What Derby Day Means To One Person, At Least...

[PapaChach]

The following is not an elegant rationale for the TG-lish-ess reasons for selecting a particular horse to win tomorrow, but, rather, one man\'s reflections on what Derby Day represents to him. I am an occasional customer and sporadic poster (and have neither ordered nor posted in several months) but wanted to share a Derby-related rant in a forum that might (or might not) take an interest...god knows there are so few of us out there...

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\"Well all of the hard days are gone,
It\'s all beer and whiskey and songs from now on,
Laugh at the darkness and dance until dawn,
All of the hard days are gone.

We\'re all safe and warm here, my friends,
All the bad times are over, they won\'t come again,
Raise up your voices and give us a song!
All of the hard days are gone.

Well, life has been cloudy and gray,
Take the bad memories and put them away,
The sun has come out, we\'ve waited so long,
All of the hard days are gone...\"

\"All of the Hard Days Are Gone\" The Mckrells

I had it planned out, all those months ago, way before the bottom fell out of our beautiful life.

Me and Lauren loved to go to a good party, but we loved throwing a good one even more; and in quiet moments now and then a loved one will pull me aside and tell me they dreamt of her, and oftentimes, they tell me that dreamt of her, and of all of us, at a party, and way back in the late summer days of last September, I had a party in mind, our biggest one ever:

The 2008 Derby Party.

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As corny or crazy as it may sound, Derby Day always held special meaning for me. I saw it as a rite of spring, as a signal that yet another long and bitter Northeastern winter had passed through once and for all. To me Derby Day, the first Saturday in May, signaled renewal, and it carried with it the rose of hope, it meant that we stood on the cusp of the best days of the year, the days of spring and then summer. The sun has come out, indeed.

We had our first Derby party in 2003, a small and impromptu affair, we decided that morning to have just a little sumthin\'-sumthin\', just my sisters and my brother and their families, Brian and Deb and their two kids, and Ruth and Paul. I fired up the grill for simple stuff, and I ran over to Ollie\'s to pick up a couple of cases of good beer, and Greg brought some Ballantine Ale, just for old time\'s sake, a nod to our fathers and their generation, perhaps, and we sat out in our yard on a sunny but chilly early May day and ate and drank and watched the kids run around, and we watched the race, my sister Deb jumping up and down in our living room as the New York bred gelding Funny Cide fended off the Kentucky blue-blood favorite Empire Maker to score an improbable upset victory; she had her husband bet on him for her, at 13-1, because she liked underdogs, like most of us do, and because she liked a story she had read in the local paper about his handlers, Barclay Tagg and Robin Smullen, I believe.

The next year we upped the ante a bit, invited a few more people, made more food, for some odd reason I went all Italian, not really Derby-esque, but that\'s how I went, and Brian made his killer salsicce and peppers and I made lasagne and we had some traditional appetizers and some antipast\' and plenty o\'beers, and someone who shall remain nameless suffered a shameful episode of inebriation out in our garage. I inexplicably fell in love with a 21-1 shot named Read The Footnotes in the days before the race, but then, who can explain why a man falls in love with a woman, or a Derby horse, just another mystery of the universe, right, and many of the partygoers chipped in twenties and fifties and hundreds and we pooled that money and went all in on various bets tied to my pick. He sat third, behind Smarty Jones, the undefeated favorite and eventual winner, through the early stages, and we all got a brief thrill when he moved up slightly nearing the far turn, but he quickly faded, and we lost it all, leading Michele\'s Kevin, a Derby betting neophyte, to refer to the race as \"the most disappointing two minutes in sports.\"

Well, by this point, we had decided that the Derby Party would just have to become an annual tradition, for decades to come. Life was good. A couple of months after the 2004 Derby, in July, we went back to Lauren\'s homeland in England, to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary; we had a son, and we had another much-wanted child on the way. After a busy summer and fall at work, she gave birth, in late November, to a bouncing baby girl, weighing in at a gargantuan eleven pounds two ounces. And I remember my pride in my wife as I made the calls, telling people, yeah, damn straight, eleven pounds, and my girl did it the old fashioned way, damn straight, she\'s a big-strong-tough girl, damn straight, that\'s my girl, telling the story to anyone who would listen, with my grin as wide open as the sunrise.

