Theater Of The Absurd

The Possum Lady

Remarkably, Georgette Spelvin, also known as The Opossum Lady, has been around for years without us knowing about it.  This is very disappointing because Flying Pie headquarters is tricked out with the most powerful radio telescope arrays known to man and its refined Nitwit Meter is the envy of nutcake hunters everywhere.  Where did she come from, Cotton Eyed Joe?

For many years, The Possum Lady was mild-mannered housewife Georgette Spelvin of Southern California.  But then one day while vacationing in Western Kentucky, she stumbled into a strange cave in the middle of a dense forest.  As she went further and further into the tunnel, the cave opened up significantly and became brighter.  When Georgette hesitated to proceed, a booming voice rang out in the distance.  “WELCOME!” it echoed.  “Welcome to the lair of The Great Possum.”   And at the end of the tunnel, there he was on the Possum Throne.

“I will give you these two stone tablets,” said TGP.  “On them are the many truths possumhood has collected over generations, secrets unknown to mankind.  You will take these revelations and make them known to the world.”  Gotcha, said Georgette Spelvin.  And thus, her adventure began.

Georgette started showing up (perfectly coiffed, ala Jackie O.) on YouTube with important messages for the world, like how to take proper care of your own opossum.  Possums are apparently style conscious, so we mustn’t neglect their wardrobes, where simplicity rules.  It’s also a critical matter to schedule those monthly pedicures.  Spelvin, if you ask nicely, will be glad to teach you how to properly massage your opossum, assuming you’re interested.

Now, some folks might be a smidge concerned that Georgette’s partner in crime is one Pearl de Wisdom, a dead squirrel who knows everything.  But not us.  The Flying Pie feels if there is a deceased squirrel out there willing to share her psychic wisdom with us via an earthly mouthpiece, have at it.  Many fans have benefited from Pearl’s thoughtful commentaries on love, money, work, health and etiquette, particularly as it applies to impatient automobile drivers who can’t wait a few seconds for a street-crossing squirrel to make up her mind.

People who scoff at the possibility of psychic wisdom from rodents should take a few moments to remember the vast contributions of Mighty Mouse. And by the way, how much have you really learned from Dear Abby anyway?

Bizarro World

An enterprising Michigan woman who prefers to remain unidentified is looking for a new home today after police discovered she was living inside a rooftop sign above a grocery store.  Nicknamed “the rooftop ninja” by police, the lady took up residence above the Family Fare store in Midland about a year prior to her discovery.  Police said the 34-year-old woman, who has a job and a vehicle, had furnished her digs with a mini-desk, flooring and a food pantry.  She was released without charges and was last seen heading for Times Square.

Some people just love those thrill rides at amusement parks to death.  Literally.  Recent visitors to Disneyland were bummed to find their seats on the Rise of the Resistance ride smeared with bone chips and ashes, the cremains of someone who must have liked the ride a lot.  Dusting the landscape at The Happiest Place on Earth seems to have become a thing in Anaheim, where remains have also been discovered on attractions like It’s a Small World, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion.  The park would like to remind everyone that grandma won’t necessarily stay where you drop her off.  Sooner or later, she will be swept up and dumped.  Maybe you should try Sea World next time.

It was so hot in Death Valley last July that Belgian tourist Noah Goossens, 42, melted the skin off his feet after losing his flip-flops on the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes.  The air temperature was a mere 123 degrees but the sand has been known to get as hot as 200 Fahrenheit.  The scalding temperatures made it impossible for a helicopter to land in the dunes so Noah was hauled off by park visitors to a safer elevation, then flown to a hospital in Las Vegas.  Rangers advise summer visitors to Death Valley to stay within a ten-minute walk of air-conditioning, not hike after ten a.m., drink lots of water and carry a salt shaker with them at all times.  Goossens says next year he’s going to see the glaciers in Alaska.  Keep your shoes on, Noah.

Bet you can’t tell us who’s eaten the most Big Macs ever.  That would be Don Gorske, 70, who first sunk his teeth into McDonald’s signature sandwich more than 50 years ago and hasn’t missed a day since.  He’s up to a Guinness World Record 34,000 Big Macs lifetime, though he’s cut down to only two a day lately (his max for a day is nine).  When he started his marathon, his mother made him promise to eat at least one Macless meal a day and he’s kept his vow.  Gorske walks about six miles a day, gets regular checkups and appears healthy.  “No one will ever break my record,” Don beams, proudly.  Still, there is occasionally a price to pay.  “My wife and I were planning a vacation to Russia,  then someone told me there were no McDonald’s stores there.  Can you believe it?  Well, we cancelled immediately, of course.  I thought Trump and Putin were friends, for crying out loud.”

Kathygrams

Our alert reporter Kathleen Knight is the Queen of Miscellany, often coming up with significant tidbits unreported elsewhere.  These anecdotes are usually brief, bizarre and of great interest to someone, although we are not sure who.  With that in mind, The Flying Pie has decided to occasionally publish a gaggle of them for public consumption in hopes that they will somehow reach the odd people who should know about them.  Thus, we enter the Era of Kathygrams.

1---Surgeons are conducting rare ‘Tooth-In-Eye’ Operations to restore vision to blind patients in Canada.  The complex procedure involves extracting a patient’s canine tooth, adding a plastic optical lens to it and surgically embedding it in the eye.  Who wants to go first?

Known more formally as osteo-odonto keratoprosthesis, the surgery has supposedly been performed successfully in a handful of countries like Transylvania, but never before in Canada where people keep track of these things.  In late February, three patients Up North underwent the first part of the complex procedure.  If all goes according to Hoyle, they could have their eyesight back by summer.  And yes, they’re all using those toothbrushes with the very light bristles.

2---Swiss scientists played music to cheese as it aged.  The cheese seemed to like Hip-Hop  best.  Swiss cheesemaker Beat Wampfler and a team of crazed researchers from the Bern University of Arts placed nine 22-pound wheels of Emmental cheese in individual wooden crates in Wampfler’s cellar and for the next six months, each cheese was exposed to an endless 24-hour loop of one song using a mini-transducer.  The transducer directed the sound waves directly into the cheese wheels, a practice called ‘hitting the vein’ by Zurich drug addicts.

The Classical cheese got Mozart’s Magic Flute, the Rock cheese listened to Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, the Ambient cheese got Yello’s Monolith and the Hip-Hop cheese was exposed to A Tribe Called Quest’s Jazz (We’ve Got).  The unfortunate control cheese aged in silence.  The cheese was then examined by alleged food technologists from the ZHAW Food Perception Research Group, which concluded that the cheese exposed to music had a milder flavor than the control cheese.  The also found that the Hip-Hop cheese had a stronger aroma and stronger flavor.  The cheeses were then sampled by a jury of culinary experts during two rounds of a blind taste test who came to the same conclusion.  All of which goes to prove what we’ve long suspected---that the people of Switzerland have too much time on their hands.  Asked for his opinion on the matter, American cheese expert J. Ray Cash said, “Don’t take your cheese to town, boys, leave your cheese at home.” 

