The pony incident 1974

In the previous blog I mentioned a “pony incident” as one of the life-threatening set ups I experienced in my life. I know I’ve talked about this in YouTube videos going back to 2019 but since I’m blogging now I may as well write it out as well. This occurred when I was six years old, and a lot of things of this sort are aimed at children, very old people, and animals so I think that kind of shows that the idea that these attacks are some kind of justifiable punishment or behavior modification program is a complete farce. It’s really more about trauma, control, profiteering, and the sick pleasures certain depraved souls get from activities like this.

One of the ways to discern that any given incident is a set up is by matches – linked names, dates, or similar incidents. In this case, the incident occurred at my schoolmate Allison Pettit’s home (apparently she later changed the spelling of her first name to Alyson) – for her 6th birthday. This would have been around April 30, 1974. I had myself just turned six a month earlier.

Alyson was from a family who loved horses and riding, they did trail rides, rode in parades, and when Alyson was older she rode in gymkhanas. According to her obituary, the first horse she rode was named “Hot Lightening.” When we were young children, my memory is that Alyson had two white ponies, which I often saw outside her home on Indianola Cutoff, driving by.

Two months earlier, in February, my mom had been riding her horse on the trails around Redmond Road when her horse fell into – the story was “a sinkhole” caused by “an underground stream.” My mom broke her back in the incident and her horse survived but had to be pulled out of the hole with a winch. Fortunately my mother recovered, though it took some time. It was only in 2018 when I started to think about all of this that I realized that the ground all around us was clay, and I’d never heard about any “sinkholes” anywhere else in the region. It had to have been a booby trap. And furthermore, it seems like my parents would have had to have known that.

My mom was probably still recovering at home when I went to Alyson’s birthday party. As part of the party, the children were permitted to take turns riding Alyson’s white pony. We lined up, were put on the pony, and permitted to ride the pony several times around a corral. I went after several other children who didn’t just walk the pony around, they kicked the pony to a trot, maybe even a gallop (at this time, it’s really hard for me to believe they let kindergarteners do this, but they did). I had ridden a pony on a lead before, but I don’t think I’d ever ridden by myself. When it was my turn, I did what the other children had done, kicked the pony to a trot, maybe a canter. I have a memory of how the gallop felt so much smoother than a trot. Everything was going great until saddle went sideways and I found myself hanging from a stirrup as the horse continued along. My life – a highlight reel of all six years – flashed before my eyes like a slideshow. Then my foot released from the stirrup and I landed on the ground unharmed.

I don’t remember who picked me up after the party, probably it was my dad. I do remember someone explaining, casually, that the pony must have held its breath, as horses, they say, sometimes do, so the saddle cinch wouldn’t be so tight, and they’d neglected to re-check the cinch, and that I just got unlucky as the saddle happened to slip while I was riding. I accepted this as reality until I realized that these incidents happen in matched sets, and in this context, it’s unlikely that I just happened to experience a life threatening incident with a horse only two months after my mother’s horse had fallen into a hole on a trail.

I have a lot of memories from this period of time. I even remember the first time I met Alyson on the first day of kindergarten, and how she was crying so hard she blew a snot bubble out of her nose, which made her start laughing. I remember that we were placed on the pony by a young man. In 2018 I had a dream that seemed to reveal the name of the man as Floyd Greenleaf. I recognized the name Greenleaf as being linked to a family who sold marijuana. I looked up the name Floyd Greenleaf saw that it belongs to a man who have been around 23 years old at that time.

Alyson’s last name, Pettit, is the same last name as Chris’ first live-in girlfriend, Kim Pettit, though they pronounced their names differently. I don’t know exactly when Chris and Kim got together but I suspect it was sometime between 1974 and 1976. Alyson seems to have died in 2010. Her obituary is published online. She would have only been 42 years old.