We thought it would go on this way forever. Well, not forever, but as close as we mortals can get. We had each other, the love between us growing with the years together, we had a house we loved and planned on growing old in, and family and friends to die for; and once in awhile, in those days that seem now to have happened to another man, in some other life I barely noticed whilst glancing through half-sleep at a tv at the other end of a bedroom, I would wake in the dark and I would watch Lauren, and just graze her shoulders with my fingertips so as not to wake her, I would watch her chest rise and fall with the elongated breaths of deep sleep, and I would think, my god, how could I have fallen into this bed of roses, who do I thank, and where do I pay my respects, at having the universe bless me with such a golden fate? Oh yes, we\'d raise our kids together, raise them right and strong, watch them go out into the world and we\'d sit together somewhere, alone, old, holding hands as the sun set, holding hands as our children brought us the gift of their own children, and then they would sit beside us as we bowed out of this world, old and graceful and thankful.

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We had our third and final Derby party in 2005, though we didn\'t know it then. We invited even more people, made even more food; I went barbeque that year, fulfilled my newfound obsession with pulled pork. On Oaks Day, the day before the Derby, I borrowed a second kettle grill, and my friend Jerry sauntered over to talk about the day\'s results and what might happen tomorrow, and he noted he could smell the wood chunks burning from two blocks away. Lauren\'s folks were over from the UK. I made the pulled pork that day, and twenty pounds of potato salad, and scores of bottles of craft-brewed ales and lagers sat waiting in ice-filled coolers in our garage.

Derby Day 2005 dawned sunny but windy, and the wind nearly ruined the party. The electrical wires running behind our yard flapped in the strong breeze, and then, an hour before the race, the wires ran crazy, they slapped against each other and sparks flew, to the delight of the assembled children, and then one of the wires fell to the ground and the power went out. We called the fire department, and I thought, oh shit, we\'re not even gonna be able to watch the race. The fire truck pulled up and the kids went nuts, yelling and cheering for the firemen. The firemen called the power company for us, explaining the urgency of the situation, and a neighbor volunteered her portable generator, and just as a friend and me went into her garage and dug the thing out and carried it over to our house, the power company arrived. With a crowd of excited children and drunken adults rooting them on, they made things right, and, ten minutes before post, the lights and the tvs went back on. The power guys got back into their trucks as we cheered them on and sang their praises, and my mother ran out to them with pulled pork sandwiches to take with them on their travels.

We watched the race in the living room, people on top of each other, the kids still abuzz with the excitement of fire trucks and power company trucks, and we got a thrill when my longshot special Closing Argument made the lead a coupla hundred yards out, but the surprise of the twenty-first century, Giacomo, a 50-1 shot none of us saw coming, ran over us in the final yards, and we wound up with nothing but good memories.

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A couple of months later we got a call from Lauren\'s folks. Her dad had pancreatic cancer. He seemed to be a candidate for some drug trial. There seemed to be some cause for optimism. None of us knew a damn thing about pancreatic cancer, about the fucking hopelessness of it. I did some research on it one day at work, and when I got home, Lauren said, so, what did you find out, and I looked at her sadly and tried to cover up the truth, but a man cannot hide very much from a woman he has lived with and loved with for the better part of a decade and a half, and she saw right through my weak attempts at rousing the ghosts of hope, and she held on to me tightly, for she saw the truth in my eyes, my words meant nothing: she knew, by looking into my eyes.

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Turned out he didn\'t fit the rules for the drug trial, and they offered nothing but conventional treatment. It was a matter of time. We all knew it. In August she took the two kids back home to spend two weeks with him, while he could still spend the time, and I stayed back here, she wanted me to take my time off when she got back, so I stayed back here and worked, and went up to Saratoga on the weekends. Still remember tapping out on a Lisa Lewis-trained filly named Silver, um, Silver Something, maybe Silver Strings, 12-1 or so, and Robby Albarado got her in all kinds of trouble in the stretch and I wound up home alone with yet another night of takeout and beer, licking my wounds from a big ol\' beating at the races.