3---The first person in the United States to get a speeding ticket was a New York City taxi driver.  Who wouldn’t have guessed that one?  In 1899, cabbie Jacob German, a driver for the Electric Vehicle Company, was cited for jetting an astonishing 12 miles an hour by a bicycle officer, of all things.  At the time, NYC had a speed limit of 8 mph when going straight and 4 mph when cornering.  Horses, of course, had the same speed limit.  German was actually hauled in and temporarily imprisoned.  The first known speeding ticket in the world was issued in England to Walter Arnold of East Peckham, Kent in 1896.  Walter was traveling at breakneck speeds of 8 mph in a 2mph zone and fined one shilling.  Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do…whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

4---The Moon has its own Catholic Bishop.  No kidding.  According to an obscure Church edict called the 1917 Code of Canon Law, when an expedition sets out to discover new territory, that new land then becomes part of the diocese that was home to the expedition. Since Cape Canaveral was under the purview of the diocese of Orlando when Americans landed on the Moon, Bishop William Borders got the honors.  Following the success of Apollo 11, Bishop Borders had occasion to make an ad limina visit to the Vatican to visit Pope Paul VI, during which he casually advised the unaware Pope, “You realize, of course, that I am Bishop of the Moon.”  Paul VI nervously looked left and right at his advisors.  The current Bishop of Orlando is John Noonan, who is much less of a showoff.

5.---The town of Karawa, Japan has released a line of collectible trading cards  featuring the town’s male elders.  Is this a great idea or what?  Instead of a bunch of rich, honky ballplayers, the characters on the cards are the town’s ojisan---middle-aged or older citizens who have benefitted the community.  “I thought it was a shame that nobody knew about them,” said Ms. Eri Miyahara, Secretary General of Saidosho center, who created the idea.  “The cards went viral and now many kids look up to these men as heroic figures.”  The 47 card characters include local ‘Soba Master’ Mr. Takeshita, an 81-year-old noodlemaker and Mr. Fuji, a 67-year-old prison guard turned community volunteer whose card is so popular that local children will often approach him asking Fuji to autograph his card.

Obviously, this is an idea whose time has come.  We can see it now…”I’ll trade you two Mayor Wards for one Chuck LeMasters”…or “how about I take that Michael Davis off your hands for six Randall Roffes?”  There are all kinds of possibilities.  When we were kids, we’d get down on one knee and scale our trading cards at a wall several feet away…the card closest to the wall wins and gets to keep the other cards.  Or kids would get together in small groups like baseball general managers and arrange three and four-way trades trying to accumulate an entire set.  The old cards came in packages of incredibly bad chewing gum but these new ones could be distributed by hip local institutions like Heartwood or the Hippodrome to supportive customers.  “Anybody out there got a Nancy Luca, I just need her and Mark Chiappini for my set?”  “Yeah, I got Nancy, but it will take two Jeff Meldons and a Bill Killeen to get her”  “There’s a Bill Killeen card?  I thought he was dead.”

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com

Fun In The Sun

Funny how you grow up in the same house with people for seventeen or so years, then you don’t see them any more.  When we were kids, the family chugged along in slow cars on small roads for hours to visit relatives, then they repaid the visit.  People were always home, because where the hell else would they be?  You had to work for a living in the textile mills, shovel the snow, put the kids through school and collect your S&H Green Stamps.  You didn’t have to drive anywhere to visit grandma because she was right upstairs in the same house, where she belonged.  If older relatives became ill, foul-tempered or slightly deranged, you took care of it best you could for as long as you could.  When they started setting the curtains on fire, you reluctantly sent them to the crazy house in Danvers.

If anybody roamed very far away, don’t worry, they’d always be back for Thanksgiving.  Nobody had Turkey Day dinner alone, it was always a massive production of at least a dozen souls.  Alert grandmas would scour their neighborhoods for loners and drag them over for cranberry sauce by their ears.  It wasn’t the Christian thing to do, it was the Nana thing to do, and nobody argued with Nana.  When people graduated from high school, they didn’t go looking for a job in some foreign city.  Why would you want to go anywhere else but Lawrence, Mass. when you had band concerts in the Common on Sunday afternoons, the Red Sox on the radio and Salisbury Beach as soon as summer arrived?

Still, we now and then might cast a lustful eye at faraway Florida.  The Sox had Spring Training in Sarasota in those days and the radio announcers would warm our February afternoons with tales of brilliantly sunny days, grassy green fields and the glories of little gem ballparks in exotic places like Bradenton and Lakeland and Vero Beach.  It was everybody’s dream to some day go to Spring Training where you could see Ted Williams up close and maybe get an autograph.  Nobody was moving there, of course, it was against the solemn laws of New England to bail on your town and leave a weeping mother at the door.  Or as my own grandmother might say, “What’s the matter with you, anyway?”  Nonetheless, the Sunshine State always giggled in our prefrontal cortexes.

Breaking with tradition, in 1958 I was guilty of slip-sliding away to Stillwater, Oklahoma to go to college.  A couple of years later, my sister Alice found out we all wanted to be California girls and blasted off for the West Coast, leaving our little sibling Kathy (8 years younger than Alice and 10 younger than me) sisterless and brotherless.  Somehow, despite all this, Kathy made it through life optimistic and psychologically undamaged.  We were like three points on a scalene triangle and have remained that way, Alice in Camarillo, Kathy in Salem, N.H. and Bill eventually in Florida for all these years.  Sure, there have been the occasional visits, but not enough, and now, suddenly, we find ourselves all very old.  Especially me.  Kathy and Alice, musing on all this, decided a trip to the home of the old gaffer was essential before unidentified gloved minions began inserting him into a furnace somewhere or interplanetary friends of Gary Borse started lifting him off to Proxima Centauri on a benevolent starship.  They got on a plane, Jane, and set themselves free.

Welcome To The Big Swamp

The Two Sisters posse landed in Charlestown, wrecked the place in three days and moved further south.  The night before they left, of course, there was a giant SWAT raid on their hotel, which they claim had nothing to do with them… but come on, how many times have the cops ever raided your hotel?  Next stop was Savannah, where they drove through cemeteries and complained about the downtown parking and lack of action.  “It’s a snore,” griped Kathy.  “Where’s the beefcake?  Where’s the Chippendales?  Where’s the miniature golf course with the big dinosaurs?”

Eventually, the Deadly Duo arrived in lovely Fairfield, encamped in the Ellison estate’s famous Little House, drank champagne to celebrate and passed out.  Alice had trouble sleeping so she went out on the porch and was attacked by a terrifying armadillo.  “It was BIG,” she swore, “about five feet tall with red eyes and bad breath.”  We think it was really just Frank from down the street but we left her to her to her own imaginings.  Sometimes people from California have withdrawal symptoms when leaving the state and hear alligators under the bed.

Next day, it was off to jolly old St. Augustine, where the deer and the John Birch society play.  We parked in one of those places where you have to take a photo of the QR Code, send it in a self-addressed stamped envelope to the Vatican and sit in a dive bar until the Pope’s imprimatur comes back.  Then we marched on to St. George Street, as everyone does.  Fortunately, the crazed woman who daily runs up and down the street with the giant Trump flag was busy scaling speckled trout that day, so we enjoyed a modicum of peace on our little jaunt.  Matter of fact, foot traffic was very sparse that afternoon, a phenomenon we attributed to the arrival of Alice.

