Horizon

Getting There from Here

It’s a shame the first post of Horizon’s second year will concern a stolen car, camels, bourbon, middle-age decadence, and a dog named Trousers, especially when you review the posts from May of 2004. That was some beginning a year ago. The intelligence! The wit! The commitment to the nobility of language! The lack of three (make that four) exclamation marks in the same paragraph!

I read almost nothing this past weekend, traveling to upstate New York to steal my father’s car. He did sign it over to me, but as his memory is but a memory, it felt like stealing. Taking the car away was a public service: he is eighty-seven and thinks there’s nothing wrong with his going for afternoon spins when the inspiration strikes. You know you’re old when you have to take Daddy’s T-Bird away (actually it’s a Ford Escort, but I don’t recall a Beach Boys song about Escorts).

On the way to New York, driving south through the Champlain Valley, we spotted a camel in a field. I’ve seen plenty of llamas in Vermont and a few buffaloes, but that was my first camel. It was a Bactrian camel (two humps), the kind that can handle the cold. I’d be interested in understanding the desirability of camel-ownership, and wonder how you go about obtaining one.

Saturday evening I was introduced to eighteen-year-old bourbon. Having humble beginnings, I’m the sort who knows Wednesday’s bourbon hasn’t aged enough, but Tuesday’s is just fine. After a couple fingers of that heaven, a friend let me sit in her new Mini Cooper. I declined the offer to drive it around the block, saying I wasn’t driving anywhere in anything with the whisky in my blood. This struck my friend as odd, and then I remembered I was in a part of the world where the natives don’t find it strange that there should be publicly-financed snowmobile trails that lead from bar to bar. The Mini Cooper is an astonishingly beautiful automobile, but more astonishing was my friend saying, “You know, I’ve turned fifty-one, the kids are through college, so I thought I deserved this.” I smiled and thought, this is exactly what’s wrong with this country.

When I returned home Sunday, I saw Alan A’s Trousers Began a Grudge was the last post of Horizon’s first year. I thought if we changed it to Trousers Begins a Grudge we’d have a decent children’s book on our hands. Trousers would be the name of a dog that has difficulty staying out of the neighbor’s yard. Lots of conflict and important life lessons, and at the end Trousers saves the neighbors by rescuing them when their house catches fire during the night. Then he retires to Pennsylvania and becomes the Horizon mascot.

I hope everyone had as good a weekend.

Posted by Bobby Farouk at May 2, 2005 11:19 AM