by Annie M Manzi

Created on: September 16, 2008   Last Updated: June 25, 2009

Horses are funny creatures and they have caused endless amounts of joy and laughter in my life. I had a horse named Red, which is not a very unusual or unique name. In my defense she was a bright red sorrel and the name Red suited her. Her registered name was Guided Lightning. She was anything but fast. She liked her pace to be relatively slow. However Red was always getting in scrapes and she liked the boys. When she was a yearling she jumped several fences to get to a stud horse we stabled down the road. She also was curious and had a great personality.

To keep her virtue intact we moved a ways up the road along with a few other horses to the heifer barn. Every night I would drive the half ton farm truck up to the barn, go through the gate and bring feed to the animals. The tailgate would be left down while I unloaded and did my work. One day I heard a truck horn honking incessantly and ran out to see what the urgency was. There was Red with her head in the driver's side window, pressing her nose against the horn on the steering wheel! Any other horse would be scared and jerk their head away possibly getting hurt, but not Red. She seemed to be enjoying herself and kept blissfully honking the horn. When I started laughing she pulled her head out of the window, lifted her head up into the air and curled her upper lip as if she was laughing along with me. She then stuck her head back in and went back to the business of beeping the horn again.

When I told my family, everyone thought I was trying to pull a practical joke on them and no one believed me. I finally conned my father and cousin into going with me to the upper barn the next day to prove my story. Sure enough Red made her way up to the truck, but instead of sticking her head into the truck's window, she stepped up into the truck bed and stood with all four feet in the back of the truck! She was stock still as she surveyed the world from her new height. She looked like a statue with her head raised and wind lifting her mane to flow in the wind. After a few minutes, she carefully backed off the truck. She came up for a petting and then walked back to the open window on the driver's side. No surprise, she started honking the horn. We all stood there laughing so hard our sides hurt.

My credibility was returned and she became a legend around the neighborhood. She was not inclined to exhibit this behavior often and we discouraged it despite how funny it was. We did not want her getting hurt. She did take advantage of our inattentiveness once and a while and climbed back into the back of the truck or beeped the horn if we were not careful. I still get a chuckle years later as visions of her standing in the back of the truck like she was trained, stirs my memory. However, the honking of the horn was priceless and just plain unbelievable, but it was all true.

I had a show horse who would steal hot dogs and hamburgers from people's hands and eat them. And he was jealous of any male person who came near me. He even gave a black eye to a boy who was trying to kiss me once. He bit the hand of a boy who was holding mine. He was always shoving boys away from me with his head. My parents loved him. This horse also knew where the ice cream stand was and always kicked up a ruckus whenever we drove him within a mile of it. He wanted his banana split that we always bought him. But Red's encounter with the truck was the funniest thing I ever saw a horse do. She was a one of a kind horse and I loved her dearly.

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