We took photos of the splendid lighthouse and drove to the beach on Anastasia Island, where it rained a torrent.  We got out when it died down and crossed a bridge to an ocean overlook, where two ladies from Titusville were enjoying their day.  “We need a casino here,” one of them grumped.  “Where are all the men?”  Kathy and Alice told them not to complain, it was worse in Savannah and in Charlestown your hotel got raided.  “Oh, my!” gasped one of the ladies.  “Think we’d have any luck on the whale-watching tour?”  Maybe with the whales but not the old men, Alice told them.  “You might want to try computer dating.  Be careful, though, the ones with the cutest pictures are all liars.” 

Take Me For A Ride In Your Boat Boat

There are exactly four things your average tourist can do in Ocala; visit a top-flight thoroughbred horse farm, take a glass boat ride at lovely Silver Springs, ogle the awesome World Equestrian Center or swing and sway over the abyss at The Canyons Zip Line and Adventure Park.  We didn’t tell Alice about the zip-line because the last time she went on one (in Belize) she forgot to use the brake and had to be landed by a scrawny little 125-pound Belizean fellow.  Which is a little like standing on the railroad tracks and sticking your arms out to slow down the Orient Express.  They gave the poor guy a big tip but how much does it cost to replace your external obliques?

We went to Silver Springs instead.  They used to have an abundance of wild monkeys there, rhesus macaques to be precise, but they multiplied to untenable numbers and some of them carried the herpes B virus, which could be spread to humans, thus the state took measures to curb their monkeys.  Nonetheless, aggressive monkeys have forced the park’s closure on two occasions.  In one instance, a woman visiting Silver Springs with her family said the monkeys had charged at them.  Bad monkeys!  None of them bothered us, of course, because they were afraid to incur the wrath of The Two Sisters, who carry tasers and keep cooking pots in the car.

Silver Springs’ main claim to fame is their glass-bottom boats, which float over springs producing over 500 million gallons of water per day, making SS one of the largest first-magnitude springs in the world and a significant contributor to the Florida Aquifer.  One fine day in the late 1870s, a couple of Marion county lads named Hullam Jones and Phillip Morrell decided it would be a good idea to fix a piece of glass to the bottom of their dugout canoe to better explore the local springs.  When Colonel W.M. Davidson and Carl Ray bought the Silver Springs area in 1924, they developed the larger gasoline-powered boats needed to take groups of tourists over the springs.  Even though Silver Springs is not the booming tourist mecca it once was, virtually all the boats going out the day we were there were filled.  Even The Two Sisters liked them.  And Bill got a Junior Captain’s badge for volunteering to steer the boat if the Captain got bushwacked by monkeys or anacondas.

Further Travels

On the way home from Silver Springs, we swung by the burgeoning equine playground of the World Equestrian Center, which doubles in size every four hours, about the same as amoebas.  Named one of Time magazine’s 2024 World’s Greatest Places, WEC is easily the largest equestrian complex in the United States with endless horse barns, state-of-the-art arenas and luxury accommodations on more than 2,000 acres at last count.  They even have enormous Jumbotrons around the arenas so blind people can keep track of the action.  Their laundry building is bigger than the Astrodome and their posh restaurant Stirrups in the Equestrian Hotel only takes reservations if you’re in the Fortune 500.

The original plan of the Roberts family which built the place was probably to make a few bucks somewhere down the line, but every time they make a million they spend two million more.  At last count, they had over 3000 stalls, which is double what they have at most thoroughbred racetracks, and the WEC stalls are much nicer.  Each one has non-slip mats in the bath and even those little bottles of shampoo, conditioner and shower gel hanging on the wall.  There’s also a Call Button if you need someone to come in and brush your back.  Young horses in Illinois just beg their parents to take them there, it’s better than Disney World.

No June adventure to the Gainesville area is complete without a visit to the Hippodrome’s dependable summer musical comedy.  This year it’s an oldie---1982’s Pump Boys and Dinettes.  At the Princess Theater on Broadway, it played to capacity audiences in olden times and even won a Tony award for Best Musical.  As with many musicals, the story line is thin (very thin in this case) and mainly used to tie the country pop tunes together.  The musicians, on the other hand, were better than terrific and deserved a larger crowd.  They’ll probably get one if the Hipp ever gets their tiny elevator fixed.  Many oldsters---like Alice, for instance---aren’t crazy about scaling the 30 steps to the staging area, and people over sixty are a large percentage of the Hippodrome’s business.  “We’ve got the UP part fixed, now we’re working on the DOWN,” says the manager.  Let’s hustle it up before Aunt Bea breaks a clavicle or someone falters on the descent, creating a snowball effect on the steepish stairway.

Back at the Little House, Alice and Kathy packed their suitcases with iron bars (don’t argue, I carried them) and loaded up for the trip back to Charlestown and flights home.  We discussed the Good Old Days, of course, as only siblings can and commiserated over the demise of several old neighborhood pals.  We spoke vaguely of a future meeting before the Cosmic Archer starts aiming his arrows our way, hopeful the sturdy Killeen genes allow for an encore down the road.  We’re optimistic because we’re Garfield Street Kids and we don’t allow Reaper parking on our street.  We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but we’ll meet again some sunny day.

That’s not all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com     

   

The One That Got Away

“In another life, I would make you stay
So I don’t have to say
You were the one that got away
The one that got away.”---Katy Perry

When we’re young and foolish---and inexperienced---there should be someplace we can go for good advice.  True we have parents, grandparents and assorted relatives only too eager to disperse the pearls of wisdom they have accumulated over the ages, but there is one problem with that---they’re not cool.  Sophisticated maybe, wise in the ways of making a living or playing the bassoon, but not cool as defined by the Teenage Book of Assessments.

Our friends are cool, of course, and just as ready to tell us what to do, but we can see by the way they conduct their own lives that they are naive, rash and perhaps insane, not that there is anything wrong with that as long as it doesn’t infringe upon our own existence.  So that leaves us with exactly no one particularly qualified to provide guidance on new things which crop up in our lives like puberty, the opposite sex and romance.  What we really needed in such perilous times was a primitive neighborhood street booth manned twelve hours a day by a reputable sage who clearly understood our various dilemmas---sort of like Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip.  Short of that, we were on our own.  Looking back, that should have been very, very scary.  Considering our powers of analysis and decisions made in haste, we’re lucky we got out alive, let alone lost a few girlfriends/boyfriends along the way.  Is it too late to request a do-over?

Candidates

We think it’s fairly safe to say that our quirky high-school decision-making apparatus might have been suspect.  Bill Killeen was accepted by Harvard, after all, but chose to meander across the country to attend Oklahoma State University in Gooberland.  A brilliant friend flunked out of MIT after one year (which most of us would do), gave up on higher education and became a potato farmer in Maine.  In college, my first dormmate became overly homesick for Indiana, if such a thing is possible, and left school after two months.  If these things don’t seem entirely rational to you, welcome to the club.  Should these people be trusted at this stage of confusion to make even more important decisions on who to mate with for life?  Probably not.  On the other hand, my sister Kathy married her teenage one-and-only John Scanlon right out of high school and the two of them celebrated their 50th anniversary last year.  But perhaps that’s the notorious exception which proves the rule.

Despite all this, many of us fondly remember someone from our first 17 or so years as The One That Got Away.  Maybe that’s because the first time for everything is exciting and memorable and usually has no strings attached.  It’s easier for relationships to be perfect the more short-lived they are.  In Still Life With Woodpecker, Tom Robbins says “When two people meet and fall in love, there’s a sudden rush of magic.  Magic is just naturally present.  We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more.  One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone.  We hustle to get it back, but by then it’s usually too late, we’ve used it up.”  And then we mourn the relationship lost.  Maybe the object of our affection forever becomes The One That Got Away.

