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Overview
Carole surprised everyone: her family, her doctors, even herself. After seven months in the hospital and twenty-eight skin graft surgeries, she began to ride her beloved horse, Bailey. Thanks to the therapeutic nature of riding, she slowly regained almost full use of her legs. And though more surgery and almost four years of rehabilitation would follow, Carole eventually plunged into the world of performance with a clever trick horse named Dial.
Carole Fletcher tells an inspiring and eloquent story of recovery and rebirth. Healed by Horses offers a compelling account of one woman's uncommon courage and perseverance, and illustrates the extraordinary connection possible between humans and horses, and how that bond can restore, motivate, and heal.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781416516576 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Atria Books |
| Publication date: | 02/22/2011 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Lawrence Scanlan is the author of nine books -- six about horses. He worked closely with Monty Roberts on their bestseller, The Man Who Listens to Horses. He lives, and rides, in Kingston, Ontario.
Read an Excerpt
A family photo shows me, Carole Ann Rosenberg, at age seven in favored costume: cowboy hat, western dress, steer horn round my neck. I look doe-eyed and awestruck, for beside me are my heroes of the day, Gene Autry and his famous horse Champion -- replete with tiny guns on his bit shanks and tack embossed with shining silver.
A neighbor on our street in suburban Teaneck, New Jersey -- Claire Primus -- was a journalist who had managed to get me backstage at Madison Square Garden to meet the legendary Singing Cowboy. I have a vivid memory of Gene strumming his guitar on his horse in the rodeo ring, Champion losing his balance, and his rider falling off the back end. Gene calmly dusted himself off and got back on while joking to the crowd that there must be an easier way to dismount than this. Afterward I met the Range Rider (Jock Mahoney), his sidekick Dick Jones, and the rodeo clowns who hid from the bulls in barrels, and got everyone's autograph.
In the evenings, I'd watch Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Have Gun, Will Travel, Bat Masterson, and Rawhide. I'd escape into the books whose horses had captured my heart -- My Friend Flicka, Black Beauty, National Velvet, The Black Stallion. For years, I rode the bench in front of the piano. I even kept sugar cubes in my pocket on the off chance that I'd encounter a horse I could befriend.
As a child, I carried my Gene Autry thermos to school every day, along with my Roy Rogers lunchbox. I still have both thermos and lunchbox. They sit on a shelf in the living room, and visitors to our house invariably pick one up and hold it. For most people, thesight of Gene singing to Champion or of Roy with his hand on Trigger's face brings back memories.
I cannot remember when I did not love horses. Some of my earliest memories are of riding rocking horses for hours on end, and stick horses with yarn manes attached. I rode every carousel horse at fairs for as long as my parents would let me, and every mechanical horse in front of every store.
Starting at age six, I spent entire summers at camps in New York and Pennsylvania, in the Catskill and Pocono mountains, camps such as Camp Lakota, Camp Roosevelt, and Camp-with-a-Wind. I took to camp like a duck to water. I loved the daily horseback riding, waterskiing, and softball, and the camp musicals, in which I often played the lead (Sister Sarah in Guys and Dolls, Ado Annie in Oklahoma, Nellie in South Pacific). Here I was no longer a slave to the piano and the metronome. Here I was in the company of birds, fish, dogs, barn cats, horses. Close to nature, close to God.
At Rosenberg family reunions, I befriended my cousin Justine, three years my junior. She had a large pony named Ginger and a less-than-purebred Thoroughbred called Spring Fever. They were kept at the Fox Chase stables, where Caroline Kennedy kept her horse. I would pet or groom Spring Fever for as long as the horse would allow. Justine had the life I longed for but only dreamed of: her own horse, her mother's blessing. When I was a teenager and warring with my mother, I pleaded with her to let me go live with Uncle Eddie and Aunt Sarah in Short Hills, New Jersey. Surely they'd let me have a horse. My horse.
