Month: April 2018

Once all of the mules were home, we started to learn who would be in charge in the herd.

I hesitate to use the term “pecking order” since Terri acquired five chickens and they were establishing their own hierarchy.

Donovan was the largest of the mules at about seventeen hands but he had no interest in being the boss.

I chalk that up to his being a draft horse cross and they are general considered to be pretty docile.

I also think he was closer to my age, in the mid-sixties, than the fifteen years the vet in Pennsylvania claimed.

I’m only kidding about his being in his sixties. Mules can live up to forty years old and if I had to hazard a guess I would say at least thirty when I brought him home.

Donovan’s only interest was in eating, hanging with his herd and being fed treats, which I was glad to provide him.

Tulip had no interest in being the boss either.

She is kind of stand offish except with Terri, who lavishes all of them with affection as she does all of the animals including the chickens.

Her one real pleasure in life appears to be torturing the boys when she periodically goes into heat.

During the most inclement weather, she prefers to stay outside the barn and, on those occasions when Terri travels and I have barn duty, it can be a challenge to coax her inside for her grain.

The role of being boss didn’t fall to Franklin by default. He stepped right up to the plate and claimed the mantle against all comers.

If there was any doubt about who is the boss, it became clear when it was time for them to get a bucket of grain hung on the inside of their stall doors.

Franklin would quickly down his and then muscle his way into the other stalls to eat Tulip and Donovan’s grain too.

Poor Donovan, who was too old for combat, would wail and try to block him but it didn’t always work.

Nothing would annoy me more than to see him bully this old mule out of his grain.

If I was in the barn when he started it, I would make a loud hissing noise and he would flee Donovan’s stall.

Terri wasn’t happy with my solution and Franklin would be a bit wary around me for a while.

Remembering our vet’s earliest warning, I was always on guard to avoid getting kicked in the head.

Not long after they were all home, I learned that they were not only cautious but very curious too.

The Amish builder had installed latches on the outside door to each stall but they were of little help in keeping the mules in their stalls.

All of them quickly learned that they could pop the latch by simply hitting the door with their chest. It complicated matters if you put them in the stall just before a visit from the vet, the furrier or equine dentist.

Just as that person would arrive one or more of them would pop the latch and you would have to go out and catch them to return them for the visit.

Terri asked me if I could do something about it and I went to Home Depot and bought three large sliding bolt locks. I’m not particularly handy but I figured out that even I could install them on the outside of the stall doors.

I brought out the locks, a drill and a bucket that I kept various tools in and sent them up on a small stool outside of the stall doors.

As I drilled and screwed the locks onto each of the doors, I suddenly had an audience behind me that was paying rapt attention.

Before long I had three huge heads looking over my shoulders keeping track of my progress.

I’m not sure whether it was plain curiosity or a recognition of what I was doing but part way through my security installation, Tulip dumped the stool, the bucket and my tools over into the pasture.

Still, I didn’t let this apparent minor act of rebellion deter me.

As I finished each of the installations, the mules wandered into the stalls and I locked them in.

They each seemed somewhat disappointed as they learned that they couldn’t open the stall door with a push.

I stepped back, looked at them and announced, “Your days of coming and going as you please are over.”

Little did I know that they would prove me wrong over and over again.

To be continued next week.

In July of 2011, Terri’s barn was completed. Watching it being built was a true education in culture and the American work ethic.

Terri had contracted with an Amish builder named Andy Byler who built the barn from start to finish in eleven days.

The crew of builders numbered anywhere from two to six although for much of the time Andy worked alone.

The Amish culture frowns on much of modern technology including motor vehicles. That meant that Andy would pay someone to drive him and his employees from their community in Madison County to our home.

After the project got underway, Andy, his wife Paulie and their infant lived with another couple in an Airstream on our property while they built the barn.

The hammering started at sun-up and ended at sun-down. I had never seen anyone work harder.

While they were forbidden to use electric tools, they cut their lumber with gas-powered chain saws.

Instead of using nail guns, they made do with hammers and they were so expert in their craft that there was almost never a wasted or bent nail.

As the job unfolded Terri and I learned a lot about their world.

We learned that although formal education stopped during teen years, Andy and his crew were some of the brightest and most inquisitive kids I ever got to know.

I refer to them as “kids” because they were in their early twenties and younger than both Kate and Meghan.

Andy could lay out a job with the eye and skills of a trained architect. He could estimate and acquire materials as well as any project manager and, if what we planned didn’t seem right, he could redesign it on the fly.

We also learned that once schooling ended, these young Amish kids were allowed a year to live outside their communities in which they could experience the modern conveniences and freedoms from restrictions before deciding whether they wanted to return and remain part of their Amish communities.

