“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”---Robert Louis Stevenson
Saturday
When we were kids, Saturday was Freedom Day, a respite from the agonies of school and the drudgery of Mass, a day to play baseball early in the morning and ramble over to the movies in the afternoon to watch Abbott & Costello battle it out with vampires, werewolves, mummies or the godfather of horrors, Frankenstein himself. Saturday was an opportunity to motor off to Salisbury Beach for a sprint into the ocean, a stop at Tripoli Bakery’s pizza shrine, a ride on the Dodgems, where the optimistic sign read “No head-on collisions allowed!” Good luck with that, pal.
As we grew up and many of our expectations were relegated to the sad shelves of Reality, the glories of Saturday never diminished. In college, where the unread assignments constantly hung over our heads like the Sword of Damocles, Saturday was a needed escape, a retreat into football, dances, fraternity hijinks, girlfriend/boyfriend extravaganzas. Some of us were forced into pilgrimages to nearby oases where liquor was legal. At night, there was a scarcely believable phenomenon called the drive-in theater which carried a greater variety of food items than a Bangkok street stand. Even when it rained, Saturday seldom disappointed.
Time passes, habits change, but Saturday never loses its luster. No matter how badly the rest of the week treats us, there is always Saturday, visible in the distance, beckoning, promising relief. There are some people who try to treat the day the same as all others, but Saturday will not stand for it, shaking out its brightly-wrapped packages of weekend cruises, NASCAR races, million-dollar weddings, nights with the Symphony. And as any fool knows, every Saturday is National Road Trip Day.
If some days are truly diamonds and some merely stones, Saturday is the famed Allnatt, 101.29 carats with a cushion cut, vivid yellow, origins unknown. We wouldn’t trade Saturday for Scrooge McDuck’s money bin, the Treasure of Sierra Madre, the Secret City of Paititi or all the tea in China. It is a singular blessing, this Saturday, the day with no alarm clock, dependable, consistent, available to all and never more than three days away. They even named Saturday Night Live after it.
(1) Siobhan with Mike O’Farrell; (2) Bill at Dreamers Point; (3) Trainer George disciplines his troops.
Making The Rounds
If Saturday is a little less raucous for senior citizens, they are still invited to participate in the day’s largesse. For Siobhan and Bill, Saturdays begin at 8:30 a.m. on the 5/8-mile training track at Ocala Stud, often a nippy place to be on a Winter’s morn. Ocala Stud has been around a very long time, since January 16, 1956, in fact, when Maryland horseman Joe O’Farrell and his brother, Tom, were members of a nine-person syndicate which paid $700,000 for 800 acres of land on Shady Road near what is now the Paddock Mall in southwest Ocala. One of the earliest thoroughbred operations in town, Ocala Stud gradually became an institution, marketing its first crop of two-year-olds in 1958, the beginning of a tradition of selling the farm’s entire juvenile crop either privately or at the various two-year-olds-in-training sales in Florida. In 2010, Ocala Stud was America’s leading breeder of U.S. graded stakes winners. The farm also trains outside horses on one of the safest and most consistent tracks anywhere, a paramount reason for dispatching our last homebred, Cosmic Outlaw, into their care. The Plan is to be ready by late March or early April for a trip north to begin her career. So far, so good.
On Saturday mornings, the O’Farrell family gathers at Dreamers Point to survey the progress of their tutees. The original Joe is gone, of course, the mantle being passed to his worthy son, Michael, a wise but optimistic fellow, a gentleman of good humor with a cautious eye and a barnful of stories to tell. He is joined most Saturday mornings by his own sons David and Joe, who do much of the farm’s heavy lifting. George, the trainer, a merry man of the islands, holds forth with his directorial stick, to be waved for emphasis at critical occasions. The barn area is presided over by Leon the Mobile, who ranges to and fro, choreographing the ballet. Due to some shortcoming in his upbringing, Leon is a devoted fan of the Alabama Crimson Tide and also the Pittsburgh Steelers. Due to his impeccable work with Cosmic Outlaw, we bought him a Steelers jacket for Christmas, but it wasn’t easy.
You’re liable to run into anyone at Dreamers Point. It’s a weekly stop for some owners with trainees at Ocala Stud and an occasional one for out-of-town visitors checking on the progress of their stock. There may be 150 or so horses in training there but Mike and David can give you the name and sire of each one as the horses pass by. Two weeks ago, Kentucky-Derby-winning trainer Carl Nafzger showed up to observe. You may remember a 1990 video of Carl in the Churchill Downs grandstand with his owner, Frances Genter, in her nineties and short of vision, giving the lady an excited play-by-play as her colt, Unbridled, roared down the stretch to victory, at the end hugging the sobbing woman and exclaiming, “Mrs. Genter---you just won the KENTUCKY DERBY!” It was a moment. If there’s anything more exciting than that, well, dress me up and call me Loretta.
Opportunities for fun and frolic abound at Publix markets.
