I guess that’s the way it is with a lot of folks at holiday time. You are busy and the weather has turned cold. The blood thickens and everything takes longer to do and there’s more than the usual to do. 

Let me jump ahead to the time the paper will be in your hands.  Thanksgiving will be over and the day for most of you will include shopping.  Of course you will not be alone; I believe the statistic remains accurate that the day after is the biggest shopping day of the year.

Gees, doesn’t it make you wish you could be down on Route 17 in Paramus, N.J.?  Here lays a shopping Mecca to die for.  I was there several times during the holidays.  Oh, never for the shopping, but just trying to get back home from the Meadowlands.  That race meet used to run from Labor Day through New Year’s Eve.  Home, for me was in a different town for every meet I spent there.

The first year was ’77 and home was in Summit, N.J. Can you imagine that trek every morning at 5 a.m. and it was not always possible to get home for a break if I had a horse running that night.  You know the ole lasik routine and waiting for the track vet to come by to check the horse for racing soundness.

The races started at 8 p.m. but always it was required for the last race to go off before Midnight.  If you were lucky enough to win or unlucky enough to not win when the odds said you should have, you had to go to the test barn. You had to go there too if you ran second in an exacta race.  My old horse, Domino’s Dewan, had a penchant for drawing into the last race, an exacta race and he ran second on more than one occasion and ended up the favorite on the last night of the meet.  The horses were off before the ball dropped in Times Square, but it was New Years when those ole platters got to the wire. He ran 5th and off I went to the spit-box. (Test Barn, where urine samples are collected and blood samples drawn for drug testing)

This story could go on until there is not a trickle left so I will not bore you with more. I will not go into detail about living in Rutherford and even I, want to forget that awful third floor flat in Lodi. 

Lucky for me, I did not have to stay there much.  I was racing at both The Meadowlands and Belmont, then later at Aqueduct so I also had an apartment in Elmont.  Unlucky for me, I had little time to stay there.  I spent most of my time on the Beltway between two NY tracks or stuck on the George Washington Bridge.

When Domino was piddling or worse yet not piddling in the test barn on New Years I no longer had my apartment in Lodi.  I drove back to Elmont, had a cup of coffee at Dunkin Donuts and headed in the gate at Belmont.  It was time to train.

It makes me laugh when people identify racing people with the country life.  Oh sure, most of us either came from the farm or get to one occasionally to look at stallions or a new crop of foals. 

But once you sign on as an official race-tracker, it’s very much like joining the Navy to see the world. 

I grew up in Wimer, OR and I have raced in most every city with a white fence around an oval. 

I spent three post- racing years in the Big Apple.  I love the country life and I love the City life.  I just do not care for the sprawl that prevents so many areas from being either. 

When you go out to do your holiday shopping, do this little city in the country a favor and support your local merchants.  They preserve the city flavor for us.  And do the country surrounding this city a favor and support the farmers, who grow food locally, they grow food with real flavor.

Stay alert about the franchise for racing. The position Saratogians might find themselves in down the road is no joke.  While the kids are writing to Santa Claus maybe you should sit down and write to our legislators.  Let’s make sure they are not pulling the proverbial wool over our eyes.

The child in me will always want a pony for Christmas.  The adult in me knows just how important ponies are to saving green-space.  Please, no VLT’s under the tree. 

If you do all of your shopping at The Mall and Wal-Mart, it’s okay.  It will save you a trip to Paramus.  There are developers just waiting to get their hands on properties near a thieving town.  Obsolete farm land and closed local businesses are hotly sought after.

Will I see you at the post office?  How about downtown? It’s your town too!!  

Happy Holidays