Laise le bon temps roule!

A favorite motto that I have tried to embody in my every day life. A lot easier when you don't have to get up at the crack of dawn to drag yourself out of bed, put on your best clothes, commute thirty minutes to to be pushed around by people not worth your time, closed up in the four walls of your office for the next nine hours, breaking only briefly to insert your next Starbucks fix so that you can make it to the end of the day without giving yourself a concussion from your head hitting the desk from utter boredom. But I guess that's why they call it the grind, right? Because you drink coffee all day? No?

Looking back, my melancholy over my current employment status is completely understandable. Although this is by far the best paying job I have ever landed, it is by no means the best. One of the best was probably working at the racetrack.

I was in college when I applied for a job at the racetrack, which had just opened the new slot machine section, as a change cart attendant. The personnel office called and asked me if I'd be open to a different position, selling betting tickets for the horse racing. I'd never been to the races or bet on a horse, of course I had also never used a slot machine, so there was no difference to me.

Punching tickets was an interesting experience. You meet all kinds of people, literally. In my line I might wait on a homeless man who scraped together enough money for a beer and a sure thing show ticket, followed by the millionaire owner of the very horse upon which the homeless man was wagering. There is an amazing blend of camaraderie and competition among gamblers, and probably the same can be said for horse trainers too.

I worked at the ticket window all throughout college. I met mobsters and crooks, politicians and business men, and I developed a taste for the action myself. The tellers were a special group, completely separate from the 'slot' people in every way. A lot of us who worked a night shift once in a while would wind up partying together, often resulting in all night/next day trips to our favorite gambling, partying continuation, Atlantic City. We'd stay all night (morning) until either whoever drove made a big score they wanted to hang onto or most likely they lost their money and got crabby and wanted to leave.

I met a man, Super Joe, we'll call him, who was a professional gambler. He was a hell of a lot of fun to hang out with and was always up for any kind of adventure. Super, as he was often referred to, had been 'ruled off' most race tracks in the tri-state area, except the one I worked at. Ruled off is when the racing commission, the governing authority over racing, bars you from entering the grounds. Super had been ruled off for drugging horses, I didn't really know this when I met him. Thru Super I started working in the mornings for a trainer friend of his, Greg, 'walking hots'. This is when the horses come back from their daily exercise on the racetrack, they typically get a bath and then get walked for a half hour to cool them down and lower their heart rate. Seeing how I had just lost a bunch of weight by visiting Super Joe's diet doctor in New Jersey, I was really into the hot walking because I was getting a little exercise and best of all learning about the horses. Paul was a great trainer. Very knowledgeable in every aspect. He was always helpful in teaching me things and recognized right away my intelligence and eagerness to learn.

Greg went out of town for a while and left Super and a friend of his in charge of the horses. While he was gone I realized that Super had been slipping in the stalls before a race and drugging the horses (with who knows what). Poor Greg had a family to support and was doing his best at running his business and could have gotten in a lot of trouble, even ruled off himself, so I did the worst thing imaginable to Super, I ratted him out to Greg. This immediately terminated any semblance of a friendship that ever existed, but it got me in good with Greg.

Working for Greg he gave me a horse to walk that had injured his eye and was on stall rest, P.D. (I had to shorten his racing name Precise Direction - I can't believe I still remember that horse's name ten years later!). P.D. needed lots of time out of the stall, so he was a kind of a project for me. I will never forget, P.D. had a Guatemalan groom at the time. For some reason the groom couldn't understand why P.D. (I pronounced Petey) would kick at him when he was working on his blind side, hmm. Well, after a while I got really attached to P.D. and one day I caught the groom kicking him in the belly. I immediately started screaming at him. He got in my face right back, all I could do was pick up a pitch fork and start to chase him. I guess this began my endeavor to become a horse trainer.

After I ran off Paul's Guatemalan, I felt obligated to stay and work harder and learn more than ever. He taught me how to be a good groom and how to feed horses. From what I could tell, racing horses was no brain surgery. I stuck with it. When college ended for the summer I would work both behind the scenes in the morning with the horses, then go and work at the ticket window selling wagers for the races.

Eventually I met my husband, unbeknownst to me, another horse trainer, when I started working for him. And he taught me even more about horses. When I decided to go down South for the winter to his farm I learn about mares and breeding and babies.

Things were slow for my husband and I throughout the winter, so I took a job at a large local horse show. I lasted a whole two weeks working for a top notch hunter/jumper training barn from upstate New York. If what I learned about horses I learned from living with horses, what I learned about girls and horses, I learned in the two weeks I worked for them. Imagine if you will, an all female team of trainers, riders and grooms, all catering to the whims of their multi-millionaire clients and their triple figure sales tag horses.

Probably the thing that took me by surprise most was their blatant disregard for common safety practices. Safety has always been first with me and working around horses, driven by fear. Having little to no contact with horses in my youth, I was very intimidated by their size and strength, it took me a very long time to develop the skills to work around them safely and comfortably. The girls that attended these magnificent beasts were careless about their own safety, often doing things that I would never attempt, leading two horses at once, walking behind them.

Whoa, flash forward to present time: side note, I just called my boss to let him know that a very important potential customer had called to schedule a meeting at 8:15 am tomorrow and his response was "Christ! I'm drinking tonight. I already started." It's 3:30. The same thing happened the last time he was supposed to meet them, he had a large time the night before and wouldn't answer my calls the next day when I was trying to prompt him to get to his meeting. I had to call the client, who was already on the site and explain that he was 'sick' at the last minute and couldn't make it.

Living in fast forward.

I'll keep this brief because it is depressing, but I don't want you skeptics out there to think I am completely without emotion. Sometimes it feels like we're all living in fast forward. And the button's broke on the remote control. Before I even knew what happened, I quit the Girl scouts, was out of high school, out of college, getting married, now I'm waiting for my parents to retire, and it's all a blur, pock marked by the highs and lows of love and loss.



This year finds us at some of our most difficult times, I have to be glad it's almost over. My husband and I struggled thru the illness and death of my father in law. We're living with a mortgage for a house we can't move to. My mother-in-law is leaving the farm and abandoning us to convert to condo living (I can't blame her, sometimes I feel like the farm can be overwhelming too). I've had a turbulent year at work thus far, my boss and I speak in terms of 'making it to the end of the year.' ( - no one else knows that but he and I). Myself, my loved ones, my pets, we're all one year older, which makes me sad knowing the years are ticking by and we all have to work so hard just to survive that we never have enough time or money to be able to spend the time together we'd all like to.

Before you know it.



But time has not been wasted, nor have I allowed it to slither thru my fingers without taking a way a few valuable lessons.
*I learned what a reward it is to be able to comfort your spouse and make them feel, really feel your love and support.
*I can keep a level head thru a crisis (I kind of always suspected).
*We, as husband and wife, have to be there for each other.
*As horrifying and awkward as this may come out, it is a beautiful experience for a family member to die amongst their loved ones. To be able to say, "I was there for him," and know that you truly were to the very end, to ignore your pain to comfort someone else.
*And, I have suspected this for a year or so, but I am getting old(er).