These will not be my images in this blogpost. I will, instead, steal them from the web.
Today is the thirty-fifth anniversary of the most tragic match race of the twentieth century. Thirty-five years ago today, the brilliant and previously undefeated Ruffian broke down in her race against Foolish Pleasure. Attempts to save her failed, and she had to be put down.
I remember hollyhocks.
One of the marvelous things about great horses--or maybe it's just about youth--is how their performance touches you so deeply that you feel a personal connection. Or, perhaps, maybe that is just the way the young think about everything that matters, that it matters especially to them.
They ran that race on my afternoon off.
I seldom took any time off. I was usually in the barn by 4:30 and seldom left the grounds. But once or twice a month, I would spend the afternoon with family, usually at my grandmother's house in the country. It was a big 19th century farmhouse with one of those wide, expansive porches, and a front lawn that seemed to roll away forever.
The television was kept in a morning room with a big picture window. Outside the window, next to that wide, sweeping porch, grew hollyhocks.
Growing up, I hated hollyhocks. For one thing, there was that annoying girl in the Sunday Funnies named Holly Hocks. But mostly it was how they looked: like a weed with those long stalks and those blossoms that looked perpetually faded and tattered, even when they were fresh. They look like an old person's flower, with none of the crisp, clean lines and sharp colors that signified beauty (and youth) to me.
Ruffian was beautiful (and young): solid dark bay with those clean, crisp white silks with bright crimson sleeves and the one bright, bold crimson bar. That was what beauty looked like, not some old, faded, already wilted pastel that seemed to droop in summer's heat.
Of course, that's the thing about hollyhocks--they bloom in midsummer.
It may have been my afternoon off, and I may have been away from the track, but my focus all day was not on my family but on that race. And I was in the center of the family that gathered around the snowy, black-and-white television on which we watched history. Looking back, I think it is sad that I have so little awareness of my own family that shared that moment with me, but I was young; and my memory is almost entirely private.
I had never felt shock like that before, and (fortunately) have seldom felt shock like that since. Much of the experience is blurred for me--a sense of my own posture, leaning in, looking harder, hoping by watching more closely to see something different.
But one thing is clear, bright and distinct above all else.
Somehow I was outside--I don't know how I got there--walking in front of that window, in endless circles, my eyes fixed on the grass where the tips of my shoes pressed it down as I circled, staring intently, as I had before at the screen--seeing not the grass, but the replay looping endlessly in my mind, trying to see it end differently--and circling, pointlessly circling, unable to look up.
And, at the edge of my peripheral vision, unnoticed on the fringe of my unfocused stare, those hollyhocks burned themselves into my retina.
And now, whenever I think of that race, I think immediately of hollyhocks.