A suburban kid with a country heart, I had to console myself by living on the range vicariously with my favorite cowboys -- Gene and Roy, the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid. I could recite the introductions to all their shows, knew their horses and their many tricks. There was Roy and his palomino Trigger, Dale Evans and her buckskin Buttermilk (along with their dog Bullet and jeep Nelliebelle). There was Gene and Champion, the Lone Ranger and his gray Silver ("A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty 'Hi-ho Silver.' Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. The Lone Ranger rides again!"), Tonto and his paint Scout (Kemosabe, Tonto's name for his ranger pal, was supposed to mean "trusted scout"). The Cisco Kid rode Diablo; Hoppy rode Topper; Annie Oakley rode Target.
I had a Roy Rogers guitar, a cutout doll book of Roy and Dale, and I knew the year Trigger was born: 1932. (Actually, there were at least five "Triggers" used during tours, movies, the television show, and promotional shots. Each was trained by Glen Randall, a man I would one day come to know, and each had his own special tricks. Gene Autry, similarly, used seven animals known as Champion during his career.)
Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and the others may have been the stars of those old movies, but it was the cowboys' (and cowgirls') sidekick, the horse, that pulled the movie along. The horse would rescue the hero, whinny when trouble was near, untie ropes from wrists, chase the bad guys into a corner, kick guns from villains' hands or create a diversion when that was called for. The famous horses had their own fan clubs (I was a member of several) and, in some cases, their own comic books. Small wonder that when Roy Rogers signed photos, comics, books, and programs, it was always "Roy Rogers and Trigger."
The westerns showed me the ways of the West, but they also set down what I took to be moral codes, even commandments. The shows were morality plays that pitted good against evil, good guys in white hats against bad guys in black. I still have my Roy Rogers Rider Club card and thus can list the Roy Rogers Riders' Rules:
1. Be neat and clean.2. Be courteous and polite.
3. Always obey your parents.
4. Protect the weak and help them.
5. Be brave but never take chances.
6. Study hard and learn all you can.
7. Be kind to animals and take care of them.
8. Eat all your food and never waste any.
9. Love God, and go to Sunday school regularly.
10. Always respect our flag and our country.
The first commandment posed no hurdle, but that was in part because we had a nanny, Mrs. Simons, who picked up after me and ensured I was neat and clean. She was a hefty woman with ample arms, warm and nurturing. In her fifties, with one grown son, she always wore aprons, bathed and fed me, watched me play, and took me for walks. She also made the best apple pies, and her chocolate cookies weren't too shabby either. I grew to love this gentle woman, my surrogate mother.
My own mother, Jene, was, and remains, a formidable woman. She was a working woman long before that phrase became fashionable, but as I grew up I increasingly resented her allegiance to her work -- a string of women's wear stores. We were destined to clash, she and I, and we did. Roy Rogers's rule number three -- Always obey your parents -- would fall prey to our little war. My father, Irving, tried to keep the peace but was powerless. Bless him, he also made me laugh and let me into that other world, the one I longed for -- the world of animals.
It was Roy Rogers rule number seven -- Be kind to animals and take care of them -- that I sought most to obey and the one that proved hardest to honor. Until I was eight years old and my brother Michael came along, I was an only, lonely child in the iron grip of my mother's perfumed hand.
Michael Steven was adopted as a newborn, and my welcoming remark was what you might expect from a child facing the prospect of sharing the limelight: "Why couldn't I have a puppy instead of a baby brother?" Later I would play with him and dress him up -- as a cowboy, naturally. But the age gap, along with his physical and mental handicaps, place an insurmountable distance between us.
Michael, we would eventually learn, had a mild form of cerebral palsy that affected his motor skills and hand-eye coordination. As a toddler, he would walk on his toes, unable to place his feet flat on the ground. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic advised that he wear braces to stretch the tendons and muscles. Eventually he did walk properly, and his lazy eye was corrected by glasses. But he would never run and catch a ball like other children. And while my father did all he could to "make a man" of him (even employing a neighborhood boy to teach Michael how to ride a bike and fight those who teased him in the schoolyard), my mother coddled and pampered him. She hired tutors to help him with homework or did it herself. Often, Michael would retreat and bury himself in a comic book. Later it was fantasy and science fiction, Tolkien, Star Trek, and television.
Looking back, I imagine it must have been hard for my brother as a boy to compete with a sister who was an honor roll student, and voted most popular, best-looking, and best-dressed in eighth grade.