I thought I had seen the bottom, or something like it, as I sat alone in our house and missed my wife and kids and the money I had blown that Sunday afternoon.

Little did I know.

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In January we learned that, despite our very best efforts at employing birth control effectively, she had become pregnant yet again. We knew her father had weeks or months to live. We figured her mother would want to come and stay with us for long stretches. We had a third child on the way. We only had three bedrooms. We knew the housing market had bursting bubble written all over it. We didn\'t know what else to do. We put the house we loved, the house we planned on living in for the rest of our lives, up for sale.

In a few weeks, we sold it. We got the call from Lauren\'s mom: come home, now, your dad hasn\'t got much longer. We all went over. While we were there, watching his agonizing final days, the house we planned on buying got snatched up by another buyer. We came home, a little weaker, having said our last goodbyes to one of the clan. We couldn\'t find another house. My brother called, offering the downstairs apartment of the two-family he owned and lived in. Just for awhile, I said, until we find something. Just for a couple of months, two or three months.

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We moved in just three days before Barbaro won the 2006 Derby. We didn\'t have the time or the room or the energy to host the Derby party. Ruth and Paul had it. Placeholders, as it were. Evie, our daughter, broke one of their vases. We felt horrified, ashamed. We offered them the money to replace it, and they refused. We bet a bunch of horses with Bluegrass Cat underneath, and he ran 2nd at 41-1; somehow, we didn\'t have Barbaro in there. No worries, though. Plenty of Derby Days to come. Next year we\'d be in a new house and we\'d host the party again.

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Next year came and went, and still no house. Nothing really happened in the housing market in general to encourage us to buy. We didn\'t particularly like the arrangements but we saw them as temporary, a mere year or two blip on the radar of our long life together. Brian had the Derby Party in 2007. As usual, we ate and drank like champs, and bet like chumps. We loved Street Sense, the winner, but we got all freaked out by Hard Spun\'s super-fast pre-Derby work, and we tossed him from every bet we made; when he ran 2nd, we got beat out of everything.

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By that Derby, Lauren\'s mother had emerged successfully from a mastectomy. More cancer. Lauren, an only child, had lost her father and had almost lost her mother. She started pushing to buy a house. I pushed back. Just wait a bit longer. Now\'s not the time. Trust me. Just wait a bit longer.

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Closing Day at Saratoga, Labor Day, 2007. Me and our oldest son, pushing nine years old, venture up for the festivities. Lauren stays home while the two little ones nap. Three days prior, we had sat in a doctor\'s office. She had noticed major hearing loss in her left ear. Her primary care doctor didn\'t think much of it at first. But when it didn\'t clear up, he sent her to a specialist, who tested her hearing and discovered she had lost almost all hearing in the affected ear. He sent her for an MRI, expecting to find an acoustic neuroma, a small tumor of the inner ear.

They found something else; a menigioma, a benign brain tumor. The tumor was, in the words of one of the doctors, \"enormous, just a gigantic tumor for someone this young.\" Lauren was thirty-eight eyars old at the time.

The tumor, though benign, had already started pushing against her brain stem. It had to be dealt with.

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There was a huge Pick Six carryover on that Closing Day. A bunch of us pooled a few hundred bucks together in an effort to take the thing. Pick the winners of six straight races and perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars were yours for the taking.

The first leg of the Pick Six was a two year old turf maiden turf race, a bunch of horses who\'d never run before, no prior form to go on. We used six horses, wanted to go with seven, but we didn\'t have the money. We threw out the rail horse, a 14-1 first-timer from the Pat Reynolds barn.

I didn\'t have high hopes. I just wanted some distraction. I just wanted our bet to make it through a few races. I had just found out my wife, my life, my soulmate, best friend, lover, and partner in crime, had a brain tumor. I wanted some distraction. Something to hope for, if just for an hour or two.

We put our bet in and sat down to watch.

The rail horse, the Reynolds horse, went to the lead. He looked like a freak. Down the backstretch, halfway through the race, my experienced eyes could see that the race was over; this horse would blow them all away. Our Pick Six dreams dead already, so much for that.

