Horses
Hadn’t seen LT in a while but Friday afternoon, since we’d missed an earlier opportunity to get coffee, it was too late for coffee.
“How about going for a beer: I know it’s early….”
“I don’t know any places. Seems like Maggies is where we end up, so…”
I hadn’t sipped a cold one since last year’s hospitalizations, but seeing as I was in need of advice on horses and he was the expert, I changed my work clothes and was off.
***
He was sitting in the bar under a baseball cap emblazened with a hunt club logo, but his reserved, superficially somber face was familiar even in the dim light.
No one has a better sense of humor.
At Hunt meets, the field often makes its way past him with respects. I had no idea he was the guru, so self-effacing and polite were his manners. He was likely the best read gentleman I had ever met.
“Happy Juneteeth!” I hailed the barmaid who had delivered LT’s appetizer bread and butter.
I did not expect her to be as thoroughly equestrian as LT who rides infrequently these days.
She lowered her eyes conspiratorially and asked if someone would inform her boss it was Juneteenth.
For my part, I was happy to be a silent witness to the conversation.
The bar back apparently kept horses and raced them in Charles Town, and showed an impressive grasp of local tracks both in Virginia in nearby states.
“I am thinking of taking the sommelier exam…” she vouchsafed when LT mentioned I was a winemaker.
“Just do it.”
“Welllll…”
“How expensive are the exams?”
“The Management said they would pay,” she said reaching down behind the counter to clean a glass.
“James, you know James? He comes in every Monday to have dinner with me. You should join us” she leveled her invitation at LT, not me.
It was about horses and bleeders. A thoroughbred, if bleeding starts, can forfeit a race. These were the deeper secrets LT knew but which I was only a peripheral party to.
She got off duty at three o’clock and I launched into a conversation that brought LT out of his natural reticence, and we laughed.
I like friends who laugh easily and make me laugh.
What was it men our age talk of, over a mid-afternoon beer at a upscale place like Magnolia’s?
***