Bless their hearts. *laugh*

As a kid, I adored Arabs. Just adored them. I wanted either a pretty gray one or a black or bay with lots of chrome, and we’d be bestest friends, and…

Then I met some.

Let’s see… There was Star, of course – nice horse, a little quirky, a little interested in the fillies still, and I’m still boggled at the weekly bathing in mayo thing.

I rode a mare named Lacey for a while – fleabitten gray, which I just don’t like that much – and she was a bit of a pill. She had two settings: lazy, and “FINE, I’ll GO, you evil human.”

Then there was Marcus, who just… had no personality at all; I have nothing bad to say about him, and nothing particularly good either. And his stablemate, whose name as totally escaped me but I think started with a T (Taffy? Tally?), who spent pretty much all her time jigging in place and is pretty high on my list of horses that were so annoying on the ground that I’m not sorry at all that I never rode her.

And of course there was Punky – dear, sweet, brain the size of a hummingbird Punky. The second horse I ever came off of. We used to joke that she had a five-minute reset button; you’d get her OK with something, and five minutes later, it was scary again. She’d stand in the crossties and scream and scream for her pasture buddies – who could care less – even when she could see them through a doorway into the arena. She had nose-bleeds. She was uncannily, frustratingly agile; we once watched her duck out of a set of stocks inside a wash rack, making a complete u-turn in a space that couldn’t have been more than two or two and a half feet wide at its widest. She regularly got sticks knotted in her long mane and tail. She was a very sweet horse – I only ever saw her make a mean move once, after a particularly rough series of camps – but man, oh man, was she a pain sometimes.

There was a half-Arabian too, a little bay pinto named Callie. She could be sweet, but for the most part she was a little turd, prone to kicking and head-flipping and this horrid little power-trot that felt like someone had replaced her legs with a mini’s and then lit a fire under her butt.

I realize, of course, that not all Arabians are those Arabians – and not all Arabians are the gorgeous ones in the show ring and professional portraits. That takes work that a lot of the ones I dealt with just didn’t have put into them on a regular basis.

But, being older and wiser than I once was… I don’t really want one any more. They’re shorter than I prefer overall. It’s a lot of maintenance to keep that pretty face. From what I understand, it can be tough to find a saddle that fits them really well. I’m sure I can come up with other excuses, too…

Of course, if The Horse For Me is an Arabian in the end, I’ll take it, but when it comes time to look, I probably won’t be looking at Arabs to begin with.