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Tuesday, June 5, 2018

A Mule in my Future?


                                                  The Mule Problem




As a child I wanted to be a cowboy. I began my reading career with horse books, particularly those by Walter Farley. Before my family became one of the first in town to have a television, I listened to  The Lone Ranger on the Radio, and when television kicked in around 1950, (I was eight years old), well, I missed the radio, because television was so boring, at least during it's early days. T.V.'s first decade of life began with the likes of Philco Playhouse and Omnibus, interesting only to a minority of Trotskyite eggheads like my parents. The real growth spurt of the medium came, finally, after we, the patient American public, had endured a few long years of that tripe, when the medium discovered the efficacy of producing its own Westerns, and from then on, it was All Westerns All the Time, at least until they discovered Cop Shows.   

And even before adolescence kicked in I had been attending the popular Western Movies that were shown at the local movie theater at the Kids Saturday Matinee, which usually consisted of numerous cartoons, followed either by one of the series; Francis The Talking Mule or a Roy Rogers or a Gene Autry movie, followed by a feature film, more than likely something that included Glen Ford or Jimmy Stewart and a female star such as Susan Hayward.
 
So needless to say, my fantasies especially in my youth were often in the Western genre. To illustrate; well into adolescence, during my second year of college, [my adolecence lasted another ten years], while I was flunking out, and in order to assuage the anxiety of that painful period, (I was in NYC)  I would go to double, and even triple feature [yes there really were triple features] Western movies, on 42st.  It was an easy trip, coming back from school there was a subway stop right by all the movie theaters. I saw all the John Wayne movies up to that date, 1962, and all the Audie Murphy movies, and many others of the somewhat lesser stars. I preferred the Murphy movies mostly because the horses were Quarter-Horses, well fed and shiny coated, and did lots of galloping up and down the sides of mountains. To this day, my favorite style of horsemanship is Western Movie Freestyle.     

The reason I bring this up is, I still fantasize, and I'm sure it's become a pathological problem. You see, for me to believe I can BECOME something or other, "when I grow up!", is ridiculous!  As of this writing, fer Crissakes, I'm 75 years Not young!  To make matters even more complicated, these days my daydreams seem most of the time to involve mules.

That's right. Mules; the reason for that is because when I discovered U-tube, a few years ago, I found a few videos of people riding mules in the rocky mesa Western Movie country and the mules were incredibly nimble, almost like Mountain Goats, which appealed to my freestyle riding self-image.  So I started researching Mules, and I came upon some videos of a lovely woman with silver grey hair  who was busy raising Donkeys and Mules, out in Tennessee.*  She had tons of video on her day-to- day work with her equines, and with her encouragement, (she turned out to be charismatic and very smart and funny), I got hooked.
I learned about the history of the American Mammoth Jackass, and how that equine is used to raise the American Mule which has done so much to assist, well.....I was going to say our country, but the truth is the Mule has been, along with it's Mama, the horse mare, the muscle behind the Proto-Indo-European, otherwise known as Western, Civilization. 

So I dream about owning a mule.  I dream about prowling the countryside on my mule, particularly up and down hills, and draws, canyons and mesas, and through deserts and forests and all-over-Hell- and-gone, and imagine that I've learned how to ride and handle my mule, much different then a horse because he, or she, is smarter, and more thoughtful and discriminating, (like me I should add), and going to Bishop Mule days, (which means I need a truck and a trailer), and, in the mean time, I go to a local farm and rent a horse, and ride through mosquito infested South Florida jungles and down the Power Lines, with a crew of nice ladies a half-century or more younger than I am, and at night before I turn on the news I spend a few minutes reading my Western Mule magazine.
I think I should add here, that all in all, I'm a quite content old man.

*Deb Kidwell
Lake Nowhere Farm
Martin, Tennessee

      
  

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