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Getting What You Want Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

9 February 2022

It took a few decades and it was only a photograph but we finally got the pony we wanted as a boy. At least that's our story and we're sticking to it.

Old Rusty. Olympus E-PL1 with 14-42mm II R kit lens at 41mm (82mm equivalent), f5.6, 1/100 seconds and ISO 250. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.

We came across this fella on a walk in which we'd holstered our Micro Four Thirds camera. We'd seen it before but this time we whirled and drew our trusty piece from the Pro Pad attached to our belt, just like Wyatt Earp (who's buried near here in Colma) at the OK Corral.

But we weren't dueling. We were indulging a hankering. A long-held one. For a pony. Which, when we developed the hankering, was the right size horse for us.

Nowadays (as would-be cowpokes say), we'd be a burden to a pony. And nearly anything else, come to think of it.

And if there's anything an old cowpoke does not want to be, it's a burden. At the first smell of burdenship, old cowpokes just ride off into the sunset, tipping their hat without looking back.

But before we went off into this particular sunset, we took a picture, which is one way to get what you want. A picture of Old Rusty.

We couldn't leave without giving that pony a name of our own. Since we couldn't ascertain its gender without trespassing, we picked a name that seemed appropriate whichever way it turned out.

We liked it standing there against a neutral gray on a tile floor whose colors were muted. We liked the rope harness and long lead. If we were still a paperboy instead of a cowpoke, we'd probably have launched a few morning papers at its nose.

Boys will be boys.

But cowpokes live by a different rule hardly ever cited in our modern world. It's engraved on Earp's tombstone in two lines:

"... That nothing's so sacred as honor,
and nothing so loyal as love!"

Love for a pony, apparently, as well.


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