This explained Andy’s encyclopedic knowledge of country music and country and western radio stations which I found on the truck radio while transporting them back to Madison County at the end of some of the work days.

Bruce Springsteen’s music wasn’t lost on them either.

One day I came home early and encountered Andy and his friend and fellow crew member, Owen, waiting for a delivery and reading the morning paper which we still have delivered.

There was a story in the paper about one of my defendants cursing at me during a court proceeding and whom I’d held in contempt.

Andy asked me, “Did that fellow really say those words to you in court ?” “Yes, he did.” I replied. There was a moment of silence and then Owen said in astonishment, “Holy cats!”

I told Owen that if the guy had said that, instead of swearing at me, he wouldn’t be in jail.

One of the features that would be integral to the barn was water.

We were fortunate that our friend and next door neighbor, Kevin Carter, is a superb excavator.

Terri hired him to dig and install the water line running from the house to the barn and he dug a trench that ran well below the frost line.

We learned how accomplished Kevin was, when we had an unusually frigid winter and water lines in many of the other barns on the road froze, requiring the barn owners to hand carry buckets of water from their homes to the barns for their animals several times a day until the spring thaw.

Once the barn was done, it was time for the mules to come home.

Franklin came home first.

Nancy Cerio brought him home in a trailer and we walked him into the barn and put him in a stall that had access to the pasture.

I was about to get my first demonstration of exactly how herd bound mules are.

Franklin walked out into the pasture faced east and began to bray loudly.

He clearly didn’t like being separated from all the horses that he had spent the past several month with.

I was astounded to see that in facing east, he knew exactly in which direction his herd was.

He continued to bray loudly and my neighbor, Kevin Carter, asked me, “He isn’t going to do that all night is he ?”

“No, of course not” I told him although I had no idea whether he was or not.

The braying continued over the next couple of hours but the breaks between the brays became longer until he stopped altogether.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief as I got all of us a beer and we toasted to silence.

Tulip came home next and Franklin was delighted to have a pasture mate especially one who was female.

Mules are sterile but no one has told them.

Donovan remained at Nancy’s for several more weeks gaining weight while I continued to work with him.

I learned the hard way that you should always give an equine a wide berth when walking them. I was walking Donovan from the pasture to the barn and he stepped on my foot.

It didn’t help that it was about half an hour before the start of golf league and I was wearing soft golf shoes.

Once he got his fifteen hundred pound hoof of my foot, I managed to limp to the car and limp through a round of golf.

Since my golf game is so bad normally, the guys in league thought I was making the limp up as an excuse.

The next day I went out and bought a pair of steel toed boots which I wore whenever I was around the mules in the future.

A couple of weeks later Donovan came home and the menagerie was partially complete.

More to come next week.

In 2010, after thirteen marathons, hundreds of road races and countless training miles, I had my right knee replaced.

Due to complications from the anesthesia, I would up spending almost three weeks in the hospital.

It gave me time to think about life and I decided to learn to trail ride.

It was such a big part of Terri’s life that I thought I should share it too.

After being discharged I had months of rehabilitation and exercise ahead of me and I threw myself into it wholeheartedly.

I even missed a whole season of golf although I don’t think the sport suffered from that.

In April 2011, Terri said to me, “I got you a wedding anniversary gift.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a nice little female mule,” she answered, “she’s a cross quarter horse cross and her name is Tulip.”

I was silent for a minute while all of that sunk in.

“Terri,” I said, “Do you know what the guys at the bar in Knoxie’s will be saying about me if I’m riding around on a little female mule named Tulip. I appreciate the thought but I don’t think that is going to work.”

Our summers, since moving to the country, had been spent with her trail-riding with her girlfriends and me trying to improve my golf game.
Terri was enjoying trail-riding but my golf game wasn’t improving.

I had the highest golf handicap at the Pompey Club and still do.

Shortly after our conversation, Tulip arrived at our friend Leona McGinnis’s barn while Terri was building her barn.

Terri had bought her from a family in the southern tier and they had primarily used her for coon hunting at night.

At that point I had never ridden a horse, never mind a mule. It would be an understatement to say that Tulip had no manners. The first time Terri got on her, Tulip took off at a gallop and Terri had to turn her towards a tree to get her to stop.

Needless to say, if that had happened to me, my image at Knoxie’s would have been burnished even more.

“I think I need my own mule,” I told Terri, “one that is a little calmer.”

After searching the internet for a few months, I found one on Craigslist that was located just over the border in Pennsylvania.

Terri and I drove down to look at him with Leona.

We found a mule standing in a stall in about a foot of manure.

He had come from a resort in the Catskills and was the last of the group purchase. His companion had been sold separately and he was the saddest animal I had ever seen.

The owner, who claimed to be a “rescue” person brought him out and had one of her employees ride him.

