I grew up in a small town in the rural South in the 1950's -- an era when westerns were still a Hollywood staple. Of course, I wanted a pony. We had a big yard -- it seemed big to a nine-year-old anyway -- with lots of grass for a hungry horse, and I would take care of it. 

My mother was unmoved although I had an answer for every objection. I finally outgrew the argument, but until then, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that our back yard was the ideal place to keep a horse. 

My older sister also wanted a horse, but that's all we agreed on. I wanted to be a cowboy, and cowboys required horses. It was a practical matter. My sister's fantasy, however, was rooted in the kind of National Velvet sentimentality that boys didn't understand. 

Like lots of young girls, she flirted with the notion of becoming a veterinarian.  We cowboys couldn't afford to be so sensitive. We would never mistreat our horse, of course. But, ours was a symbiotic relationship based as much on trust as on need. Sometimes horses had to be ridden hard and even exposed to danger. 

Fortunately we had cousins who lived on a farm and had horses. Besides horses, they also had pigs and goats. My sister thought the goats were oh so cute, but even she, the future vet who loved animals unconditionally, drew the line at pigs.

If we were lucky, Uncle Bud would let his daughters, Jean and Sara Eleanor, bring out one of the horses. Up close at petting distance, they loomed much larger and more intimidating than they did on the screen at the local picture show. 

Both Jean and Sara Eleanor were several years older and Jean in particular was an enigma to me. Sara Eleanor, on the other hand, was an unabashed tomboy. That I could understand. 

I don't recall Jean ever riding, but Sara Eleanor could ride like the wind. Sometimes, she'd just put on a bridle and gallop off bareback as if there was nothing to it. I imagined that she rode as well as Roy Rogers and Gene Autrey. She was the cowboy I yearned to be . . .  at least until the day she sneaked up behind me and pushed me into a creek, but that's another story.  

The high point of any visit came when I was allowed on the horse. Just sitting there so far off the ground was exhilarating. At first, Sara Eleanor would hold the reins and walk the horse around the yard, but as I got older she let me take control and ride solo. I was amazed that I could control something so much bigger and stronger than I was. A gentle pull on the rein or a slight nudge usually was enough to yield the desired result. It was heady stuff. 

My sister began to lose interest in horses about the time she discovered boys. Suffice it to say that she never became a vet, but she did have a dog for a while. I, on the other hand, soon fell for a horse of a different color -- one with lots of horsepower and a seductive name: Mustang. It was dubbed the Pony Car, and I knew that we were made for each other. Like Roy Rogers and Trigger. 

I can still remember the first one I saw one up close. I was sitting in a crowded parking lot in a 1958 Ford Coupe that had set me back $500 -- about two years' of  bagging groceries and stocking shelves at the local IGA. I was lucky to have wheels of any sort, but at that moment, I didn't feel lucky. Envy is more like it. 

That '58 Ford Coupe is a classic today, but in 1964, it was your father's car. If your father was a working class stiff. It had no cachet. No sex appeal. If the Mustang was a turtle sundae, my Ford coupe was plain vanilla. 

But . . .  I was supposed to start college in the fall.  A Mustang cost about the same as a year of room, board, and tuition. I could have one but not the other. So, I did the practical thing. If I was good at anything, it was postponing gratification. Anyway, the Mustang was an instant sensation. It would still be there when I graduated.

But the Mustang I fell in love with and coveted, the early models from '64 to '66 had disappeared from showrooms by the time I finished college and a stint in the Army.   Ford's marketing people had managed to tame the wiry mustang by making it muscle-bound. The romance was gone for me, and I bought a practical car -- one of the earliest fuel-efficient, 4-cyclinder models. No car since has captured my imagination like the first Pony Car did. 

After growing up and moving off to college, I never expected to ride (horses, four-legged) again. But, I did. My first posting as a young Army lieutenant was at Ft. Gordon, Ga., which lies on the fringe of Augusta -- the town made famous by the Master's golf tournament. I didn't know it at the time but the post also was a mere stone's throw from South Carolina horse country which had its unofficial capital at nearby Aiken. 

While at Ft. Gordon, I met a young social worker fresh out of the University of Georgia who was an avid rider. When we began to get serious, she insisted on taking me to meet her horse. I agreed because I got the distinct impression that if the horse didn't like me -- and vice versa -- I was toast. I never did meet her parents. 

She also insisted that we go for a ride although I hadn't been on a horse in years.  Everything went well -- I managed to stay on the horse even at a gallop -- and we dated seriously for months. We might have married but the Army shipped me off to Vietnam, and we drifted apart during the long separation. Well, that's not exactly true. She drifted apart. Where would I drift? 

After that, I didn't think much about horses -- except in the spring when the Triple Crown was in the news -- until years later when my young son discovered them. He discovered dinosaurs first and found them endlessly fascinating, but he understood that they existed only as fossils. So, while he asked for dinosaur books and dinosaur models, he never asked if we could keep a dinosaur in the back yard. Life was good. If you didn't mind stepping on the sharp spikes of a Stegosaurus in the dark. 

Then, one day, out of the blue, he asked if we could get a horse. He would feed him, of course, and there was lots of room in the back yard. I learned that day that explaining why having a horse in the back yard is a bad idea to a young child was like explaining the joys of fatherhood to a bachelor. It was one of those rites of passage for a parent -- like learning to change a diaper without gagging and teaching the kid to ride a bike without valium -- that they don't discuss enough in the parenting literature. 

Eventually, my son accepted the fact that he wasn't getting a horse and quit asking. Life was good again. Until he discovered cars and girls. I realized, too late, that a horse in the backyard didn't sound so bad.