If I Had a Broken Leg ...

If I had a broken leg...

My FirstBorn skipped right over baby talk and said exactly what she meant, from the beginning, and has never believed in preliminary bush beating. She was waiting for me as I drove in one day. Her greeting was," If I had a broken leg, would you shoot me?"

The background for this was that the vet had looked at her horse, announced that it had Thrush and should be shot. I replied that even if true there was no hurry and we could at least talk it over. She started asking questions of other horse owners, farmers, and druggists, found some ancient remedy recipe, cured the incurable foot and got back on her horse. The abridged OED lists the earliest entry for Thrush related to horses as 1753, described as "an inflammation of the lower surface of the frog of the hoof, accompanied with a fetid discharge." Furthermore, in 1665, Thrush is described as "a disease, largely of infants, characterized by white vesicular spots on the inside of the mouth and throat and on the lips and tongue, caused by a parasitic fungus. " This is a precise description of a malady I had when I worked nights in a factory assembling transistors. The doctor said "I have no idea what it is, but will you please stop thinking you can be a factory worker, and go home and get some rest." Here, 49 years later, writing about horses, I find the first clue ever as to what it might have been.

Not long before the horse problem, the FirstBorn came in from school, in sixth grade, and again with no preamble, said, " I need $42.00." At that point, she might just as well have asked for $42,000. Girl Scout camp had been announced at school that day and she had decided to go. We settled on a plan by which she could try to earn the money by selling cookies. She was to pay for the ingredients out of sales, I would make the cookies, and she would take complete charge of the selling and delivery.

We chose 4 favorite recipes: Crisp Oatmeal, Lemon Caraway, Ginger, and of course Chocolate Chip, which were the best sellers, as always. She did her selling by phone, to people she knew, and delivered once a week. It took just 6 weeks to get the $42. 00 and the only complaint we ever had was disappointment that she quit, because the cookies were so good. She never needed any more camp money, due to poison ivy, leeches and other diversions, although she became a skillful and happy tent camper, first with the family, then alone or with the great English Spaniel, Elmo, and later the Greyhounds.

Elmo used to get so bored home alone in a tiny row house that he would throw a tennis ball down stairs so he could have the excitement of running down to get it. Just now I was down on the floor looking up horse foot remedies in a book called Fortunes in Formulas (1907) on the bottom shelf and thought I might as well dust a little while I was there. Far under the bookcase was one of Elmo's tennis balls, lost on a visit here. And the doctor who gave up on the white spot diagnosis became one of the leading cookie customers. I used to think novelists went pretty far out using coincidence to tie plots together. No more. You can't go further out than ordinary life does, when it comes to coincidence.