There’s a lot more I’d like to tell about. Because things have changed in the last thirty-four years that ought to be pondered. What happened with Toss and Buddy and Jack, and Spencer’s family too. With Alan and his boss, and Charlie Smalls, the stallion groom. With Mercer Tate, and his farm. With Secretariat, revolutionizing racing, and standing at stud at Claiborne, and the fire at Blue Grass Horse Vans. But it won’t get written here. Now. It’ll take another book, or two. Or maybe even three.
I’d like to explain about Alan and me, and what’s grown up between us. Which changed our lives forever, and several more besides – including our three sons’. Meeting Jack’s mom was an unnerving experience I can promise you I won’t forget. And who Jack met again, and how it was between them, when he went back to France deserves contemplation.
I did get to go East (and South and West and North), and to Europe more times than I expected, for work and pleasure both.
I’ve been involved in two family businesses now. Intimately, if not objectively. And the pressures and stresses, and the satisfactions too – the unpredictable ramifications of genes and upbringing and changing generations – have been wide and deep, and wake me up in the night, alternately smiling and gnashing my teeth.
It can be a hard ride, working in the horse business. Which makes my part of Kentucky as small as a wren’s nest, and as wide as the world that comes to buy our horses. Who break our hearts like our own kids. And make us want to get up in the morning to see what the day brings.
I hope I can write again about the families here that keep the horses going; the people you know now and the ones who matter you haven’t met; the home-places that shape us all; and the worries too that drive us on; the hatreds that fester, and the ones that fuel the flames of violence and despair.
And I will write that and something more if I’m given time to do it. And I don’t say that without meaning it. I’ve been told I’d be dead in six months or less. And it “concentrates the mind wonderfully” – to paraphrase Samuel Johnson.
But that pronouncement came a year ago. And what’s kept me here is a whole ’nother story I’ll tell if God gives me time.
It changes things. Death breathing down your neck. In lots of ways for the better. Alan and I had a whole year we knew we couldn’t count on. (Which is the only kind any of us have, though we normally just ignore that.) I don’t complain about the weather anymore. And it feels like a gift to be strong enough to scrub my own floors and do dishes. And now we’ve got grandkids coming, and I ask pretty much everyday for a chance to watch them grow up.
Writing this book helped while I was in the worst of it – the worst that’s happened so far. It made me concentrate outside myself on work I thought was worth doing. And I hope it’s a book you think about sometimes, when you’re driving your car or drifting off to sleep, that made you smile, and worry some, and glance at where you’ve been, too, and how you want to end up.
Jo Grant Munro
October 15, 1996
Rolling Ridge Farm
McGowan’s Ferry Road
Versailles, Kentucky