December 5th, 2022

The Ragman’s Horse and Other Family Frustrations

Here’s a story: about ten years ago, I was walking with my parents in a park and my dad and I started talking about our shared love of animals, and he told me a story (meta!) from his childhood. He was very little, still living in Brooklyn so less than 7–this would be the early 1940s. And he was playing in the alley by his house and the ragman drove up with his horse and cart, and leaving them in the alley, went into the house to bargain with my grandmother. My father, in the alley alone with with the horse, was entranced, and like any little kid would, started to try to feed the animal grass and pet it, just see if it would interact at all.

The ragman came back and my dad was scared of getting in trouble for bothering the horse, but instead, the man lifted him up onto the horse’s back and urged the horse to carry him down the alleyway. A tremendous gift to a little boy–my dad was astounded at his good fortune and at the feeling of being in motion atop this huge, muscular creature, carried along down the alley, to the lip of the street.

I flew into a rage upon hearing this very charming story. Like any parent, my father had many anecdotes that he repeated over and over–some I enjoyed hearing again and again, some I tolerated, some I cut off at the introduction. But THIS story, I only heard that one time, walking in the park, nearly 70 years and a nation away from when it happen. You lived in the time of door-to-door ragmen?? People travelled in Brooklyn with horse-and-carts in the 1940s?? They left you alone in the alley when you were so little? Where was everyone else? WHY DID YOU NEVER TELL ME THIS LOVELY STORY BEFORE?

I was, and remain, furious at the caprice of memory. Someone mentioned to me recently being sorry they didn’t ask their parents more questions before they died and that’s the thing: I DID ask my dad all the questions I could think of. But you just can’t elicit interesting stories by demanding them–you have to know specifically that there was a ragman to ask if he had a horse, and to know that there was a horse to ask if anyone ever got to ride it.

Up until a few months before he died, my dad was telling me new stories–not often, but now and again. He was 80 years old, and wounded when I accused him of holding out on me–he didn’t always remember, both the stories themselves, and what he had or hadn’t already told me. But…then he’d think of something new.

Something I tell myself as a writer is that an accurate map of the world is the size of the world–and, the parallel, that a true retelling of a life would take a lifetime. We edit the details to give a sense of the whole, but nothing is ever the true whole except the thing, or the person, itself. This is, in my darkest moments, cold comfort.

I have been talking about family history again and every time I learn or figure out a new fact, it fills me with joy but it also all drives me crazy–so much I don’t know, so much I will never know, can never know, because so many people insist on being dead.

I have long thought I would someday write a book called The Ragman’s Horse and Other Something-Something. I don’t know what the subtitle should be. I don’t even know what the real subject should be–my family’s history or my somewhat bonkers attitude towards my family’s history (took me quite a few paragraphs to admit I know I’m not being rational, didn’t it?)

In the meantime, that story is really very sweet, isn’t it? Horses, in Brooklyn, in 1942ish! Is that what you would’ve imagined? I would never have thought of it I wasn’t told.