My parents' business -- my father worked in the stores as well -- eventually did well, prospering so much that we moved "uptown." Moved, that is, from a mill-town house on a lot so small you could hear your neighbor sneeze to the classy suburbs.
Our custom-made flagstone split-level ranch house was built on a hundred-foot-square lot that boasted a backyard with a small hill I could sled on in winter. The finished basement had a built-in bar and barbecue pit. There were automatic garage door openers, built-in lazy Susan cabinets throughout the kitchen, and a laundry chute that dropped laundry (and my toys) into the basement laundry room. My mother hired an interior decorator who deployed expensive antiques (vintage French) throughout the house.
Private schools, Broadway shows, and weekends in Catskill Mountains hotels were standard fare for our family. There was money, too, for lessons -- ballet and tap dancing to the age of six, and piano, of course.
But not just any piano. It was a 1923 Steinway "M" baby grand, and my mother would tell all who cared to listen that it had been tuned by the same man used by Leonard Bernstein. From the age of six to the age of fifteen (when I finally rebelled), I practiced daily at that piano. My mother would time me.
"Tie you?" asked a friend to whom I recently told my tale. He was horrified, but he had misheard. Yet in a way, he heard right. My mother was an opera buff, and she had a notion that her daughter would become a concert pianist. She also dreamed in her youth of becoming a teacher, but that never happened. Instead, she foisted both dreams on me, and I wavered between doing all I could to please my mother and running in the other direction. For all intents and purposes, I was indeed tied to that piano by my mother's sturdy rope. Not to play would have been ungrateful. My mother had bought me a Steinway, after all, had layered on all that guilt and expectation, and it would have been churlish of me not to play.
My teacher was Grace Harrington, an instructor at the famed Juilliard School of Music and a pianist who had played at Carnegie Hall. I remember her shiny cheeks, the bun in her hair. Her metronome still rings in my ears. I was made to practice an hour daily, and then two hours daily -- flowing up and down scales, studying theory, and sight-reading.
When I grew frustrated with this strict regime, as I often did, I would escape to the basement. It was there that my few animals were confined. My mother detested animals, likely because of some long-forgotten incident in her childhood.
As a child, I was not allowed a dog or a cat -- despite all my pleas. Pets, my mother informed me, were dirty. They would have soiled her wall-to-wall beige carpeting or, worse, got up on the baby blue upholstered sectional. My animal friends, upstairs anyway, were a huge stuffed frog called Grasshopper and a stuffed chestnut pony who went by the name of Tony Pony. Neither posed a threat to the furniture.
My basement coterie included a turtle called Tomatohead, assorted fish, parakeets, and a parrot named Trixie, whom I taught to climb a toy ladder and follow a mirror. These animals were my best friends, and I'd talk to them and care for them daily. I was intrigued by God's wondrous creations and wanted to touch them and learn their every movement. I am both sad and grateful about this, but it's true: my animal friends were the most cherished of my childhood. Though I had friends and was well liked at school, I was lonely at home.
My father once smuggled into the basement a stray kitten I called Pretzel, after my father's favorite snack. The ruse was soon exposed by a live-in German maid named Ingrid who responded to the creature in her laundry basket with a string of words whose meaning I had no trouble guessing. Pretzel went to neighbors.
Tomatohead and the birds would have to do. Every day when I came home from school, I'd rush down to the basement, clean their cages, put in fresh seeds and nuts, fruit, and vegetables for the birds, and lettuce for the turtle. I'd let Tomatohead out of his cage and watch him crawl around the room from my perch on the sofa. I'd also let the birds out of their cages, taking pleasure in seeing them explore every nook and cranny of the basement. To my mother's horror, they also explored her coiffed, hair-sprayed, beauty parlor hairdo. I would caress their feathers and teach them how to talk -- "Pretty boy" and "Hello" and, to my father's amusement, "Oh, crap!" (timed to coincide with my mother coming down the stairs to my animal kingdom).
I was just starting to experience the rich communication possible between human and animal.
Copyright © 2005 by Carole Fletcher and Lawrence Scanlan