December’s Bounty

“How did it get so late so soon/It’s night before it’s afternoon,

December is here before it’s June/My goodness, how the time has flewn!”---

Dr. Seuss

When we were kids, December was a difficult critter to pigeonhole, quite unlike frigid January and February, obvious enemies of the flesh and spirit, not as beneficial as June, July and August, the Three Queens of Summer.  Sure, it was freeze-your-ears frosty now and then but every so often a reasonable day poked it’s head through the clouds.  It was only the beginning of Winter, we had yet to be crushed under the weight of endless bone-chilling days when extremities became numb, snow-shoveling took over as the preeminent sport and icicles on the eaves threatened our very existence.

December brought positive credentials into the bargain.  Christmas lights appeared everywhere, as if by magic.  Bing Crosby sang ‘White Christmas” on the radio.  School let out for ten glorious days.  And there was the distinct possibility that Santa would bring us shiny new sleds if we’d been good enough (or hopefully, even if we hadn’t).

But more than that, there was a festive spirit in the air.  Personal miseries were forgotten or put on hold.  Petty animosities withered.  Friends and relatives began showing up at the door with small gifts and liquor.  For the last eight days of the month, our house was a repository of nightly visitors, of laughter, the clinking of glasses, the Spirit of the Season shared.  For this rare smidgen of time, these priceless days in December, a curious mist settled over the land and everyone was happy.  Say what you will about the Ultimate Month, Yuletide euphoria atones for a litany of minor crimes.

When we were kids, December was a villain, but a hero, too, a purveyor of exceptional goods, of life-lasting memories.  We can still see our grandmothers hustling through their pantries, our mothers carefully placing delicate ornaments on the tree, our fathers assembling the complicated toys.  There was a gleam in their eyes, a song on their lips and hope in their hearts that the world would treat their children as well as December did in those days of yore, when treetops glistened and kids like us listened to hear sleighbells in the snow.

Moments To Remember

December offers more than just Christmas festivities.  The month features a variety of events guaranteed to pique the interests of all but the dreariest curmudgeons.  Today, for example, is a perfect time to don your scarf and mittens, plunge outside into the brisk afternoon and celebrate National Cocoa Day.  Tomorrow is the rare and wonderful National Monkey Day, the one opportunity you have each year to overdose on bananas, swing from the trees and throw feces at the mailman.  Important around here, December 15th is National Cat Herder’s Day, although that could be every day at the Ellison Feline Complex.  December 16 is a special date for music lovers, being Beethoven’s Birthday.  Celebrate along with Peanuts’ Schroeder by listening to his famed 5th symphony on an eternal loop.  December 23 is Festivus, created by a Seinfeld writer’s father and populized by Frank Costanza.  You and yours can celebrate by gathering around an aluminum pole and airing your grievances.  This relatively new holiday has gained an increasing number of followers since its introduction in 1997.

December 24, as everybody knows, the Treaty of Ghent was signed, supposedly ending the War of 1812 between America and the British.  As treaties go, this one wasn’t particularly effective as the war leaked on another year.  On December 28, Poor Richard’s Almanac was published in 1732.  The almanac was sort of a calendar-cum-weather forecast for the year, rife with poetry, stories, astrological facts and much, much more.  Think of it as your 18th-century iPhone.

Too late to celebrate this year but not to be forgotten in the future is the annual National Cookie Day on December 4, when Oreos are king and everyone is allowed to be a cookie monster.  December 5th, of course, was National Ninja Day, a perfect time to suprise your friends by dropping from the ceiling wielding your nunchucks and screaming epithets in Japanese.  Not as good as September’s priceless Talk Like A Pirate Day, but better than nothing.

On December 12th some of us celebrate the Festival of Unmentionable Thoughts.  We’d like to tell you about it but, well….you know.

(1.) Fun in the sun.  (2.) April Love is for the very young.  (3.) Siobhan in Amelia Earhart days.

Today Is Your Birthday!

“December’s Child has dreams to live.”---Pat Kelbaugh

England swings like a pendulum do, but not necessarily Ipswich, England, a town in Suffolk set on the River Orwell in east Anglia, about 66 miles northeast of London.  It owes whatever fame it enjoys to being the birthplace of noted equine veterinarian, research scientist, cat mogol, yogameister and rock-hunter Siobhan Patricia Ellison, born of not particularly poor or humble parents on a bright December 13 in 1952.  The world has never been the same since.

My world, at any rate.  I met Siobhan in the mid-1980s when she was starting out in the veterinarian business as an assistant to my long-time vet, Ted Specht.  In our first meeting, she mildly chastised me for keeping alive a three-legged-lame mare named Fast Janice.  The mare was doing fine at the time, having foaled one big, healthy and fast daughter and was pregnant once again.  A couple of years earlier, Janice had run through a fence and came out of the collision with an unhealable elbow infection, leading to her later condition.  My thought at the time was who the hell does this woman think she is?

Time went by and Ted Specht decided to return to school to become a surgeon.  Subsequent veterinarians proved undependable or otherwise inadequate and I called Ted for suggestions.  “Well…” he offered, “I know she’s not your favorite, but Siobhan Ellison is very competent.  What she lacks in experience, she makes up for in intelligence.” 

“Oh, God,” I thought.  “Not her.”  But Ted was persuasive and convinced me it was worth a try.  Siobhan and I established a good rapport even though we occasionally disagreed on how to proceed with a matter.  Her first year working with my 15 mares found all of them pregnant.  The average is about 67%, so I was over the moon, to say the least.  Siobhan thought she deserved some sort of reward and said she’d have to think about just what would be appropriate.  When I got to the farm a few days later, there was a note on my blackboard expressing her preference: “Dinner in Paris.”  She wasn’t talking Paris, Kentucky, I was pretty sure.  I told her next year we’d have to cut back to 11 in-foal mares.  Eleven mares gets you dinner in Bridgeport.