As he barreled down the homestretch, all alone, I felt nothing but aggravation. I looked a row beneath me and saw my son, standing, cheering, shouting, full of the joys of spring, yelling, go, go, go...turns out Jerry had liked the horse and bet $2 on him for Bailey, and as far as Bailey knew, he was in clover, he knew the \"14\" above the horse\'s number on the tote bord, where the odds went, meant he had some big money coming, $28, in fact.

They declared the results official. The winner: Big Brown.

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A week later, we met with a neurosurgeon with a gold-plated reputation, the best guy outside of New York or Boston, everyone told us. He laid out the options: do nothing, a bad option for such a young woman, he said, this thing had to be addressed; radiation, but he put the chances of success for that at \"only\" 60-70 percent, an odds-on or better shot at the track, but she didn\'t see it that way, or, as she said to me later, how many odds-on horses have we watched crash and burn over the years; or
surgical resection.

She was hell-bent on the latter course. I could not talk her out of it. I tried. I wanted to try radiation, wanted to go to New York or Boston. But my love, for all of her wonders, was a very stubborn woman, and she had made up her mind; she wanted the damn thing out of her head. She scheduled the surgery for the day before the 2007 Breeder\'s Cup, for October 26th, 2007.

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I gave up arguing with her and decided to trust her. She hadn\'t steered me wrong yet in fifteen years together. Every time we faced a major life decision and we went with her gut, things turned out fine. So why not this time? She had the form, right?

They said she\'d be laid up for two or three months, which would take us into December or January. Fatigue will be the main limitation, they said, and we bought that shit hook, line, and sinker.

She said, look, when I get better, around the turn of the year, we\'re buying a house, come hell or high water, I don\'t care what your economics blogs say. I said alright, alright, at least we can start having the Derby Party again.

And I started planning it. I\'d do the pulled pork and potato salad again, being they were such a hit back in 2005. I decided we\'d invited everyone we knew. It would be a celebration; after the death of her dad and the near misses with her mom and her own brain surgery, this party would be a celebration of life. And although I am not very talented in the visual arts, I started messing around with an invitation, something we hadn\'t done for the other parties. A picture of a horse crossing a finish line, and a quote from the song quoted above.

The theme of the party was to be, of course, all of the hard days are gone. I planned to gather the assembled crowd around, in the last minutes before the race, and deliver a toast, to the courageous, lion-hearted woman known as my wife. And then, with bellies full of booze and food, we would gather \'round, the group coming together to honor both the departed and the survivors, the survivors most especially including Lauren, to watch the race, the rite of spring, the rite of hope and renewal.

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That party will not take place tomorrow.

For Lauren died, almost six months ago, complications from the surgery to remove that tumor took her from us.

On this Derby Day, a friend will have a small party instead. The closest of the inner circle will gather around me to guide me through what will surely be a bittersweet day, with the emphasis on the bitter. We\'ll make a few bets, and for sentimental reasons, in honor of the sight of my son dancing in the aisles watching a horse win on the last day of Saratoga last year, I will root for Big Brown.

But I won\'t really care who wins, and I won\'t really care if we win money or not. Two months ago, I couldn\'t have even imagined caring about watching the Derby, but I will watch, with interest, to my surprise. I will watch and I will let the race, and the day, represent renewal, and hope; I will watch and I will dare to hope, I will dare to believe. Better days may come, or they may not, but I will watch a simple horse race tomorrow and I will choose to believe that those better days will in fact come.

[girly]

Wow! Just when you start to take yourself too seriously,someone comes along to remind you about what\'s really important. You have great memories! Hold on to them, and to your good friends! I love Kevin Mckrell, it\'s hard to be down when you listen to his music. I wish I had a Derby party to go to,sounds like a nice tradition! Enjoy the day!

[Chuckles_the_Clown2]

condolences

shes still with you through the kids

[TGJB]

Good luck to you.

[ronwar]

I wish you the very best!

[marcus]

Papa - you sound like a winner ! it shows that you still know and have always known what\'s important in all matters  ...  Best luck & wishes to you  !!!