You Bet Your...

When I was a little girl, there was a man named Mr. Humphries in our neighborhood. He owned two horses, a retired police horse and another horse he'd rescued from a very bad situation. They both needed exercise and the rescued horse needed lots of riding. Being only one man, and not a young one, he needed help.

His solution to his problem was to enlist the neighborhood kids. With our parent's permission, he let us ride on the horses. One behind him, and two on the horse he led. Nowadays, he wouldn't be allowed to do that, as the insurance implications would be dire...and he'd be (quite wrongly) suspected of base motives. It is a real shame that things have changed so.

Thanks to Mr. Humphries, kids in my neighborhood had a chance to learn to ride a horse. Most of us wouldn't have had much of a chance to do so, otherwise. Though, I got to do it at Girl Scout camp..and the lessons really helped me there. I went from a beginner rider one year to "most improved" the next because I'd learned how not to be nervous around a horse.

Well, it did help that the first year I'd been assigned a HUGE horse (about 18 hands) on the basis that his name (Big Red) showed he was appropriate for me, but the next year I'd been fortunate enough to have gotten a pony. I was a short kid. With the first horse, they'd had to shorten the stirrups as far as they'd go.. and even then, I was riding by tiptoe. I hated it. The second year, with the pony, a cantankerous beast, I felt confident enough to take control and actually get the critter to do what I wanted him to do. I was still pretty small, but you can bet your breeches I wasn't going to take any guff from him. After dealing with a giant the year before and having spent most of a year taking almost daily rides with Mr. Humphries, I wasn't taking any guff from a pony.

Mr. Humphries has passed away long ago, but I remember him and thank him for being patient with a neighborhood full of baby-boomer kids, for rescuing a horse that everyone else had given up on, and for giving me confidence. I am very sorry that somewhere, out there, there is probably another Mr. Humphries that is being prevented from doing something for other kids by fear of what would probably never happen. Kids today don't have things better than we did, not by a long shot.