I Owe My Childhood Imagination to a Washington Police Horse
A single memory can fuel a lifetime of wonder.
I wish I could remember more of the memory that has been my fun fact at parties for the last twenty years. “I once rode a police horse on Pennsylvania Avenue, in front of the White House,” I’ll say, and then add, like a punchline, “but I was eight, and I wasn’t being arrested.” It’s a light, smile-coaxing story, a shiny anecdote plucked from a childhood otherwise unmarked by the extraordinary. But the sensory details, once so finely edged, are as grainy now as the photos my dad snapped of the moment on our then-brand-new digital camera.
We wore windbreakers, my sister and I, so it must have been a misty, cold day for early May. Our hair in the photos is damp, my face solemn, hers split wide in an uninhibited grin. She, two years younger, was the established “horse girl” of the family, but I read every equine-themed paperback I could get my hands on from the library, too.
I wish I could remember how it came to pass, or at least remember more vividly than just the fact that we were standing at the iron fence in front of the White House, peering across an impossibly wide, well-groomed lawn, wishing the famous mansion were closer and easier to see. Seeing it up close would have brought more of my wild fantasies to life…
