Sometimes I like to imagine how I would have spent my time if I had a second run at living my life, given the chance. The exercise may sound laced with regret, but on the contrary, the imagining is just for fun. There would be a few things I would skip over, but not too many. As you might suspect, I have a list. The list stretches a long way back in my history.
I no longer want to be a trapeze artist, but at one time the idea of it made me giddy with excitement, spinning and swinging high above the ground. I would have insisted on a safety net; I think. We don’t always have possession of our “self-preservation gene” while we are growing up. Most of my early “dreams of becoming” had something to do with a horse. I told my dad when I was eight or nine that I wanted to ride in the Kentucky Derby. “You’d be the first girl to do so,” was his answer. That wasn’t meant to dissuade me but maybe to set up a challenge. The Kentucky Derby would run one hundred years before a woman rode as a jockey.
“The Right to Ride” exhibit in the Derby’s Museum shows Diane Crump to be the first woman to ride in any professional race in the United States and she rode in the Kentucky Derby in 1970. Diane required a police escort for her first race to get safely to the track through an angry crowd in 1969. She had her first win as a professional two weeks later while the crowd yelled, “Go back to the kitchen and cook dinner.” The harassment continued with male jockeys boycotting the races she was registered in.
Ah, the good ol’ boys club.
Those women trailblazers had a significant challenge, and their accomplishments should not be forgotten by anyone. Diane died in January of this year with a thirty-year riding career earning 228 wins. Julie Krone won the Belmont Stakes, considered the ultimate endurance race and the third race in the Triple Crown, in 1993 aboard Colonial Affair as a 13-1 longshot. She recorded 3,704 wins before her retirement, the winningest female jockey. Rosie Napravnik was one of the most successful jockeys of her generation not just among women but overall. She recorded 1877 wins and was the only woman to ride in all three of the Triple Crown races. There are 1,000+ female jockeys registered with the Jockey Club of Great Britain, while Canada has seen only eight women become professional jockeys based on the information I could find, with seventy-one in the United States. Regardless, I think my racing days are over, but not before I had a good many of them with Earl and Wayne, sadly not winning a one of them. But what fun they were! I can still see Earl aboard Prince a long distance ahead of me, Prince’s legs moving at lightning speed.
One of the entries on my list that recently caught my eye was to engage in wood turning, an ancient craft that dates to ancient Egypt, just slightly older than me. My first year in 4-H would have been 1967 with the Devlin-Crozier Calf Club; a photo with “Missy,” my Hereford heifer, is on my fridge even now, standing beside Doug and Blair Anderson with their Hereford steers in the Showmanship Class. I was pint-sized. Our club leader, Steve Caul, set up a wood lathe in his shed for members to build the club project for the Emo Fair display, a miniature version of a feedlot. We took turns on the lathe, and I remember the feeling of exhilaration transforming jagged pieces of wood down to a perfectly symmetrical tiny fence post. Wood turning has become a work of art rather than just for function. I don’t own a lathe or other equipment needed to participate in this creative passion, but I wish I did.
There were several entries on my list that were never going to reach fruition. I was never going to be a tap dancer or a concert pianist. There was a time I imagined being an opera singer or a professional whistler, but my brother put a stop to both with some immediacy. I wasn’t going to be a trick rider at the rodeo or a banjo player. I did have writer on my list, and it took me to almost age fifty to realize that one. The point is we never need to stop “becoming” just because we are getting long in the tooth. The possibilities are still pretty much endless of who we can become whenever we decide to grow up.
wendistewart@live.ca
