One Hammer Of A Heartbeat: A season on the backstretch

When I watched him stroll casually through the gate to the barn area at Playfair Racecourse, I gave him no more consideration than any of the hundreds of horses I had cared for growing up. I'd never been around Thoroughbred horses on the backside of the racetrack except as a casual visitor being the only difference. Just another horse, was my thinking at the time. There were champions in his pedigree, but he was offered for sale at a thousand dollars and purchased for eight hundred. Little Provolone, as we called him, would never be a champion to anyone but me.

I never understood my father and he never knew what to think of me until this horse came along. Because of this horse, I was able to spend half a year with my favorite uncle, my father, and what came to be my favorite place, the backside of the racetrack. Our time together, Little Provolone and I, also manifested a couple dozen hard-earned life lessons, as any worthwhile love affair will do.

Our journey takes us from the day I met a Thoroughbred racehorse officially named Officer's Citation according to the Jockey Club Registry, through the day his knee and my heart shattered simultaneously somewhere between the guinea stand and the quarter pole at Playfair.

Uncle Baldy would tell the jockey to wait until the quarter-pole to let the horse run, "...and if you don't know where the quarter-pole is, it's past the fucking guinea stand."

I've never researched the origins of the name, guinea stand. To be honest I'm afraid of what I will find.

You'll meet my mentors at the racetrack, my father Marv and his brother Baldy. I probably brag about them too much in this memoir, but if they occupied the same positions in your pedigree, you would too.

I have/had a lot of great uncles, but Baldy wins the favorite uncle race by the length of the stretch. Like any uncle worth his salt, a bad influence in a positive way.

I am the youngest son of Marv, and he is his own book. He once described the art of resurrecting a racehorse as "putting a poultice on his heart." Nothing brought my father and I closer than this horse. Nothing even came close.

Uncle Baldy is his own book as well. The two of them together were an encyclopedia of horsemanship one can only hope to emulate. They ran good-looking horses, and they ran tough.

Believe me, they could both tell a story better than I.

Some of it feels like it happened yesterday, but these are thirty-year-old memories about the first year I spent on the backside of the Playfair Race Course, now Playfair Business Park.

But "One Hammer of a Heartbeat" is not a book about any of these people or events.

I've come to see it as a love letter to life on the backstretch three decades ago and in remembrance of some of the ghosts who still haunt me today.

Having been written for a ghost from the past, what else could "One Hammer of a Heartbeat" be but a love letter to the past?