking, and playing catch. They are knit together by shared activity, hard work, and play.
Unlike Alice, I did not often choose to hang out with my father. The things my father loved to do – golfing, gardening, reading history, watching baseball – required a level of patience I didn’t possess. I worked beside him in the garden grudgingly, I ventured on to the golf course or the driving range once, maybe twice, embarrassed at my ineptitude and bored by the entire enterprise. I wince at my snotty twelve-year-old impatience as I helped put up the fence to pasture my pony. Acquiring that pony was a lifelong dream, a dream my father helped come true by buying an old single-stall barn that was slated for demolition for a few bucks, managing to move it onto our property and putting up said fence.
My parents knew nothing about horses but followed me into that world with good grace, much better grace than I displayed by that fence, with my father. I earned the money to buy my Chincoteague pony ($100) by weeding the vegetable garden (15 cents a row), ironing my father’s shirts (25 cents a shirt) and babysitting (35 cents an hour). My father drove me to the Kelly Bros Nursery in Danville, NY where the Kelly brothers had purchased a mare and a stallion one pony-penning day on Assateague Island, and now had their own herd. I picked out a black and white two-year-old filly and paid Mr. Kelly in four installments of $25. It took a year.
I created the character of Matt Bliss in the weeks and months following my father’s death. I re-created the relationship my own father had offered me as a child, that I had rejected at the time. I poured my lucky, blessed adult friendship with my dad into Matt Bliss, picking up the threads of my father’s garden, his easy athleticism, the way it seemed he could do anything with the right tools and a how-to book borrowed from the library.
I am grateful that I lived long enough to lose some of my impatience and finally, really get to know my father. I wish I could go back and dig those post-holes again. There’s so much I would want to tell him now, and even more, so many questions I would want to ask.
It turns out that I appreciate everything I learned in that hot sun, struggling with that post-hole digger, unrolling and stapling the fence to those posts. I think of all that my father was teaching me, almost without words: how to build a dream, how to work for it and struggle for it, how to reach beyond what you think you can do, by breaking it down into small steps. Every one of those garden rows hoed and weeded, every shirt ironed properly, every babysitting job. Rolling dimes and nickels and quarters at the kitchen table, the four visits to the Kelly Bros Nursery, my rolls of change turned in at the bank for real, folding money, putting those dollars into Mr. Kelly’s hands.
The waiting and the wishing and the wanting and the working were as valuable, I now know, as the day we brought that pony home and let her loose in her own paddock. And then the pony herself was a source of life lessons for years to come. But that’s a story for another time.
(This essay originally appeared on Beth Hoffman’s blog.)