More likely, The One arrives a little later during the college years, our first semblance of employment, the marriage of a friend.  We consider ourselves wiser now, urbane citizens of the world, better evaluators of talent, but the truth is we are still as dumb as an Idaho congressman when it comes to the opposite sex.  Someone can be perfect for a week, maybe three, then suddenly the coins fall from our eyes at some minor transgression, leaving us dazed and confused.  “Good grief, me golden idol is tarnished!” as the kid says watching the phone booth where Wonder Wart Hog is changing back to Philbert Desanex.  Have we made a mistake here?  Is a reevaluation in order?  It’s impossible to hide our disappointment.  Sensing the abrupt reversal of form, our heretofore beloved slips off into the ethers on that midnight train to Georgia, never to return, thus elevating his/her S&P bond rating to Triple A.  The escapee now and forever becomes The One That Got Away.  Aw, shucks.

Anecdotal Evidence

Eventually most fruit matures and becomes useful, as do we.  Older and wiser, we realize such things as compromise and sacrifice are required now and then if a relationship is to succeed, things we wish a Lucy had told us much earlier.  Our choices for a successful partnership are better considered, unhurried, allowed to develop over time and we are happier with the results.  When disagreements and disappointments occur, we tackle them like reasonable adults, argue the merits of our predilections, hash out acceptable solutions and don’t hold grudges.  But married or not, cohabitant or non, satisfied with life or riding boxcars, there are times when the swirling eddies of time open up a break in the clouds and there he or she is, floating through our memory banks---The One That Got Away.

“I was going through a rugged period in my marriage,” testifies Evan, an attorney from Etobicoke, Ontario.  “I  felt we would work our way through it but there was a lot of animosity between us and we decided to live separately for awhile.  I know it sounds ridiculous, but I couldn’t help thinking of Darla, my old college sweetheart from 30 years ago.  I even got in the car one day and drove eight hours to the Chicago suburbs just to sit outside her old house.  I didn’t even know if she still lived there but I knew she once loved me unconditionally.  I was behaving like a desperate fool, but I couldn’t help it.  I felt that once there was someone perfect for me.  For all I knew, she might now be an oversized dockworker with bad teeth, but I still saw her as she was 30 years ago.  I sat there and cried for half an hour, then I drove home.  My wife and I worked it out, but I still think about losing Darla.  Stupid…I know…but the truth.”

Gregory, a lifetime New Yorker had this to say:  “I met a woman while browsing the new books at Brentano’s Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan several years ago…she just walked over and asked me if I was going to buy the novel I was riffing through.  ‘It’s the last copy in the store,’ she said.  ‘I’d like to buy it if you don’t.’  I was a little put off by her forwardness but I handed over the book.  ‘Be my guest,’ I said.  On my way out of the shop, she came over, handed me a card and said ‘Here’s my information.  Call me and I’ll buy you a coffee for stealing your novel.’  Since she looked like Veronica Hamell, I called her the next day and a four-month relationship ensued.  ‘Veronica’ was perfect for me.  I liked everything about her, especially her brash willingness to try risky endeavors, something previously alien to me.  Everything was great, I thought we’d go on forever.  Then one day out of a clear blue sky, she came to my place and said, ‘I just got a new job in D.C.  It’s perfect, I couldn’t turn it down.  Want to come?’  Even though I had a mere dead-end job of my own in Brooklyn and could have found another easily in Washington, I balked.  If you’ve ever gotten the feeling you’re driving too fast, you’ll understand.  Veronica went by herself, thrived in her new setting and is now someone most of you have heard of.  Of course, I’ve never met anyone else like her and I never will.  Maybe if I’d gone, her supersonic career would have left me in the dust anyway, but I’d sure like a second chance to find out.

Too bad, guys, you’re history  Some people never learn to hit the curve ball.

Retrospect

Reminiscing about The One That Got Away might not be good for us, but it’s the way our brains are wired, says Colorado-based clinical psychologist Jodi De Luca.  “Our memories of the past give meaning to our present and our future.  If the feelings associated with a particular memory are enjoyable, our brains are drawn back to visit that memory over and over again.  Such is often the case with the one that got away.”

De Luca likens this affect to a sort of emotional time travel, the kind we experience when listening to a favorite song from the past.  When we hear a familiar tune, it’s not unusual to suddenly be overcome by what she calls “a vivid constellation of emotions and physiological reactions even including rapid heartbeats, sweaty palms, excitement or tears, all incredibly occurring as if they were happening today.”

Unlike pop songs, however, former relationships have a tendency to be redefined by rosy retrospection.  Seeing the world through rose-colored glasses is based on this psychological phenomenon.  According to Astroglide’s resident sexologist Dr. Jess O’Reilly, rosy retrospection is a result of remembering and judging the past more favorably than you assess the present.  Over time, this distorted view “can negatively affect our experience of the present and expectation of the future.  Though this cognitive bias can be positive if it helps build self-esteem, when you inaccurately recall your ex-lover’s behavior as overwhelmingly positive, it can result in distorted recollections of the relationship.  These biased memories tend to become more positive over time as you defer recalling the end of the relationship and focus on the positive elements as time passes.  The problem is that no one is perfect and the more you learn about them the less you tend to idealize them.  With a fling, you don’t have enough time to see that side of them.”

Clinical psychotherapist Kevon Owens offers one more reason as to why we often glorify past relationships: we simply wish to right our wrongs.  “Finding things that are lost, fixing what was broken…we want to make amends,” he says.  “The one who got away can be a very distracting spot in the direction our life is heading because no one can be all the idealized things we wish for.  In a perfect world, we’d learn and grow and move past these perceived errors, but the chances to do it with the person who got away may be gone and that can be very difficult to reconcile.  The one who got away can symbolize failure in many areas.”

We romantic old fools (and yes, it’s a club I belong to) ignore the above advice and persist.  Now and then, however, we run into someone with a tale that brings us up short.  An old friend, let’s call him Mike, is a notorious loner not immune to the charms of the opposite sex, including an occasional “booty call.”  But everyone has an Achilles Heel and for Mike, it was Sophie, a vivacious redhead who spun him around like a pinwheel.  They broke up, of course, but 18 years later Mike succumbed to ennui and loneliness and decided to look her up.  He found Sophie in Tacoma, of all places, and flew out to stir the embers.

“First of all, she forgot to pick me up at the airport---thought I was coming the next day.  When I got a cab to her place, it was in a war zone, nasty and falling down.  She weighed about 250 and wore spandex and she started undressing as soon as I walked in the door.  She hesitated for a moment, went into the bedroom and put Ravel’s Bolero on her turntable.  I didn’t know what to do so I feigned being ill.  I couldn’t wait to get out the door.  Let  me tell you---in this case I was was The One That Got Away!”

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com 

    

 

The Prostate Monster

If you’re a man over 70, he’s coming down your chimney and he’s not waiting for the first peals of Silent Night.  Perhaps he already lives under your bed, hides in your closet, watches through your skylight.  He’s the Prostate Monster and he wields a mean weapon, the promise of an ugly death.  You don’t even know he’s there because the critter is invisible.  He got Louie last year and Bernie last week and he’s coming for you if you let your guard down.

