by Ron Miller
It’s quite fortunate that I don’t have to write a column on a weekly, or a (heaven forbid) daily basis. I’d be unlike your favorite singer, who can get away with singing the same song. How many times could I rerun the same column before you chose to read elsewhere?
I’m betting on your memory being quite adequate in that regard, even given the three months between issues.
Speaking of betting, I’ve got a good story to tell you this time and it features my wife, our friends, and a horse.
Before I tell you the story, let me put the horse back in the barn and create a little background for you.
Donna developed a yen for seeing Savannah, Georgia. Maybe it was to sit on the same bench as Forrest Gump when he ate his chocolates (and she’d definitely want her own box of chocolates.) Or, maybe she wanted to go where the women still wear fancy hats. Or, eat at Paula Deen’s famous restaurant.
At any rate, we booked a week on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, which is near Savannah. We invited friends from Cincinnati to pick us up at the Savannah airport and chauffeur us around for a couple of weeks. I’ll skip the part about missing our connecting flight in Chicago.
We finally made it to the city of Hilton Head Island and got settled in, more or less, just in time for the running of the Kentucky Derby. (These are the same friends who took us to the Derby a few years back.) Our friends are Wilma and Ron (not to be confused with me).
Wilma brought out a cute little sack and told us to pick one of the four slips of paper that were in the sack. You might guess that they were the names of four horses running in the Derby, and Wilma had laid out $2 each for one of those horses to win the Derby.
Donna had a very hard time getting over the name of the horse she had drawn, to say nothing of the fact that it had odds of 50 to 1. She could not imagine how anyone could name a horse “Mine That Bird,” and she fussed about that the entire race, until MTB came from last to first to win the race.
There you have it. Donna got a free ticket, found something to complain about (good naturedly, of course,) and pocketed $104, which came to her on the back of a cute little horse that Wilma discovered in a gift ship.
The rest of us were delighted to tease her about her concern for Mine That Bird’s name, and to enjoy the sumptuous dinner she bought with her winnings.
I guess you could say that there were four happy winners, because the Bananas Foster with which we ended our dinner was terrific.
And so are our friends.
(Note: In case you’re not a racing fan, Mine That Bird also placed second in the Preakness and third in the Belmont Stakes, two of the other big races - not bad for a dark horse from New Mexico.)
