Time is such a relative thing. Imagine this: When you’re gazing into a starless, night sky and that sky’s exploding with the reds, whites and blues of a thousand sparkling lights while patriotic music blasts in the background, the fireworks seem to be over in minutes. However, if a spark from a Roman candle lights your pants on fire, time can drag.
For example, I had the fortune, a few years back, of sitting by a mom at a rodeo taping her son’s first attempts at saddle bronc riding. His critter blasted out of the shoot sideways, exploded into one tremendous buck, and suddenly two feet of daylight muscled in between the rider and his steed. The steed thundered off. The boy hung suspended in mid-air for a fraction of a second before he crash landed on the hard-packed dirt. When he meandered over to sit with us, his mom played the video. The boy never made eight seconds. I wonder if he made two.
“It sure seemed longer than that,” he concluded. As I said, time can drag.
I had my own rodeo ride as a kid. My friend’s horse, Queenie, seemed tame enough but when folks yelled, she headed at a demon’s pace for the barn. I wish someone would have told me that before she began to run.
The feeling was exactly the same as I get every time I pull onto Dodge Street in Omaha as my car begins to pick up speed to keep up with the cars closing in on me on either side: How do I get off this blasted thing?
My next concern was the barn door and how exactly the door frame planned to scrape my body off this bolting piece of horse flesh. No worries. I fell off long before that after sliding from the saddle and hanging for a time—an eternity actually—under Queenie’s neck before I let go and she stumbled over me.
You know how your car’s side mirrors read Objects are closer than they appear. Horses are that way too.
This knowledge was reinforced when my newspaper sent me to cover a Bull-o-Rama. The only zoom up feature my point-and-shoot camera possessed was me, zooming up close to the action. That’s how I found myself hanging on the fence where the action was up close and personal. One card table in the center of a bull ring plus four chairs and occupants plus one deck of 54 equals one game of a particular type of Rummy. Whoever stayed in his or her chair the longest in that ring was promised one cool, crisp $100 bill. They dealt a hand of cards. Then they let the bull in.
He was a Texas Longhorn, his curved horns stretching out wider than my arms could reach. As that bull wrapped one end of those long horns around the last man seated, from my vantage point, the bull—and the man’s eyes—were much larger than they’ve ever appeared before or since.
Once the man realized he was the last man standing, or sitting as it were, he skedaddled out of there like his britches were on fire. ’Cause like I said, when your pants are fire, time can drag.
LaRayne Topp
For example, I had the fortune, a few years back, of sitting by a mom at a rodeo taping her son’s first attempts at saddle bronc riding. His critter blasted out of the shoot sideways, exploded into one tremendous buck, and suddenly two feet of daylight muscled in between the rider and his steed. The steed thundered off. The boy hung suspended in mid-air for a fraction of a second before he crash landed on the hard-packed dirt. When he meandered over to sit with us, his mom played the video. The boy never made eight seconds. I wonder if he made two.
“It sure seemed longer than that,” he concluded. As I said, time can drag.
I had my own rodeo ride as a kid. My friend’s horse, Queenie, seemed tame enough but when folks yelled, she headed at a demon’s pace for the barn. I wish someone would have told me that before she began to run.
The feeling was exactly the same as I get every time I pull onto Dodge Street in Omaha as my car begins to pick up speed to keep up with the cars closing in on me on either side: How do I get off this blasted thing?
My next concern was the barn door and how exactly the door frame planned to scrape my body off this bolting piece of horse flesh. No worries. I fell off long before that after sliding from the saddle and hanging for a time—an eternity actually—under Queenie’s neck before I let go and she stumbled over me.
You know how your car’s side mirrors read Objects are closer than they appear. Horses are that way too.
This knowledge was reinforced when my newspaper sent me to cover a Bull-o-Rama. The only zoom up feature my point-and-shoot camera possessed was me, zooming up close to the action. That’s how I found myself hanging on the fence where the action was up close and personal. One card table in the center of a bull ring plus four chairs and occupants plus one deck of 54 equals one game of a particular type of Rummy. Whoever stayed in his or her chair the longest in that ring was promised one cool, crisp $100 bill. They dealt a hand of cards. Then they let the bull in.
He was a Texas Longhorn, his curved horns stretching out wider than my arms could reach. As that bull wrapped one end of those long horns around the last man seated, from my vantage point, the bull—and the man’s eyes—were much larger than they’ve ever appeared before or since.
Once the man realized he was the last man standing, or sitting as it were, he skedaddled out of there like his britches were on fire. ’Cause like I said, when your pants are fire, time can drag.
LaRayne Topp
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