Some people don’t believe in the Prostate Monster because they can’t see him, and he just loves that.  Others know he exists but just whistle in the dark, hoping he opts for someone else.  Forget it--the creature has an unlimited appetite and sooner or later he’ll be rapping at your portal like the pizza delivery man.  You can slide down your rain barrel and barricade your cellar door all you want, he knows how to get in.  70% of men over 70 contract prostate cancer and 10% of them die from it.  If you know someone who has crashed and burned you know it wasn’t a pleasant exit…something like the train letting you out at a dive bar in Port-au-Prince on a bad day.

The President of the United States can contract prostate cancer despite the Secret Service.  The Pope can get it and God can’t do anything about it.  If they can get it, so can you.  Several of our friends who seemed otherwise smart enough called us on various occasions to report they had prostate cancer, sometimes stage four.  Maybe only 10% die, but we seem to know a lot of them.  Our best pal Torrey Johnson got it and died.  Ocala Tipoff Club President Augie Greiner got it and died.  Bill Killeen got it but didn’t die because he knew it was coming and did something about it.  Hopefully, so will you.

Getting The Finger

Clever as he is, there are two ways to unmask the Prostate Monster.  The most common manner is to have blood drawn for your annual physical and have the PSA checked.  Both healthy and cancerous cells of the prostate gland produce the protein known as PSA, which is particular to the prostate.  The Prostate Specific Antigen test quantifies the PSA concentration in the blood, often expressed as nanograms of PSA.  Prostate cancer victims usually have elevated blood levels of PSA (over 4.0), but not always.  Bill Killeen’s PSA number was only 2.5, which suggested there was nothing to worry about.

The second and best means to detect prostate cancer is an annual DRE, a digital rectal exam where a gloved finger is inserted into the rectum to feel for abnormalities of the prostate--enlargements, hard areas and other irregularities that might suggest prostate cancer.  This is not as much fun as a day on your surfboard so many gents choose not to participate.  “I’ll have that done if and when my PSA numbers go up,” is a common reason to defer.  But in Bill Killeen’s case and many others, opting out would have meant failing to discover a growing problem…maybe until too late.

Given the bad news, Bill visited Dr. Jack Paulk, then the reigning emperor of urologists in Ocala.  A prostate biopsy revealed he didn’t have cancer yet but did have Prostatic Intraepithelial Neoplasia (PIN), which is like the cancer semifinals.  The finals will be played soon enough.  He asked Paulk what he could do to prevent the cancer from manifesting.  “Well, we can’t do much,” Paulk frowned, “We usually just wait and take it out or radiate it when it turns into cancer.”  Oh.  That didn’t sound very ambitious.

Grasping at whatever straws were available, B.K. joined a University of Tennessee study operated by medicos at The Cascades in central Ocala, which was testing the effectiveness of a breast cancer drug called toremifene.  A year later, a biopsy showed no advancement of the cancer, but shortly thereafter Bill suffered a heart attack, which Gainesville CVI cardiologist Dr. Gregory Imperi said might well have been caused by the toremifene.  Killeen philosophized, “When you sign up for these studies, you’re required to fill out forms which tell you the study drug can cause blood clots and the like.  But at the time, the prostate wolf is at the door and you’re not particularly concerned about the heart attack on the other side of the mountain.”  Obviously, that was the end of Bill’s study participation.  A third biopsy two years later showed the PIN had evolved into prostate cancer.  Time for the main event.

One Man’s Tale/bill killeen

The silly men at the American Urological Association and the U.S. Protective Services Task Force have for years recommended against screening for prostate cancer in men over 70 years old “due to the likelihood of indolent prostate cancer in older men.  Most men will eventually die WITH prostate cancer rather than because of it.”

Men, of course, just love to hear this.  Who wants the inconvenience of an annual butt check?  But what if that prostate cancer turns out to be not so indolent?  What if it becomes aggressive like, say, the cancer that got Torrey Johnson and Augie Greiner and, oh yes, Joe Biden, 46th President of the USA?  By the time this is published, the gnashing of teeth over Uncle Joe might well have made these people think again.  Many men have an annual physical replete with CBC blood tests--how hard is it to at least add a PSA test to the list?  Primary care doctors and urologists, like everyone else, enjoy being regular guys but discouraging their patients from getting a DRE is a lousy way to achieve popularity.  It’s not that big a deal, folks, and even the biopsies are much less onerous than a night at a Lil Maboo rap concert.  All this is prelude, of course.  In my case, the Prostate Monster had entered the building.  Now what?

“You have three choices,” said Dr. Paulk, “watchful waiting, surgery or radiation.  Some people opt for those radioactive beads but virtually everyone who gets them comes back to me complaining about the pain.  There’s also cryosurgery---don’t like that---body parts sloughing off and all.” 

Nobody, including me, is crazy about any surgery, let alone this one, which can have some sobering aftereffects.  Then again, who wants their intestines fried along with their misbehaving prostate?  Throwing out the baby with the bathwater comes to mind.  Siobhan was solidly in the surgery camp and was almost always on the money where medical issues were concerned.  I decided to interview a surgeon and a radiology doc the same day at Shands, wife in hand.

We got very lucky with the surgeon.  Dr. Li Ming Su, despite his Asian moniker, grew up in Gainesville and had just moved back to town after performing over 250 prostate surgeries on the newish da Vinci robot at Johns-Hopkins.  He was personable, charismatic and had little doubt about his abilities.  “The first thing you need to know,” he said heavily, “is that you will no longer be able to father children.”  I asked him if that was the bad news or the good news.  Siobhan said the bad news was still coming.  “Second, no matter how good sex is for you right now, it will be less so in the future.  The intensity will be diminished---for some people, not too much, for others a lot.”  After dropping that bomb, Su sat back in his big chair, waiting to see if I ran out of the room.  “But still better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, right?” I asked.

“It will depend on how many of the nerves we can save,” said the doc.  “Sometimes, we do very well.  The third thing you should know is that everybody who has this issue has some degree of temporary incontinence.  It can last for a couple of months to a few years.”

“When do we get to the good part?” I asked Siobhan.

Dr. Su went on to say that all operatees need a catheter for a week or so.  No heavy lifting was allowed.  For some vague reason, they also didn’t want anybody driving while the catheter was in place.  Otherwise, have a blast everyone.  You did get the unexpected bonus of not having to go to the restroom at halftime, since you had one strapped to your leg.  Oh, and you got the additional gift of a batch of free Viagra, which you could possibly use in two months if you were lucky.  “If things don’t work out for some reason you can still have radiation,” added Dr. Su, “whereas if you have radiation and it doesn’t work you cannot repeat it.”  Why is that, I asked Siobhan.  “Nuked guts,” said she.  Oh, right, said I.

Finally, I was offered a visit with a woman downstairs who had an apparatus she hooked up to your penis for enlargement and hardening purposes and she’d be happy to give me a free demonstration.  “Let’s go down on the stairway instead of the elevator,” I whispered to Siobhan, “so we don’t run into that woman.”

The Nuclear Option

After the meeting with Dr. Su, it was time to chat with the radiology doc about the alternative eraser.  I didn’t catch his name, so let’s just call him Doctor Strangelove.  Dr. S. didn’t believe in guilding the lily, he let you have it with both barrels as soon as you walked in the door.  “First off,” he frowned, the treatment will be daily, except for weekends, and it will last for 8 1/2 weeks.”  Holy shit!  “Second, there is the possibility of intestinal perforation from the radiation.”  Siobhan, give me a Quaalude, please.

