Under the Wire

I’ll never forget the day my daughter brought him home. He was so ugly. She was so in love. This was one of those, “Daddy it followed me home. Can I keep him?” events. It was obvious why this fine looking specimen was left to wonder about aimlessly.

The truth of the matter is, nobody in their right mind would have wanted to be seen with him.

As my female child stroked his dirty, tangle hair with uncommon tenderness, hundreds of thoughts raced through my mind. One question kept leaping to the top of my list. “What is she thinking of?”

Every parent knows situations like this. If you tell your child, “No, I absolutely forbid you to do this, keep this or anything else for that matter, guess what will happen. You got it right. That event suddenly becomes the biggest thing in their life. Instead, we carefully express our concern and let them make their own choices.

It probably should be mentioned here, the little girl confronting me with this crooked legged, bad headed example of genetics gone bad was at the time old enough to make her own decisions. Fathers will recognize that little girls never grow up in their eyes.

I also stifled another question or two that would have made me unpopular. They included “Has he had all his shots?” and “I hope he’s been cut.” I didn’t ask, but sure hoped the answer to both was yes.

Over the next few weeks this skinny, sorry looking, dirty, weak backed and pigeon toed creature ate a lot and became fat and slick. Oh, he was still weak backed, pigeon toed and dirty, but his coat sure began to shine. Every time visitors came to the ranch, my beaming youngest would have to lead her find out to be inspected by the crowd. Most said nothing. A few said things like, “My Goodness, where did you ever find him?” or “Yep, he’s sure unique.”

Through it all, I bit my tongue and kept mostly quiet, hoping this too would pass. Eventually, as I had hoped, the little apple of Daddy’s eye began to come around. Once the stars in her eyes began to fade, her sense of good judgement slowly returned.

One fine day I realized I hadn’t seen “the creature” hanging around the corrals lately. Gingerly, I raised the subject. “Where’s it at?” I asked. “Gone,” was all she said. She obviously didn’t want to go into details and frankly I didn’t care.

We had dodged a bullet. This one never became a son-in-law.