My Old Kentucky Home (You want to follow along, don’t you?)
The sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home
Tis summer, the darkies are gay
The corn top’s ripe and the meadow’s in bloom
While the birds make music all the day
The young folks roll on the little cabin floor
All merry, all happy and bright
By ‘n’ by hard times come a-knocking at the door
Then my old Kentucky home good night.
Weep no more, my lady
Oh, weep no more, today
We will sing one song for the old Kentucky home
For the old Kentucky home far away.
When the horses parade onto the Churchill Downs track to the strains of My Old Kentucky Home for the 137th running of the Kentucky Derby this Saturday, nobody will have a clue as to what is about to happen. Never in memory has there been a Derby so wide open, so devoid of a convincing favorite or even a couple of favorites. Of the twenty horses in the race, it’s probably fair to say that only a half-dozen or so can’t win—after that, it’s anybody’s ballgame. Unlike most years, several of the horses in this year’s race are Florida-breds and a large number of entries were broken and received their early training and/or raced here. Horses coming off the winter meet at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale have performed well in the Derby the last few years so we’ll see if the trend continues. We don’t have a dog in this hunt so, as usual, we’ll root for some little guy to poke his head into the picture and win his 15 hours of fame. And hold our breaths that everybody comes back in one piece.
Down On The Farm
Elf had her first real work the other day, going 24.3 for the quarter, out in 39 flat. She comes back for a final work a week from Saturday and then it’s off to Miami. Juno has her first two-minute-lick this Saturday morning. Wilson has asked when it’s his turn and we told him it won’t be long. We forgot to bring his carrots the other day and he was very offended. “I just can’t understand the incompetence,” he told the other horses. We were very embarrassed.
Wanda coliced last night, an event that never ceases to generate a sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach. Every horse owner has lost one or more to colic over the years and has endured long and arduous battles, occasionally degenerating into abdominal surgeries which often end badly. Most of the time, a simple banamine shot from the owner or his vet dissipates the colic spasms and everything turns out fine, but when that first shot doesn’t work or produces results for only a short time, you know you’re in for a grim few hours….or worse.
Colic has many causes. Horses can get sand colic from ingesting too much dirt, which is one reason not to feed them from buckets hanging along a fenceline. They spill grain onto the ground, then eat it—along with the surrounding sand. Most of the time, this causes no problems but occasionally, particularly on farms with little grass which do not feed much hay, the result will be sand colic. The latter can be determined by examining the feces of the horse in question, especially by inserting it into a long plastic glove, adding water and holding the glove up with fingers down. The sand will sink into the fingers, often filling them up and extending above the finger level, an obvious illustration that the horse is full of sand. Most horses with reasonable degrees of sand colic can be treated and, if managed better in the future, returned to health.
Other colics derive from feeding issues or lack of a good deworming program. Horses are creatures of habit. It doesn’t make any difference what times you decide to feed them but when you have chosen a schedule it should be adhered to religiously. Also, changes in types of feed and amounts increased or subtracted should be adjusted gradually. Again, most of the time, horses will adjust to bad feeding practices with no bad result…but these practices invite colic.
You have probably driven by pastures with those round bales of hay left out for horses so eat, free-choice. By allowing horses to eat all the hay they want, you are inviting impaction, during which a horse’s intestinal tract becomes blocked and cannot pass manure. These situations produce some of the longest, most drawn-out sieges of colic, as horses suffer through days of oiling, excessive walking, drugs and general misery until they either achieve relief or death. Horse farmers like to buy these round bales because they are less expensive and we use them, too. But we do not make our hay available free-choice—we keep it in an enclosure and peel off a specific amount for each feeding. The absolute worst use of round bales involves leaving them in the pasture until they are used up and then waiting a few days to replace them, inviting the horses to gorge on the new bale after having no hay for an extended period of time. This is just asking for trouble.
Wanda’s problem may have originated from ingesting straw which was used as bedding in her stall after she foaled and was brought up at night. Most mares will not eat straw, but Wanda, if she is hungry (which is always), will eat rocks. She is out at night now and there is no more straw, so hopefully the problem will not recur. She seems okay this morning and grouchy as usual. Hannah says hi.
And Now, Let’s Have a Long Round Of Applause For….
MARTY JOURARD!
Long embarrassed by his prodigious girth, Marty recently embarked upon a severe regimen of modest exercise (reading) and discomforting bulimic restriction (eschewing, at least, the equally dangerous gastric bypass), dropping a phenomenal amount of weight in what seems like no time. As a reward for this impressive success, he would now like to be called “Marty The Thin.” It’s the least we can do.
Motoring In Florida—The Northern Provinces
I escaped my annual visit to Jacksonville this year when I missed my first Florida-Georgia football game in 20 years, but The Fates were not going to let me get away that easily. Stuart Bentler, previously trapped in the Coney Island Memorial Hospital in Broward County, was finally diagnosed—for the second time—with amyloidosis and shipped to the Mayo Clinic just outside Jacksonville. Unlike the South Florida hospital, the Mayo Clinic insists their personnel attend Doctor School someplace other than Ulan Bator and be able to write with an implement superior to crayon.