 

(1.) Helping out a new foal.  (2.) Siobhan at Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone.  (3.) Daring Duo at the Matanuska Glacier, Alaska.

Onward, Through The Fog

At thoroughbred racetracks across the land, those days on which there is no racing are called “dark days.”  Because I worked at the Circus five days a week, often until ten at night, there were only a couple of days a week left for dating.  Betsy Harper, a previous girlfriend, called the non-dating periods “dark days.”  This was not an acceptable arrangement for Siobhan Ellison, who worked seven days a week at her equine vet practice in Marion County.  I moved to her little house in Fairfield in 1986 and 32 years later I am still there.  Through thick and thin, Siobhan has been a trooper.  She has a predilection for anticipating washouts in the road ahead and a prescience for avoiding them.  If there are glass-half-full and glass-half-empty people, Siobhan could best be described as someone who is more concerned with where you get the stuff to fill the glass.  A realist, a pragmatist.  If a body plans to sweep her off her feet, that person better bring a big broom.

In 2005, Siobhan and I were driving around visiting clients in the late morning when I began to feel unusually murky….stomach upset, but not nauseous.  I had just the slightest soreness in the lower pectoral muscles which I blamed on bench-pressing at the gym a day earlier.  The miasma gradually got worse but no pain occurred, none of the normal indications of heart attack.  By late afternoon after hours of prodding, I agreed to check in with my general practitioner in Gainesville.  He didn’t anticipate an imminent myocardial event but agreed with Siobhan that cardiac catheterization might be a good idea.  Since I had none of the normal heart attack signs, I demurred.  Siobhan badgered me from the doctor’s office all the way across Payne’s Prairie before I conceded to have the procedure done the next morning at North Florida Regional Hospital.  By the time I got there, I was nineteen hours into the episode and sick as a dog, with about 30 minutes of Earth time remaining.  Siobhan told interventional cardiologist Dr. Daniel Van Roy in no uncertain terms that the patient must be saved.  “I can’t just go out on some street corner and find another Bill,” she advised.  Van Roy later told Bill that his friend was pretty scary.  “I figured I’d better not mess up.  I was scared to go back and tell her I’d killed you.”

(1.) Watching Old Faithful erupt. (2) Atop the Empire State Building.  (3.) At Jacksonville Beach. 

Career Change

There were many dark days on the financial front, as well, with a 1990s slump in the horse-racing business, the closing of the Subterranean Circus and a glut of Marion County equine vets reducing the coffers of all.  “You can’t always get what you want,” said the wily Mick Jagger, “but if you try sometime, you find you get what you need.”  When our highest-earning thoroughbred, Vaunted Vamp, came along in 1992, she seemed ordained by the gods.  Vamp won 21 races and $420,000 over the next four years and Siobhan returned to school to earn her PhD and began working with a crew studying a horse business dilemma called Equine Protozoal Myeloencephalitis, to which she found some answers.  On graduating, she started her own lab, Pathogenes, Inc. in a small cottage behind our house, tending to clients whose horses have EPM and related diseases.  The enterprise continues to thrive.  The racing didn’t do too bad, either.  In 2001, a colt named Juggernaut won two $100,000 stakes races and bankrolled over $240,000.  We began taking annual 14-day vacations, mostly out West.  With no training or prep work, Siobhan managed the 16-mile Yosemite hike to Half Dome and back and one year later negotiated the 14 miles of the Zion Narrows.  “Bill goes to the gym three days a week,” she told her amazed friends, “I train on Tylenol.”

Here Comes The Bride

In February of 2015 at our annual Valentine’s Day dinner at the Island Hotel in Cedar Key, after a short courtship of 30 years, I asked Siobhan to marry me since she had done reasonably well in her tryout period.  Some girls might tear up, others jump around waving their arms.  Siobhan just said “Sure.”  It’s the Ellison Way.  We got married in the Chapel of the Flowers in Las Vegas on June 25, 2016, but it was a close call.  I was supposed to follow the limousine which took Siobhan and her maid of honor, niece Ashleigh, to the proceedings, but the valet parkers at the overly busy Palazzo hotel took forever getting my car from the garage.  When I hurriedly darted onto Las Vegas Boulevard, I turned the wrong way.  Oh-oh.  Anyone who has ever tried navigating LVB will tell you that you are going nowhere fast.  The red lights are interminable and the traffic brutal.  I called Siobhan to give her the bad news.  I couldn’t possibly get there on time.  Under ordinary circumstances, this would only mean the wedding would be slightly delayed.  At the Chapel of the Flowers, however, nuptials were scheduled every half-hour.  You’re late, you’re cancelled.  Any other bride would be hysterical, furious, embarrassed to death to report this outrage to the guests.  Siobhan was very calm and reassuring, the always reliable port in the storm.

Not me, though.  I drove down Las Vegas Boulevard like a biker on meth, exceeding 80-mph on a couple of occasions, switching lanes left and right, zooming past stunned drivers and pedestrians alike.  I arrived at 1:02, handed off the car to Ashleigh’s future husband, Flo, who was waiting to grab the baton in the parking lot.  Inside, Siobhan was the picture of composure, as if nothing untoward had ever happened.  “I knew you’d show up,” she smiled.  Elvis sang “I Can’t Help falling In Love With You” and the ceremonies went off without a further hitch.  And our heroes lived happily ever after.  So far, at least.

Happy Birthday, faithful Indian companion.

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com