Ole Jack

This Week's Song - Fire Escape - Andrew McMahon - Just because.

I am a son of the suburbs, raised in the shade of shortleaf pines and sugar maples that cover power lines in a middle-class subdivision. I never rode a horse in my formative years. Instead, I mounted up a yellow Schwinn Scrambler with a black banana seat and trail tires and flew down Heritage Drive with my posse on a mission to buy baseball cards at the White Store. I played junior golf at the country club and learned to roller skate at Skatetown U.S.A. on Mondays after school. Odds were not good that I would ever own and tend to horses in my lifetime. But then again, I couldn’t know that Nancy would walk into my life.

Jack

In the fall of 2005, the beautiful and mysterious creature I married just three years earlier took me to "look" at a house and surrounding property in Lenoir City on one of those East-Tennessee afternoons at the peak of autumn when providence descends into the valley from the mountains and the colors leave no doubt of a loving God. I thought the house hunt was a phase, just my wife itching for a change - a "hey-let's-take-a-look-around" moment. Boy, was I wrong. The farm stood in the middle of a forest of exploding color and included a four-stall-red-roofed barn and fenced pasture. It wasn’t a fair fight. 

I’ve always hated change. It took my first wife’s death to bring me to fully understand that change was inevitable and something over which I exercised no control. Perhaps it was because I finally realized that life was not a series of paths forking in the wood. It wasn't a multiple choice test, but instead, maybe a roller coaster, the wheels of the car following a track designed by someone else. Once you strap yourself in there is nothing to do but hold on and see what's in store.

After I met her, I let go. I followed her way, her instinct. I still fight it but I stopped trying to control everything. This cloud, this whisper of a woman, so filled with mystery, magic, and beauty, after less than 4 minutes on the property, said "I want it," and I didn't think twice. She hadn't even been inside the house. Not only was a farm cast into my path, but something had to go in the barn, and that was her ultimate dream. Just like that, the boy on the Scrambler, educated inside the walls of a fine university and a first-class law school, a man who's hands were soft and void of callus, a man of letters and books and the law, a man who'd never maintained more than enough land to require a push mower, became a farm owner and, yes…a horseman.

His official papers from the American Quarter Horse Association revealed the name of Two Eyed Jack, III.  On May 30, 1985, when Nancy was graduating from high school, and my only cares in the world included varsity basketball and the girls roaming the halls of Farragut High School, Jack was born to his mare, Miss Snipfire, on a barn-stall floor in Bottineau, North Dakota. As he was struggling to raise himself onto his awkward rail-thin legs I was in my first year of driving, seated behind the wheel of a 1984 Camaro Berlinetta, a cocky 16-year-old blaring AC/DC, sporting a Members Only jacket and convinced that if I didn't already, I would soon own the world. Who could know or believe our paths would cross.

Jack's trip along the track was colored by tragedy. His first owner, a teenager, shot and killed his step-father after the man sold Jack without permission. Jack had been loved that much. There'd been other stops for Jack along the way, including years with a man who would drink until passing out on trail rides only to have Jack safely deliver him home. Then, after 22 years of finding his way to my family, our paths crossed on a day when the first snow threatened on our new farm. I handed a man an envelope with cash in it after he unloaded the horse into his new pasture. That evening, as darkness fell in unison with the temperature, Nancy and I went to the fence to feed him for the first time. As we walked to the fence, a red bucket in her hands and a bag of grain in mine, the snow began to fall. The flakes - first the size of dimes, then nickels and then quarters - were wet and of the kind that excite young children and the child still living in all of us. It was the kind of snow that somehow enhances silence. Nancy broke the silence by banging the bucket against the fence as instructed by the man who delivered him. We waited as the sound echoed in the trees. We couldn’t see him in the field. Out in the dark, he heard the bucket. Long before we ever saw him we heard him. He galloped toward us, the thundering of his hooves digging into the clay and the sound of his exhalations piercing the falling snow. We didn't know where he was coming from but the sound of him sliced through the night like a train without headlamps. She grabbed my hand. Suddenly, he emerged from the snow only a few feet from us, his breath rising like a cloud, his head bobbing back and forth to shed the flakes. When he plunged his face into the bucket we knew we would never forget what we’d just witnessed.

We tended to and loved Jack for nearly 10 years. The girls rode every now and then, but the majority of Jack's time spent with us was in the role of a large pet. Nancy often would feed him and sit with him in the barn. We would also go down together, engage in long talks about the kids and friends and family with Jack chomping on his grain and hay in the background. He was a constant in our life and not a day went by that I (or anyone that knew me) wasn't amazed by the fact that I owned a horse. But, kids grow up and move away. Priorities change. Seasons end. Two years ago, we returned not only to the suburbs, but to the very neighborhood where I grew up. As I write this, I look out the window of my home office upon the street where I rode my yellow Schwinn Scrambler. I sometimes see my 12-year-old self, curly dark hair, wearing my #89 Tennessee Jersey (Larry Seivers for those of you who don't love the Orange), trying to ride a wheelie up Heritage Drive with three packs of baseball cards in my pocket. Our beloved Jack is 32 years old and is barely hanging on. Yes, 32. He lives on the farm of a dear friend who loves him. Nancy and the girls visit every now and then. Nancy and Cori went by the other day to say goodbye. The word is that his health is failing. I don’t know what to believe about his health for Jack has always beaten the odds, but I know it won’t be much longer. None of us can stop the sun from setting.

The children in the photo above are now 24, 21, 21 and 18. There is so much we want for our children, but the thing I want most for them is to find someone who helps them lose their sense of self. I want each of them to find someone for a lifetime, not a season, to find someone who makes them see the world differently, who opens their mind to experience what life has to offer, and who convinces them everyday that they are the most fortunate person on the planet. The right person can make you into something you were meant to be or return you to yourself when you didn't realize you were lost. The power of the right person is beyond question. It comes early and often and screams at you when you need it...and even when you don't. It makes its presence known at the oddest times - perhaps every morning over coffee or with a hand on your knee in the bleachers at a basketball game. It can come in a whisper or when you cry together over a great loss. You are reminded when a foot kicks yours in the night or with a call or a text or a note or a sweet word, but make no mistake - its power will not be denied. It may come into view on the most beautiful day or when the chips are down and its 4th and long, but its beauty is most evident when it simply nudges you in the unexpected moments - like on a dark night, by a fence, listening to a horse thundering toward you through the snow.