Saturday Is Doughnut Day
When the horses retire to the barn, our heroes are off to the Publix market to secure the week’s sustenance. This, of course, includes maple-frosted doughnuts, three of them, one for Siobhan the Skinny and two for Bill, the not-so. Pastry is provided by Donna the Bakery Queen, who secrets them in a box and sticks them under the counter until Bill arrives. Seems these maple things are a popular request, although not popular enough for the doughboys to make enough of them to preclude their selling out.
Donna is a sister New Englander from Maine, always ready to share a story or remembrance of the Old Country. She’s also a grandmother with adoring grandchildren in Clearwater, where she visits often but hopefully not on Saturday. Donna lives alone and has battled cancer off and on but is unfailingly in good spirits. We usually get in five minutes of conversation before being overtaken by bothersome customers in search of bread-slicing. Five minutes is good enough to keep up.
Since Publix is a weekly stop, Siobhan has managed to learn the names and habits of all the cashiers and many of the bag boys, including George the Intellectual, who keeps up with world events and will gladly dish out his opinion, like it or not. George is a moody sort and may have had a setback in life since the last few weeks have found him roaming the parking lot rounding up shopping carts. We’d ask but we don’t really want to know. We very much miss Mary Ellen, a co-shopper of delightful buoyancy who lit up the market with her exceptional personality. Mary Ellen rolls through life on such a natural high that one day Siobhan exchanged shopping carts with her and it took her a couple minutes to notice. Okay, we think it’s natural.
You can’t have doughnuts without coffee, so we stop next door at McDonald’s for our small senior cups with three creams each. Hopefully, Kathleen will be on hand to do the honors. Kathleen, from Jersey, is a formidable Irishwoman with a memory like an elephant and a talent for organization. No three employees working on methamphetamine can equal her proficiency behind the counter as she shouts out orders, moves adroitly from place to place and whips the area into shape. She knows what I want and will stop whatever she’s doing to snap it back to me in no time, exceptional service for the tiny box of Godiva chocolates she gets each Christmas. We regret, however, the retirement of our beloved (if grouchy) Seminole Woman, who dressed in complete Indian regalia, with feathers, for each FSU football game. One day, some fool customer at the head of a very long line, asked her if it was some unknown Indian holiday. She put down her stuff, looked to the side where I was standing, and said in a fairly loud voice, “See what kind of crap I have to put up with?” In another life, she could have been Lily Tomlin.
The final stop is always at Seminole Feed, where the animal requirements are met. By the time we reach the place, doughnuts half-eaten, Siobhan is in cell phone conversation with our horse-trainer pal Debbie Thomas, hard at work on her own farm or halfway to Gulfstream Park with a horse in tow. Debbie is the salt of the thoroughbred business, one of the thousands of little guys striving to make a living in the shadows of the rich and famous. It’s a daily battle and Debbie has been a combatant since girlhood. “I wouldn’t know what else to do,” she remarks, “and I’ve had a lot of exciting moments. It’s beats hell out of working in a diner.” Siobhan discusses the day-to-day and leaves the racing conversation to Debbie and I while she goes in to place her feed order. The average racing observer, inured to the opulence of the classic races, the big hats and fancy costumery, hasn’t the slightest notion that the entire industry is propped up by the people on the lower tiers whose horses fill the great majority of races at all tracks on any given day. Without the Debbie Thomases of the world, the sport woud cease to exist.
Saturday is another day-in-the-life. You can float through the hours with blithe indifference or embrace the likes of Donna the Bakery Queen, Kathleen the Fast-Food General, Mary Ellen your Fellow-Shopper and Debbie the Horse Trainer. If you’re smart, you’ll resort to the latter. It could, after all, be a matter of life or death.
Who’s Number One?
Psychologist Susan Pinkler is a curious sort. She wondered why some people lived to one hundred years and others didn’t, so she did a little study, interviewing a group of oldsters, learning their habits and daily practices, then returning years later to check on her subjects. Many of the results were predictable. The people still living were more likely to be non-smokers, light drinkers, healthy eaters who excercised. In one surprise, the annual flu shot was deemed even more important than working out. But what was the single most important factor in a long life, the premier reason the train kept chugging along? Was there a secret drug that only a few people knew about, mined in the jungles of the Amazon and smuggled into Assisted Living centers across the land? Could there be a mysterious yoga posture devised by the ancient lamas and passed on for generations that involved standing on one’s head in a corner for twenty minutes a day releasing Gregorian Chants? Nope.
Turns out, the winner and still heavyweight champion is a remarkably easy undertaking. The most important factor in living a long life is---trumpets, please---Social Interaction. So, sit in your dreary cave and grumble at the world at your own risk, that guy with the hood and scythe is on his way. Wake up, the world is available for participation. You might be surprised what you find. I was walking down the street one murky Gainesville day and ran into Attila the Hun approaching from the opposite direction. A sourfaced guy, very large, face carved into a permanent scowl, lumbering along, looking for an ass to kick. I’d seen this sort of thing before and recognized it for what it was. When he was a few feet away, I brightened up, half-smiled and said, “Hi, pal---how ya doin’?” The guy lit up like a christmas tree, big smile, stopped and stuck out his right hand for a shake. Deb Peterson and The Beatles say all you need is love. Sometimes, all you need is recognition.
That’s all, folks….
