MOVE ALONG, LITTLE DOGGIE

(Completely and utterly inspired by Cheri Block Sabraw's blog at http://www.cheriblocksabraw.com/2009/01/sharing-road.html)


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I was born and raised right smack-dab in the middle of Los Angeles. Well, no, actually I was born in Glendale, which is sorta east-north of L.A. central. And most of my elementary school years were in Highland Park, which at the time was a higher-lower-income Chicano East L.A. neighborhood


Anyway, I always thought of myself as a city girl with a country heart. I grew up crazy about animals, especially horses, and most of my dreams involved stables, cowgirls (I wasn't gay, just not into guys for quite a while) and hitting the wide open trail.


Well, I didn't exactly get that dream right away. I did get a horse, but in a city stable, with riding trails right along the L.A. River (of the numerous huge concrete runways for flood waters scattered throughout the L.A. Basin) about four miles south of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.


We could and did occasionally ride up to the bleak scrub of Sierra Madre and were all wonder about the wilderness - looking back now, it was quite pathetic. But for L.A., it was someplace that wasn't completely covered by cement and asphalt, was wilderness, so....


Fast forward about 35 years, and now I actually do live 20 minutes away from any city, on a dirt road, with two horses in my back yard. And when we first built out here, we also had a LOT of cattle grazing. On every side of us.


So one evening in the summer, I am driving home from work, and about one mile from our house find the road filled with cows, no human in sight. Seems one brave cow had stepped over a sagging wire to get at that legendary greener grass (although the best we usually have is less-brown scrub-grass), and others had followed her example.


I supposed I could have inched the car through and continued on my merry way, but I had learned that you always shut the gate, you always fill the water, and you don't leave neighbor's livestock out in the roadway.


So I parked my car, and began herding the cows back into the pasture they had obviously come from.


And it was going pretty well until my nearest neighbor, Jack, showed up in a near PANIC. He shouted over at me, "What in the *(#^@*)! do you think you are doing!?!"


I shouted back, "Getting these *(#$^@*@ cattle back into their pasture!!"


Turns out Jack didn't think I knew the difference between heifers and bulls - and yes, I was fully aware that there was one bull with this bunch of girls - and was gonna get myself KILLED thinking I was helping out nice safe 'ol cows.


So we ended up doing it together, and fixing the fence so they wouldn't get out again.


And I am certain this little episode is the one and only reason he let me buy his pretty little stud colt for a song when he left for Tennessee - I had proven myself.


Yippee-ki-yay, lil' doggies.