“But here’s the GOOD news!” he almost smiled.  “To prevent damage to the intestines, when you come in we insert a balloon into your rectum.  The balloon is then inflated to provide separation from the intestines and better protect them.”  That’s me you see running from the room in blind panic.  “Siobhan, is this guy trying to sell me something or is he getting paid off by the surgery department?”

Dr. Strangelove got up and offered his hand as we started to leave.  “I hope you decide to take advantage of what we have to offer,” said he, smiling.  I smiled back weakly and told him we’d think about it, then wobbled to the door.

“I think I’m leaning slightly to having the surgery,” I told Siobhan.  “No shit,” said she.

Whatever Happened to Mack The Knife?

The da Vinci Surgical System is a robotic critter designed to facilitate complex surgery using a minimally invasive approach and avoiding the bloody mess which used to be prostate surgery.  The system is controlled by a surgeon from a console, typically in the same room as the patient.  It features a patient-side cart and four interactive robotic arms controlled from the console.  Three of the arms are for tools that hold objects, act as a scalpel, scissors, bovie or unipolar or bipolar electrocautery instruments.  The fourth arm is for an endoscopic camera with two lenses that gives the surgeon full stereoscopic vision from the console. The surgeon sits at the console and looks through two eyeholes at a 3-D image of the procedure, meanwhile maneuvering the arms with two foot pedals and two hand controllers.  The da Vinci System scales, filters and translates the surgeon’s hand movements into more precise micro-movements of the instruments which operate through several small incisions in the body.  Eventually, the prostate is removed through a slit just below the navel, leaving little permanent evidence of the passage but several small holes in the body from the playful cavorting of the robotic arms.  Years later, these divots will be barely evident.

Optimist that I am, I went into the surgery thinking of it as almost an outpatient procedure.  It is not that.  I lay around groggy from the anesthesia for hours, listening to my uncouth roommate bestow his unique notion of romantic solicitation on the nurses.  “You almost cut off your leg with a mower, Robert, how impressed should we be with your skills?” asked one of them.

Dr. Su didn’t care much for dispensing pain pills to his customers.  “Among other things, they constipate you,” he said, but sometimes constipation is better than pain.  Nonetheless, I left the hospital the next day and sallied over to a horse sale in Ocala.  The catheter was taken out a week later but reinserted a few days later after terrible bladder spasms following urination.  It was removed again at 14 days after surgery with no further discomfort.

Incontinence turned out to be short term.  You’re not thinking too much about sex for awhile after surgery, but for us that was only about a two-month fast, which Dr. Su assured me was remarkably good fortune.  Anyone with this surgery will be using Viagra pills for awhile and perhaps forever (they’re chummy and helpful little fellas when you get to know them).  Sexual spontaneity disappears from your dance card for quite awhile and grousing in the goodie gets to be like a planned trip to Walmart, but you adapt.  My prostate cancer turned out to be encapsulated and subsequent PSA tests kept turning out 0.004, so they were eventually abandoned.  All in all, better than agonal weeks in the hospital and a screaming death.

One thing still bothers me, though.  Had I known that some day I would be writing these Flying Pie columns I would have definitely sacrificed my dignity and gone to visit that woman in the bowels of Shands Cancer Center with the penis blow-up machine.  I mean, think of the possibilities!  What if it doesn’t shut off?  What if it doesn’t work for you and the woman looks at you with scorn and disgust?  What if your penis gets irreversibly bent and you have to start dating gymnasts and acrobats?  Maybe it’s not too late.  Maybe she takes appointments from serious journalists walking the penile enhancement beat.  Probably not.

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com   

        

Down The Stretch They Come! Part IV---The Big Horse

Be careful what you wish for.  When your veterinarian gets almost all of your 15 mares in foal three years in a row, one day you’ll wake up with 50 horses running through your fields.  Fifty horses who like to eat, get vet care and have pedicures on a regular basis.  But those are just the warm-up costs.  The show really begins when the yearlings go into training at megabucks a day.  All this is not dissimilar from most businesses, where the shelves have to be stocked, employees paid and the lights kept on.  But in that world, the doors are finally opened, the customers barge in and buy up the inventory.  In the racing business, you keep the inventory and hope it can run fast.

Not many owners make money in horseracing.  They are in it because it’s a challenge, because they like the action, because they’re looking for the Big Horse.  The Big Horse will pay a lot of bills.  The Big Horse is a major stakes-winner who can compete with the best for preposterous purses, generate black type for his or her family and, if he is an ungelded fellow, establish high value as a stallion.  But if you can’t have a really Big Horse, the next best thing is to have a Big Enough Horse like Juggernaut.

For whatever reason, we could not get his mother, Mito’s Touch, in foal two years running.  The second year, we threw in the towel and sent her to Kentucky where she was covered by a speed sire named Is It True.  She got pregnant right away and when her offspring became a late yearling he was shipped down to Ocala for training.  Juggernaut was on the small side, but wide and very muscular.  He took to training well, made no mistakes and looked quick.  When he worked the first time as a two-year-old, his time was good, but not spectacular.  Several ensuing works reinforced our impressions that he might be a nice allowance horse.  In horseracing, the preponderance of contests are claiming races, in which another owner or trainer may put up the claiming price and take your horse.  Allowance is the level above that.  Stakes races, far fewer in number, are at the top of the food chain.  Juggernaut turned out better than expected.

Bill with Danny Ogus at Calder Race Course

Getting Ready

Mito’s Touch, Juggernaut’s dam, was all speed, often busting from the gate in front and staying there as long as the distance was no further than six furlongs.  Her colt was different, usually breaking mid-pack and overtaking the competition in the stretch, more of a closing sprinter.  Sometimes, sprinters like this can win at greater distances, like seven furlongs or even one mile.  We sent him to trainer Larry Pilotti at Calder, who called after training hours the next day.  “He’s kind of a prick, but I like him,” said Pilotti.  We told him “That’s how we feel about you, too, Larry.”   Juggernaut was not keen on a lot of fussing around in his stall and he would rather chew nails than have a bath, like most kids.  But he was all business on the track.

We took a mild risk and entered him in a $32,000 claiming race, where he was rudely bumped and finished second, very pissed off about the whole thing.  No matter, the purses in maiden special races are much better and he won his second start going away.  Now, we had a dilemma.  Since there are relatively few winners of maiden allowance races in the early months of two-year-old racing, you had to wait, put your horse in for a tag or run him in a stakes race, none of which we wanted to do.  We felt Juggernaut was too good to give up for $50,000 so we decided on the $100,000 Criterium Stakes at 5 1/2 furlongs on July 7, 2001.  Siobhan’s new friend Karen Brown of Bayer, who was working with her on studies for a new drug, came along for the fun.

It was a murky day in old Miami for the Criterium.  Rain stopped before the race, but the track was muddy.  Noone can really tell whether a horse will take to a wet track until he’s raced on one and none of the entrants had done that in their short careers.  Undefeated Pure Precision was a top-heavy favorite and looked unbeatable on paper.  The rest of the field seemed manageable, going by their win times.  “Hey, third place gets black type and $10,000,” said Larry, then added every racetracker’s favorite line: “You can’t win it if you’re not in it.”  Visitor Karen Brown was pacing around as if she’d bet her mortgage on the race.  Then the bells rang, the gates opened and Fate took its curious course.

