The Old Age of Aquarius

“Agile as a snake!” my partner said one day, trying as usual to figure out whether he was disgusted or impressed. On this occasion Peppy had wriggled out of his stall, squeezing himself under the top half of the door and bolting.

When I met Peppy (registered name, Peppermint Twist), he was for sale cheap, because everybody in the county was afraid of him. I bought him because he could jump like nobody’s business.

I got his chart done by a horse astrologer, and she called me back in a state of high alarm. “You know he’s an Aquarian?” she said. “Well, that’s all he is. Everything in his chart is air signs. That horse is no good--the only thing he’ll ever understand is about four feet of air under him. Sell that horse!” Well, I’m an Aquarian, too (the sign that rules genius and insanity), so I said to her what I said to a lot of people in those days. I said, “But he loves to jump.”

We began going to shows. As soon as Peppy found out that a horse show is a place where you get to jump even more than at home, he became peaceful about them.

At one show there was a huge spread fence followed by a tight turn into a five-foot upright. Peppy came in hard to the oxer and jumped it clean, but he fell to his knees when he landed and I lost the reins. I had to either get the reins back or ask him with my legs to turn, set himself for the upright and take it. I did the latter. He took the fence, and there was time during the wide turn to the next one for me to collect the reins. Since American Horse Show Assn. rules define a disqualifying fall as one in which the horse’s shoulder touches the ground, we got the trophy, and I went around saying worshipfully, “Oh Puppy!” (I learned from the stories of Isaac Taintor Foote that you say “Oh Puppy!” to a horse only at the most exalted moments.)

And I started having dreams about me and Peppy and international jumping. I dreamed that I was being interviewed after a gold-medal ride. I opened my mouth to sing his praises but said instead, “He’s the same **** son of a ***** he was when I first bought him!”

Peppy became, in time, such a reformed character that he was my most reliable school horse. He became kind. I could trust him with the safety of little old ladies, babies and, in one case, a blind student. He never became calm about trucks, however, and never learned to stand quietly in the middle of a trail ride, but I’m not into trail rides and didn’t care about that.

Peppy is now retired and in the care of Mel Opotowsky, one of Peppy’s many fans. Opotowsky told me recently, “I’ve got a Peppy anecdote. I felt sorry for the hoss, because every so often he remembers that he’s the great and fabled Peppermint Twist, and he runs around suddenly doing inspired athletic things and hurts himself. So I thought I’d take him out and get a little condition on the hoss. At one point I decided to stop and rest.”

I knew what was coming.

“He argued about it. I insisted, and he settled the matter by rearing, and I fell and broke two ribs.”

I told Opotowsky, who had not known Peppy in the days of his outlawhood, about the astrologer and about how everyone used to say, “Shoot that horse!”

He said, “I’m no Aquarian, so ‘Shoot that hoss!’ was one of the things that occurred to me as I lay on the ground looking up at him. The next day, though, there he was practicing Grand Prix movements out in the pasture. There isn’t anything you can do with a hoss like that. You can’t even shoot him.”

So Peppy the Wonder Horse rides again.