Looking for the pony.

Once upon a time, there were two brothers who were night and day.  Worried that the boys had developed extreme personalities -- one was a total pessimist, the other a total optimist -- their parents took them to a psychiatrist.

First the psychiatrist treated the pessimist. He took the boy to a room piled to the ceiling with brand-new toys.Immediately, the little boy burst into tears. "What's the matter?" the psychiatrist asked, baffled. "Don't you want to play with any of the toys?" "Yes," the little boy sobbed, "but if I did I'd only break them."

Next the he treated the optimist. The psychiatrist took him to a room piled to the ceiling with horse manure. The boy dropped to his knees, and began gleefully digging out scoop after scoop with his bare hands. "What do you think you're doing?" the psychiatrist asked, just as baffled by the optimist as he had been by the pessimist. "With all this shit," the little boy replied, "there must be a pony in here somewhere!"

 

I spend most of my time looking for the pony, and I usually find it.

 

To wit;

 

Thanksgiving turned out nearly perfect.  

 

Even if half my friends on FB commented that it looked like my bird was shitting dressing.

 

 

I managed to replicate Dad's gravy, and it was perfection:

 

 

But I learned something.  Mom doesn't like gravy.  What?  In all my years of Thanksgiving, I never realized that my mother was indifferent to the one thing I find most important of all.  I was stunned.

So there, mes amis,  there is the pony in this pile of shit... I am getting to know Mom better.

Dad was such a force to be reckoned with, so high personality, that I knew so much about him. 

Now, I'm getting Mom's stories.

Turns out, she has some good ones.  

Like the one about her family's dog, Whitey... he used to follow her half brothers to school, and used to go to the High School football games with them - where he ran up and down the field.  Until someone shot him.

Yeah, you read that right.  My mother, when she was five, saw her family dog get shot at the football game.

Let me state -violence against animals isn't funny.

It was so dark and sick, we were both laughing as she told the story - although, clearly, I think it's sick and not funny.

I said to her, "Holy shit, that is some Pat Conroy grade crazy."

How, in 40 years, had I not known this story?

And what others have I missed?

There's the pony.

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