The Juggernaut brain trust with Karen Brown; left to right, Larry Pilotti, Bill Killeen and Dominic Imprescia.

They’re Off!

Pure Precision, eventually to be a major stakes-winner, blasted to the front, easily outpacing his rivals.  Inauspiciously, Juggernaut at 11-1 trailed the field.  If anyone had lost confidence, it was not Karen Brown, who was screaming bloody murder in the trainer’s box and making people nervous.  Unconcerned, Juggernaut fell 11 lengths behind the leader, a prohibitive deficit in a short 5 1/2 furlong race, before picking up the pace and gaining a little going into the turn.  His young but talented rider, Abel Castellano, moved him to the outside, losing strides but clearing him of traffic and asking him to run coming out of the turn.  The colt responded and started picking up horses.  Karen was making so much noise the people around her considered calling the police.  Pure Precision was hopelessly far ahead in the race but as I surveyed the field with my trusty binoculars, third place looked like a possibility.  Juggernaut kept gaining through the slop and the others seemed tiring…he moved up to fourth, then third, and visions of sugarplums danced in my head.  I thought of all the bills I could pay with my $20,000 as he swept into second.  Karen Brown was running up and down the stairs, yowling and terrifying bystanders.  Pure Precision’s safe margin at the sixteenth pole kept dwindling…three lengths, two lengths, barely a length and Juggernaut was flying.  He passed the favorite like he was standing still and I quickly looked over to see if Karen still had her clothes on.  She was so low in her stance urging the horse home she was almost on the floor.  I was stunned. I had never won a stakes race before and it never looked like I would win this one.  I had to ask a punter for reinforcement on my way down to the winner’s circle.  “The one win by a mile, you jamoke…what’s the matter with you!”

Larry, Siobhan and the inimitable Karen Brown were all waiting with big smiles in the winner’s circle.  We had our pictures taken, thanked the horse and talked to the Miami Herald reporter, who logically thought Karen was the horse owner.  “Where will you be running next?” he asked her.  “Damned if I know,” she said, excitedly, “but wherever it is, my ass is there!”  Some people just know how to have a good time.

Keeneland in the morning.

The Rest Of The Story

Before leaving the winner’s circle, a stringer for the Daily Racing Form, impressed by Juggernaut’s powerful finish, looked over and said “I guess we won’t see HIM around here again.”  The inference being we’d look for grassier climes, more ambitious prospects, maybe take the route other top two-year-olds do to the classics.  I assured him Juggernaut would be back for the $100,000 Foolish Pleasure Stakes in September at a mile and seventy yards where we’d find out how he fared going a distance.  Larry Pilotti and I had no illusions, however.  Juggernaut had sprinters top and bottom in his pedigree; he was built like a sprinter and ran like one.  There was no way he’d get the mile and a quarter of the Derby, but there were several major attractions on the sprint trail.

The most prestigeous race of the summer for two-year-olds was the Sapling Stakes at Monmouth Race Track near Long Branch, New Jersey.  We vanned Juggernaut up there a week before the race, Larry and I following a few lengths behind in his hot rod Caddy.  Pilotti, a reprobate, didn’t like to fly no matter how many statistics on aerial safety you showed him.  We hung around the Jersey shore for a week, learning more about the area than you’d ever want to know.  The Monmouth track looked very fast, not necessarily the best state of affairs for our horse but perfect for the favorite, Pure Precision, who was off like a shot when the gates opened and never looked back.  Races like these quickly define your candidates.  We found out we had a quick sprinter who came on late in short races but could not beat the best of his generation at five or six furlongs when the track came up lightning fast.

One question still remained.  How far could Juggernaut go?  Many sprinters can hold their speed at a mile or more and he finished races like one who might.  On September 22, he went off the favorite against distance horses in The Foolish Pleasure and quickly zoomed to an eight-length lead.  If you’re wondering how this could be, it’s because time fractions in distance races are slower and a sprinter will have an early advantage.  Juggernaut galloped comfortably along the backstretch with no threat in sight, most of the jockeys on the other horses perhaps comfortable knowing they would have more left for the finish than this upstart in front.  One of them, the pilot of a colt oddly named The Judge Says Who (which ultimately became a multiple-stakes winner), decided there was a little too much distance between his mount and the leader and began moving in the turn.  Juggernaut did not begin slowing down until mid-stretch, however, and won the race comfortably by 2 1/2 lengths with The Judge an easy second.  When it was over, we had learned one more thing---our colt could beat good distance horses probably up to a mile and a sixteenth.  But how about the best distance horses?  We thought we knew the answer to that one but Keeneland Race Track in Kentucky was offering a $400,000 purse which would provide a definitive answer.

It was a big day at Keeneland, where the elite meet to greet and drink Kentucky bourbon all day without falling down.  All the big shots were there together with several candidates for the next year’s Derby.  The odds on Juggernaut were lower than expected and he broke with the leaders, sitting close until midway round the turn, where the pace and the mile-and-one-eighth distance caught up with him.  He finished up the track, a tired horse.  “Who WERE those guys?” he wanted to know once back at the barn.

We brought our local hero home to Calder, won a few less glamorous races and retired him when a pesky ankle kept giving him trouble.  He lived to the age of 22 in the front paddock of our farm in Fairfield, still grouchy, scornful of blacksmiths but never having to take another bath.  In the front of his paddock, which no one else is allowed to use, there is a small fenced-in area where Juggernaut is buried, and atop the grave a tombstone installed, as is appropriate where Best Horses are concerned.  The inscription on the stone contains his name, his ancestry and after that, his accomplishments.  And at the end one final line inserted by his sad but grateful owners:

“He gave us the Best Day Of Our Lives.”

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com              

Down The Stretch They Come! Part III—Arrival Of The Heroine

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My first girlfriend of consequence in the post-Harolyn years was the vivacious Betsy Harper, a hip southern belle, if there is such a thing.  Betsy was the sister of everybody’s go-to drug lawyer Bobby Harper, whose lot in life was to keep errant hippies out of jail, which he did with amazing consistency.  Betsy’s father was a stern Alabama banker and both she and sister Nan were proud ‘Bama graduates who hummed the school song around the house.  In college, Nan had dated Joe Namath and both girls thought crotchety old Tide football coach Bear Bryant was the second coming of Jesus Christ.  This was not an odd thing in Alabama.  I knew Betsy casually, as people inevitably do in smallish towns, but then one night she knocked on my door to tell me she disagreed heatedly with a lawsuit the brother of her boyfriend was bringing against me for falling off a ladder while doing some wiring in Silver City.  Nice gesture, I thought.  Unusual, but nice.

I met Betsy again some time later at the gala wedding of George Swinford, the notorious proprietor of Lillian’s popular saloon.  She was dressed magnificently in her own old wedding dress, a lovely antique, and she carried a parasol.  She was easily the belle of the ball, and that includes the bride.  Two days later, I mailed her a plane ticket to Miami for a race.  Soon after, she called me back.  “I have just one question,” she wondered.  “Will it be one room or two?”  One, I answered.  “Good,” she said.  Relationships were less complicated in hippie times.

