Un-Twin-Spired

I'm gonna miss the Kentucky Derby today.

The sun will shine, the air will be warm with fake-ID summer, and I won't be putting a couple of bucks on the nose of the Irish horse with the trainer named Sir Ian Tweed-Cummerbund.

Who will then fulfill my every expectation by running like a can of Alpo.

I will not get to hang at my favorite joint to watch Doug the bartender/restaurant manager  correctly pick the winner again. I will not get to say "That's a fine woman that hat is wearing." I will not get to predict which horse will smell a trap and refuse to load into the starting gate, or to say what I always say about gray horses.

Don't bet 'em, is what I say. They're frequently slower than erosion.

I don't know why the Bastard Plague stealing this particular sporting event will leave a bigger hole than others for me, but it will. As I am the first person to acknowledge, I am the last person to come to for horse-racing knowledge. I don't know a fetlock from vapor lock. The only thing I know about furlongs is they're a pretty fur piece. And if you asked me who my favorite jockey is, I'd probably say Tobey McGuire.

From, you know, "Seabiscuit."

I was never a horse guy, in other words. But back in my sportswriter days, I became The Journal Gazette's sort of unofficial Horse Guy, on account of I'd covered the opening of Hoosier Park in Anderson and therefore landed on Churchill Downs' mailing list. And so every spring leading up to the Derby, I'd get reams and reams of faxes (as I said, this was back in the day) about everything that was going on beneath the twin spires.

Most of it, of course, might as well have been written in Sanskrit. There was a lot of stuff about Hi-De-Ho walking the shedrow, and Shooby-Do-Wop breezing a quarter. I had no idea what any of that meant, except maybe Hi-De-Ho needed to get out more. But I passed it along.

And yet ...

And yet, the Derby always fascinated me. On my list of sporting events I never got to cover, it's right up there at the top.

I have no idea how I would have covered it, of course, knowing next to nothing about it. To which my tens of readers would no doubt have responded "Like that's ever stopped you before."

In any event, today will have a hole in it, sunshine, fugitive summer and all. One more piece of weirdness to chalk up to these weird and twisted times.

Now if you'll excuse me, I believe I'll go breeze a quarter.

I don't know what that is. But it sounds kinda fun.