Salamander
Fire Walking

Over the past four days:

47% of all hits to my diary were directed by search engines
- 13% of all hits to my diary were searches for "aspirus"
- 10% of all hits to my diary were searches for "staghorn beetle"
- 2% of all hits to my diary were searches for "wooly bear"
15% of all hits to my diary were from my own IP#
2% of the hits to my diary were from a bogus IP#
1 lonely soul out there is still using Web TV

None of this means anything, save that I probably need to get a life.

So Smarty Jones, this year's wunderkind of the races, is being retired because he's bruised all four fetlocks. At long last something about this entire phenomenon elicits a sympathetic response from me.

If one chooses to find parallels to the Smarty Story in human experience, it isn't necessary to look very far. There are plenty of young upstarts out there, even if you are only counting the ones who have overcome some terrible accident to go on and win their personal races. It's "The Little Engine that Could" for grownups. The Little Horse that Almost Could, with his troubled jockey and elderly owners, shows everyone what Heart is all about.

It probably helped rather than hurt his reputation that Smarty lost the Big One. Everybody can identify with that. Who among us hasn't at one time or another been on the road to personal fame and glory, only to go down in flames at the last minute? Remember that math test in seventh grade you were sure you'd ace, only to end up getting a "C"? Remember getting acceptances from every college you applied to except for the one you wanted most to get into? Remember dating that really nice guy/gal, only to lose them to some dork with a crooked part in their hair? It may not have been the most profitable thing Smarty did, but losing the Belmont was probably the biggest stroke of PR genius the horse could have pulled off.

Even after losing, Smarty Jones just wouldn't fall off the radar. This was brought home rather forcefully to me during the recent AVMA convention I attended. Our major speaker, who had been lined up months in advance, was to have been Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. I'd even considered attending the General Session where he was scheduled to speak, and I never go to the General Sessions. Ridge had to cancel at the last minute, but there were still two other scheduled speakers that night: Dr. Patricia M. Hogan, the veterinarian that treated Smarty when he had his close encounter with a starting gate and John Servis, the man who will forever be remembered as Smarty Jones' trainer. I went out to dinner with friends instead.

When I heard about his "bruised heels" a couple of days ago I knew the next step in the Smarty Jones story was a given. The Comeback Kid was going to try to do it again. He crowns his head on a starting gate and then nearly goes on to Triple Crown himself. He develops a debilitating hoof disease and then tries to hoof his way on to a successful racing career. He'd race, he'd draw crowds based on his name, and he'd fade away into obscurity, eventually ending up as a question on a Trivial Pursuit card. I figured Smarty Jones was going be to the racing circuit what Tom Jones is to the music industry: still out there making the concert rounds long after his last hit, with elderly women still throwing their bras on stage, God knows why.

But Smarty Jones' owners are apparently smarter and more humane than Tom Jones' agent is. They're opting out of the "pride from performance rut" and retiring their horse to greener pastures. Yeah, the cynical part of me wonders if they'd be so willing to retire the horse if he were a gelding rather than a stud. It's not my fault that when you dig down to the core of my being you find a little black hole of cynicism, sucking the trust out of life. But even I, at this point, can find something remarkable in this Little Horse that Almost Could story.

Here's to doing the best you can at whatever you're good at. And here's to knowing when it's time to move on to something else. There are not a lot of people at the top who have the grace or wits to get that second part right.