Cup of COFFEE
Oh To Be Back at Saratoga
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By Sean Clancy
hat do you miss the most?
Dinner parties? Baseball games? A cold beer at the local bar? A kiss on the cheek? The bank, the post office? The treadmill at the gym? Dinner at your favorite haunt on a Friday night? Shaking hands on a good deal or a long goodbye? The list is long and getting longer. For all of us. I missed Saratoga, my annual summer sojourn to America’s oldest racetrack. A 31-year streak, a 31-year tradition, a Secretariat span of time. Poof, another victim to 2020. The first 12 were spent as a jump jockey, loose and easy, living free. A friend once said, “I’ve got my tack bag and my credit card, I’m ready for Saratoga.” Being a jockey at Saratoga, even a twice-a-week jump jockey, was making it to the show. After retiring in 2000, a broken leg at the last fence on the first day of Saratoga providing the final nail, I gave my saddle to the Hall of Fame (it was the only way I was getting in) and we started The Saratoga Special newspaper the following summer. The words got tougher, the falls easier. This was to be our 20th anniversary, a celebration of the little paper that could. But, alas, it didn’t happen. We audibled and produced 17 issues instead
50
of the normal 34. I stayed home in Middleburg, writing from afar, trying to conjure up the vibe, trying to create the drama the horses and the horsemen of the storied track —a natural muse in a state of bliss—have always provided. My prose was passable, at best. The words felt stale, the sentences engineered, peanut butter has more flow. As I tell young writers, “Make sure the reader knows you’re there, not sitting in an office somewhere. They need to smell the dirt on your shoes, feel the sweat on the horse’s shoulder, the elation of a perfect trip, the pain of a photo finish loss.” I guess that’s what I miss the most in 2020, the dirt, the sweat, the elation and the pain. You can have the dinner parties, certainly the treadmill.I need the urgency of the moment, to do something well and do it quickly, like it matters. All days seem to run together, write today, tomorrow, next week, who cares? And I write this with full appreciation that if we get out of 2020 with a summer at Saratoga as the only thing we’ve lost, we’ve done well. I typed my last words for this year’s Special on September 11. There I was writing about a stolen summer on the anniversary of a stolen, solemn day. I remember walking into Nancy Miller’s barn in Unionville, Pennsylvania, to ride Succeed. Still reeling from a turbulent summer of The Special, our first. Sleep deprived, deadline
Go Green Middleburg | Fall 2020
hungover, I was going to go for a ride on a horse I adored, for an escape. Kay Stewart, a local veterinarian, pulled into the driveway and told Miller, who I endearingly call Aunt Nancy, and me that the world was under attack. I didn’t know what she meant. There was no cell phone with Internet to pepper you with reality. An FM radio was the only mobile communication. I went for a ride, wondering about the world. It wasn’t much of an escape. Hours later, I learned of the devastation, the carnage. Like everyone, I desperately tried to reach my friends—Annie, Wass, Pete, Charlie Moran—living in Manhattan and others in D.C. Luckily, I was spared, I didn’t lose anyone close to me on that terrible morning. And here we are, 19 years later, trying to survive a turbulent time again. September 11, 2001 was a strike to the heart, an end to the last slivers of innocence that any of us still held dear. It was strange, being removed from it all, watching from afar. It was hard to grasp, hard to digest, hard to understand. This pandemic is very different, a long slow burn touching all of us in one way or another, coupled with the most restless time this country has faced politically, spiritually, at least in my lifetime. So here’s to meeting again in Saratoga – or wherever your Saratoga is – next summer. The pandemic behind us and our political divide somehow healed, or at least healing.
