Sally Rides in the Firelight (05.03.22)

My friend Sally is nearing ninety, and for decades we’ve been laughing like loons telling each other foolish tales. (I can remember sitting in a theater with her waiting for the curtain when she, chatting with the stranger on her other side, described herself as someone who loved the theater [true] and also as a flamenco dance teacher [absolutely false].) My favorite tale about Sally, a stalwart South Dakotan and matriarch of an unruly clan, was of a trip to eastern Europe with, as she called them, the Minnesota hoi-polloi.There was theater, there were restaurants, there was sight-seeing, and one night, an organizer, either visionary or desperate, arranged for the group to visit what was then called a gypsy camp. They disembarked from a train to a rendezvous with hay-filled and horse-drawn wagons, prosperous Americans in good travel clothes, no doubt smiling as they climbed aboard. At the camp, there was liquor and food, firelight and demonstration dancing. I imagine tambourines and the tossing-about of curls. Sally, on the edge of the festivities, was enthralled. An enormous horse came to the fire circle and several of the Romani rode bareback, frontwards and sideways and leaping on and off. I imagine hats, and splendid gesturing. When they closed with a flourish, the presenter, whom Sally recalls being introduced as the King, asked if anyone would like to ride. Silence, except for, as I imagine, the crackling of the bonfire. And then South Dakota Sally, from the back, coming forward. She was lifted aboard, and the horse turned back to the circle, the handler clucking it forward. And it cantered, rocking easily. And Sally rode, around the circle in the firelight, before the hoi polloi and the Romani. “And I think”, she told me, “that I could have died happy right there.”

Sally doesn’t get out much now. I imagine that I can see her, riding easy on the horse’s broad back in the near-dark, smiling a serene and self-contained smile, until she was lifted down and returned to earth, moving toward the wagons and back toward the rest of her life in the American Midwest. All hail Sally, who rode the horse in the firelight, and returned.