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It's impossible to tell what Sharon's motivation
was. At age ten, she probably wouldn't have known
herself. But the whopper she told had two of her
neighbor girls convinced: Sharon was keeping a pet
horse in her basement.
My wife's memory is a little hazy after fifty years
or so. She does remember that Sharon was a plain,
almost ugly girl, living with an obese single mother
and a morbidly obese aunt. She had few friends.
Did she really believe in her own imagination -
for her, was there a real horse in the basement?
Did she wish so hard that she had a horse that it
had become real? Was she just trying to get attention?
Or was she simply lying, and living the pleasure
in hoodwinking two other little girls?
And hoodwinked they were. They were desperate to
see this horse, perhaps because of a combination
of young girls' fascination with horses and the
thrill of having an actual horse in the neighborhood
- albeit in a highly unorthodox location.
Day after day, Ann and Martha asked if they could
visit the horse, or even just see it from the top
of the basement steps. Day after day, Sharon came
up with plausible reasons why a visit was out of
the question. The horse was resting. The horse was
asleep. She had to go feed the horse, and it was
skittish. There were no doubt other reasons, now
lost to the decades.
An interesting thing about lies or self-delusions:
For the victims of the lies, the horse was real,
almost tangible.
There must have come a point at which the ruse
was exposed, but the mists of time have swirled
over the details. One possibility is that Ann's
mother, initially amused by the girls' antics, became
exasperated and gave the two little victims a piece
of harsh reality. Whatever happened, the fantasy
of the horse, if not the horse itself, died a natural
death.
Why do I find this story so appealing? I think
it's because we are all at times one or another
of the characters. In our desperation to be noticed,
and to connect to other people, we make up our own
horses - big and little lies or self-deceptions
to put excitement in our lives and capture the attention
of other people. In our need for adventure and novelty,
we are flattered by secret information and confidences,
even when they stretch our credulity. And in our
exasperation with other people's silliness (or perhaps
our jealousy over their enthusiasms and adventures),
we go about popping the multicolored bubbles of
their pleasant and harmless fantasies. We may even
be the horse, a wondrous creature hidden away in
the basement of our psyches and fed by our fantasies.
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