I am never going to win any awards for
patience. It just ain't going to happen. Believe it or not, I can
get...cranky. I try like all hell to have patience, but...I guess it's just not in my
genes.

I'm not a violent person, I don't do
physical harm to people or animals, and I don't yell and scream and
carry on about things. I just fantasize about doing
evil things when I get to the end of my rope. Said rope, at times,
can be decidedly short, especially if hunger or lack of sleep or time
limitations are involved.

I could learn a lot
from Mary Ellen, who has the patience of Job. Rather than getting
upset, she calmly looks for ways to relieve the situation. I admire
that quality, and, alas, I really don't believe that I will ever
possess it.

An example of our
two different approaches to frustrating situations can be seen in the
following incident that occurred earlier this week:

Mary's horse Hoo
needed to go New Hampshire, (a three-hour trek from our house), in
order to have an MRI done on his hoof. Mary was going to drive him
there by herself, and she asked me if I would take some time off of
work Tuesday morning in order to help get him into the trailer.

Hoo is not a big
fan of horse trailers. He once hurt himself severely in a trailer
when he panicked, wedged himself under a steel bar, and came fairly
close to breaking his back.

So this time, in
order to get him gradually acclimated to the situation, Mary drove
the trailer into the pasture and parked it next to the barn. For
three days prior to the trip, she fed the big boy his daily grain in
the trailer. At first, Hoo balked, but with great patience and loving
understanding, Mary finally got him to get inside. After two days of
this, he walked fearlessly into the trailer without the slightest
hesitation. He got so comfortable with it that he didn't even whinny
when the door was closed behind him!

And then came the
morning that really counted; the morning that he was to travel to New
Hampshire. Mary and I both bounced out of bed, ate breakfast
together, and headed out to the barn. Mary put the halter on Hoo and
led him to the trailer with a lead rope. My job was to open the
trailer door and then close the door behind the horse.

Piece of cake,
right?

The horse didn't
have an issue with this for the last three days, going in and out of
the trailer numerous times without incident.

That day, Mary led
the horse up the trailer. The horse followed her freely and happily,
right up to the threshold of the trailer . . . and then stopped dead.
For some reason, on this particular morning, when he had to be
in the freaking trailer by 8 am so that Mary could have him at his
MRI appointment in New Hampshire by noon, he sensed that demons were
hiding in the trailer just waiting to attack him.

So there he was,
frozen to the ground and stubbornly refusing to budge.

I tried to push
him.

Right!

A 190-lb.,
two-legged human is going to move a 1500-lb., four-legged horse?

Not gonna happen!

I grabbed him by his halter. He sharply thrust his head skyward and
practically dislocated my shoulder.

When
I landed back on my feet again, I clutched my throbbing shoulder, regained my composure,
glared at the stupid, shit-headed beast in front of me, and looked
into the trailer. Not one damned thing in there was different from the day before!

I
glared malevolently at Hoo. “So, what the hell's the
problem?”

Every other fucking
day, when he could have hemmed and hawed for hours with no
consequence, he jumped right up into the damned trailer like there
was nothing to it. The day when we really needed him to do it,
he acted as if it was the back door to the local glue factory.

We tried
everything: petting his nose, cooing his name, waving the bucket of
grain in front of him, dangling fresh hay in the center of the stall.
NOTHING worked.

After twenty
minutes of this being nice shit, I was ready to go postal on
him.

Now, there was a
time in the far-distant past when I would have allowed my temper to
get the best of me, and I would have exploded in a verbal tirade that
would have curled Mary's hair and sent the horse galloping across the
pasture in search of shelter from the storm.

But, rather than
fly off the handle and feel terrible about it afterwards, I decided
to do what I always do now when I feel like I am losing my grip. I
walked away. I took about fifteen steps into the pasture when I
turned around and saw that Mary had dropped the lead rope and was
heading for the barn, leaving Hoo standing there all by his lonesome
at the opening of the trailer.

It
made me feel so good to suddenly realize that I was handling a
very frustrating situation the exact same way that Mary was!!!! We
were both walking away from the source of our aggravation!!!!! We
were handling it identically!! . . .

Except for the fact that she was heading for the barn to get a big
carrot to feed to the horse in order to settle him down, and I was
heading to the pasture in search of the biggest fallen tree branch
that I could find to shove up his fucking ass!