Betsy Harper loved horse racing and she really loved Miami.  On her first trip, two of my fillies, Black Limousine and Mito’s Touch, won races on the same nine-race card, something that never happened to me before or after that day.  Betsy was not one to hide her excitement under a basket, yelling her head off in the trainer’s box as the races proceeded.  My ancient trainer Dominic Imprescia* gave me the Italian Eye of Approval.  “You got a good one this time.  I’m even getting used to the southern drawl.”

Months and many trips to the races went by and Betsy’s enthusiasm for the city and the game never wavered.  Then one day she brought me a large framed picture combining the two winner’s circle photos from day one at the races.  It must have cost her a small fortune.  A few days later, she called and confessed she could resist the the siren’s song no longer.  “I’m moving to Miami,” she advised.  “Once I saw what it was like, it was inevitable.  I’m helpless, caught in its spell.”  And just like a pretty thief in the night, she was gone.

New Girl In Town

My all-star veterinarian Ted Specht came by one fine afternoon with a rookie in tow, a serious looking young woman, hair pulled back in a braid, following him on his calls and learning the business.  She was terse of sentence and didn’t give away her smiles cheaply.  “This is Siobhan Ellison,” he said.  “She’s just out of vet school at UF.”

At the time, I had a mare named Fast Janice, whom I had bought in that second star-crossed yearling-buying season at Keeneland.  As a two-year-old she was very fast but didn’t bring the price I wanted at the Hialeah sale, so I brought her home to race.  The first day she was turned out, she ran through a fence and came up with an infection in her elbow joint, leaving her three-legged-lame.  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Janice together again, so we bred her and got a very fast filly.  When Dr. Ellison first saw her, she was pregnant with her second foal.  Ted Specht and I had been trying different things to keep the mare comfortable and her compromised leg had never caused any hint of laminitis in the other foreleg, but the new vet in town seemed critical that we were keeping Janice alive.  Walking off, I asked Ted “Who does she think she is?  I thought the Marquis of Queensbury made the rules.”  He smiled and told me “She’s just different…not much bedside manner but very bright.  Some day she’ll be one of the best vets in Ocala.”  Okay, if you say so, Ted.  But not around here.

Love At Fourth Sight

After several years of brilliant service, Ted Specht came to the farm one day and told me his true desire was to be a surgeon.  He was going back to school to learn the cutter’s trade.   Others in the practice would take over and it would be business as usual.  Wrong!  The replacements often showed up late, if at all.  I called him and said I was wandering in the desert without sustenance.  Who could I call for help?  “Well, there’s Dr. Ellison, of course.  She’s new, but what she lacks in experience she makes up for in intelligence.  You could do worse.  I’ll give you her number.”  Oh God, I thought, not her.  But I also realized a new vet would be a lot less busy and more likely to show up on schedule.  Ted promised the quality of the work would not suffer.  When it came time for her first visit, she was on time and cheerful.  Two months later, she brought me a fruit popsicle.  Meanwhile, she was getting all my mares in foal on one or two trips to the stallions.  One afternoon, walking out to check a horse in the field, she pulled a few pins from her hair and it toppled down in a great blonde wave to the top of her butt.  WELL!…I thought, like the shallow beast that I am.  I told her if she got all fifteen mares in foal I would take her anywhere she wanted for a celebratory dinner.  When the final results were in, I went to the barn one day and checked my chalkboard for messages.  There was just one.  PARIS!… it read.  Great, I smiled to myself.  There’s one of those in Kentucky.

Vaunted Vamp

Racetrackers have a term for those days each week when there’s no racing.  They call them dark days.  Betsy Harper adopted the term for those days when I was working until ten and there was no dating, of which there were plenty.  Siobhan Ellison did not believe in dark days, especially when there were four or five a week.  Matter of fact, since the Subterranean Circus was closing, why didn’t I just move in with her?  I couldn’t think of any good reasons, so I did.

Not long afterward, Marion County found itself in the midst of a thoroughbred glut…too many optimists with too many mouths to feed were jumping off the bandwagon, closing down farms and searching for greener pastures elsewhere.  For about a decade after Secretariat, horse racing was all the rage and captains of industry who made their fortunes in more reliable adventures were jumping in with both feet.  Most of us who are fortunate enough to succeed in business early often get the notion that we are more brilliant than is really the case and that our success in one thing will translate immediately to success elsewhere.  The unpredictable thoroughbred business with its mercurial highs and lows is the ultimate proving grounds for that philosophy.  But even so, the country’s tax laws at the time generously allowed losses in the racing business to be subtracted from one’s taxes, so a man of means had the choice of paying the IRS or his horse trainer.  What would you do?

Ronald Reagan let a charge to change all that in 1986 when new tax laws gave horse owners a stiff shot to the gut.  Owners were required to show a profit in a certain percentage of fiscal years, otherwise their pursuits would be considered a hobby by the Internal Revenue Service.  Suddenly, you could hear the sound of barn doors slamming everywhere.  Very few entities make a profit in the thoroughbred business, which was fine before but not so much in the days of unprofitable hobbies.  Broodmares particularly found a slow market and were often sold cheaply or even given away.  One day, Siobhan came home with a pedigree and an offer.  A mare named Peace and Quiet was available for zero dollars from one of her clients.  “Here, look at this pedigree and see what you think,” she said.  Even though we were chock full of horses, the lineage was too good to ignore.  “I don’t think we should pass this up,” I told her.  “I don’t need her, she’s all yours,” she said. I remind Siobhan of this fateful episode every time she questions my sterling judgment.

The next breeding season, I took Peace and Quiet over to Farnsworth Farm and bred her to a free stallion named Racing Star, who had won over half a million dollars on the turf.  Horseman are often reluctant to breed to grass horses, feeling their offspring might not run well on the dirt surfaces on which most racing is held.  Since the majority of thoroughbreds are bred to sell, until a turf sire has proved himself, the prices for his offspring will usually be low.  Since I would be racing mine, all that was irrelevant.  Racing Star was a terrific racehorse, grass or not, and it’s hard to beat free.

The result was a lovely bay filly I named Vaunted Vamp, who won early and often, eventually netting $420,000.  In 78 starts, she won 21 races, was 16 times second and 12 times third.  She was stakes-placed six times and remained sound her entire career.  Siobhan Ellison, no longer concerned about economics, put her modest practice on hold, went back to vet school and earned her PhD.  While doing so, she fortuitously discovered a drug that would inhibit a frustrating horse disease called Equine Protozoal Myelitis and parlayed the discovery into a profitable career with her Pathogenes, Inc. lab, all because of a filly out of a gratis mare bred to a free stallion.  And the green grass grew all around, all around, and the green grass grew all around.  Some days are stones, some days are diamonds.  Big fat ones that glow in the dark.

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com

*In THE FLYING PIE of March 13, 2011, there is a lively column about our second trainer Dominic Imprescia called “A Life Well Lived.”  Dominic, a colorful relic of the older days of racing, presided over my first two stakes horses, Thundering Heart and Mito’s Touch with aplomb and a good sense of humor.  His favorite expression in tough times was, “Don’t worry about nuthin’.”  DI ran one horse in the Kentucky Derby (7th) and had the pre-race favorite, Timely Writer, in another.  The latter colicked the week of the race, alas, and missed his big chance.  Defying all odds, Dominic, a chain-smoker, lived til age 94 and kept his wits about him to the end.  To access the article, see the Blog Archive under the logo.     

Besties; Dominic and Bill