Siobhan and I made the trip in a bulky 2 ½ hours, taking the scenic route through the dubious municipalities of Citra, Hawthorne, Waldo, Starke, Middleburg and Orange Park. From a mileage standpoint, this was the shortest route. From a waiting-at-stoplights standpoint, not so much.
Waldo, north of Gainesville, has long had a reputation as a speed trap. The American Automobile Association felt so strongly about Waldo—and another town just down the road named Lawtey—that they bought billboard space just outside these little hamlets advising drivers what they were getting into, the only two places in America to earn this distinction. There used to be a third little town in north Florida which was equally nefarious, but one fine day a carload of state legislators, travelling from the Jacksonville airport toward Tallahassee, was detained and ticketed by some Gooberville Police Force. Whereupon, immediately after arriving in Tallahassee, they marched into the State Capitol and revoked the offending town’s charter, causing it to cease to exist. That sure was a good joke on them.
Anyway, I never had any unpleasant experiences in Waldo. Maybe that was just because the Police Chief, A.W. Smith, was a pretty good friend of mine, but I like to think it was because I’m a law-abiding citizen. Waldo doesn’t really pull any of those clever speed-trap tricks like reducing the speed limit from 50 to 25 in the space of one block, it just seems to be the kind of town people like to speed through. And the fact they have five hundred cops sitting there over a one-mile area waiting for this to happen pretty much insures they’re going to pluck off an offender every now and then. It doesn’t mean they’re bad guys.
I’m not sticking up for Lawtey, though. When you look up “speed trap” in the phone book, there’s a picture of Lawtey. What? Oh. Well, there would be a picture of Lawtey if they put pictures in the phone book. We’re just trying to use a little poetic license here.
Anyway, getting back to Jacksonville (if we must), one day the guys who run the place decided they wanted to be the biggest city in the country—in land area, at least—so they annexed the rest of Duval County and made it all a part of Jacksonville. A sneaky maneuver, I’d say, and of no discernible lasting import. Jacksonville is now merely The Biggest Redneck City In The World instead of the second or third biggest. Jacksonville, and thereby all of Duval County, prides itself (themselves?) on not having one single Democrat voter in the entire city/county limits. I’m not making this up. But even if that were not the case, Jacksonville would rank right up there in the Top Ten of Cities You Do Not Want To Live In. We’re not sure why this is. I mean, the St. John’s River, very pretty, runs right through the place. And the outer extremities of the town to the east are right on the Atlantic, always a good choice when considering oceans. There’s an easy-to-get-to airport, good roads and plenty of barbeque, all important considerations. So what’s the problem?
There just seems to be a general tackiness to Jacksonville not found in nearby jewels like Amelia Island, just across the water, or Ponte Vedra, a ritzy enclave just south on the coast, or St. Augustine, a mere half-hour away. If you travel south of St. Augustine, however, there it is again! Daytona Beach, a tacky boardwalk town full of carnies spray-painting T-shirts and bikers bonking one another with bowling pins in strip joints. And, just to prove I’m fair, Daytona has long been considered a Democratic town. Both of these cities do share one commonality—police forces that will slap you upside the head and clap you in jail for an offense so meager as jaywalking. But if you had to deal with 50,000 drunken, hedonistic college kids on Spring Break, jumping off motel balconies, snorting coke in Appleby’s and pissing all over themselves in your nice police cars, you’d probably get a little cranky, too.
The Bentler Report
We know you think we’re being unnecessarily mean to the Broward General Hospital so we’re not going to say any more hateful stuff about them. After we tell you that the other day when the staff at Stuart’s new digs, the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, was trying to get the records for Stuart’s kidney biopsy stain from Broward they learned that the South Florida hospital had LOST it. WHAT? This is a HOSPITAL, right? It’s not like a kid losing her mittens. Stuart’s daughter, Katherine, has nightmares of the Broward doctors playing Can You Top This? at one of the neighborhood watering-holes:
“You think that X-Ray is something? Look at this goddam kidney biopsy stain I got from this guy yesterday. Is he a goner or what?”
The Mayo Clinic, by the way, is a very impressive place, as you might expect. A lot of marble, spacious, uncrowded areas, parking lots a two-minute walk from the main building. Stuart’s room is double the size of a room in a normal hospital and you could play basketball in his bathroom if you were the kind of person who did that sort of thing.
We do have one complaint, though. This place is out in the middle of nowhere, a few miles from the beach near Ponte Vedra, right off a good highway, but completely unmarked and unadvertised until you get a half-mile away. Would it kill somebody to put a couple of signs up so people like us don’t get off the highway one exit early and go rambling around the subdivisions? I mean, it’s the MAYO CLINIC, f’gawdsakes, give us a clue.
Stuart, by the way, is sort of on hold while the new guys try to assess the problem. They’re not taking anything the Broward doctors told them for granted, which strikes us as a wise M. O. Stuart says he is miserable, but he did ask about the Gators—probably just to be polite—and said he is looking forward to the first big road race ever in Austin in November. Austin? “They’re building a track,” said Stuart.
Well, we haven’t seen Pat Brown for awhile. Or Marilyn. Or any one of the old crowd who might remain extant in the Capitol of the Lone Star State. So, Stuart, if you’re going out there in November, so are we. We’ll meet you at Scholz Garten. It’s still there, isn’t it, Pat?
That’s all, folks….