After a couple turns in the round pen, she returned him to the stall.

“How much do you want for him?” I asked her. “Seven-hundred and fifty dollars,” she replied. I told her I would be back with a trailer and a check for her but I wanted a veterinarian check before the deal was done.

Terri and Leona asked me, “Are you sure he’s the mule for you?”

“I don’t know” I answered “but I couldn’t forgive myself if I left him here.”

The vet check was being done by her vet since we didn’t know any in the area and he reported that the mule, whose name was “Harry” was sound and was approximately fifteen years old.

Leona was kind enough to volunteer to trailer him back to Central New York and we drove down to get him.

The trailer ride back home showed me what kind of shape he was really in. He was having difficulty standing for the whole ride and worked himself up into a real lather.

At the time, I was taking lessons from Nancy Cerio and she agreed to board him while the barn was being built.

Nancy was a very knowledgeable teacher and I overcame my apprehensions about riding.

Her lesson horse was pretty knowledgeable too, especially when it came to me.

If he felt like cooperating, he would. If he felt like playing head games with me, he would do that too. Every lesson was interesting.

While I was taking lessons, I took the time to bond with my new mule.

I visited him every day, took him out on a line and gave him apples and other treats. I also changed his name to “Donovan.”

While we were bonding, Donovan gained over three-hundred pounds which he badly needed.

After a couple of months, Nancy suggested we take him out for a trail ride. We went out for an hour and he couldn’t have been easier to handle.

All those years on a hack line in the Catskills made him push button.

My decision to buy him was one of the best decisions I ever made.

More to come next week.

This past week, I had lunch with a good friend, who asked, “What is Terri up to?” “She bought a new horse,” I replied.

He laughed and said, “How many animals does this make?”

“We have two mules, two horses, two dogs, two barn cats and three chickens,” I told him.

The topic immediately turned to the subject of the mules and the horses as it usually does.

We moved out to Pompey in 2006 and the first mule arrived in 2008
.
I didn’t know anything about mules when Terri bought her first one at an auction.

She asked me to think about a name and, being a lifelong Democrat and remembering that the mule was the symbol of the Democratic Party, I suggested Franklin or Lyndon.

The name Franklin won the day with her.

When our veterinarian, Ben Turner, came to check Franklin out, we learned a lot more.

“I’m going to tell you three things about this mule,” he told Terri. “First, they are ten times smarter than a horse. Second, they are three times stronger than a horse. Third, they have impeccable memories. Don’t ever be mean to it because it will wait six months and when you least expect it, it will kick you right in the head.”

That last point was worth remembering, I thought.

Terri, of course, would never be mean to any animal as she loves all of them.

I would never be mean to one either but gave some serious thought to buying Franklin flowers once a week, just to make sure he knew I liked him.

Doctor Ben also advised her, “If you don’t bond with this mule in six months, sell him, because you never will.”

Franklin has proven to be Terri’s go to mule.

In the nine years they have been together, they have gone on hundreds of rides locally and around the state.

It’s important to know, that when you buy a mule or any equine, a lot more comes with it.

Terri designed, oversaw and paid for the construction of a three stall barn.

Next came a Ford F-250 pickup truck and a two horse trailer.

You can’t have a barn without tack, feed and hay.

I’m impressed every day with how she manages it and the care she takes in the feeding of the equines and the cleaning of them and their stalls that she puts so much time into summer and winter
.

One of the things that I was glad to learn about Franklin was that the reputation they have for being stubborn, while well earned, is an asset.

Unlike a horse, you cannot get a mule to do anything that it perceives is dangerous to itself.

If you’re on a trail ride and you come to a clearing or a bridge and the mule stops and refuses to move forward, it is because it senses that there is something amiss.

Several times I’ve been on a ride and the mules will stop at a clearing and stand stock still. You sit there and wait, watching their ears point in all directions and, inevitably, a bird or other creature will flush from the foliage and the mule will, only then, resume the ride.

Our friend, the late Judge Jeff Merrill, who famously kept reptiles and rodents in his chambers, was fascinated by the mules.

When people would ask why we had mules, Jeff would tell them that we breed them.

Since mules are a cross between a donkey and a horse, two different species whose chromosomes don’t match, they are sterile.

The other interesting feature about mules is the incredible endurance they possess.

One of our friends won a fifty mile endurance race by almost an hour because her mule didn’t need to stop and rest at the same frequency as the horses.

There are number of classification in mules that depend on what type of horse the donkey is bred with.

We have had all three. Franklin is a thoroughbred cross and possesses some of the characteristics of a thoroughbred race horse, hot blooded, high-spirited, agile and fast.

One spring day, we were in the Craftsman Inn when the Kentucky Derby came on. As the winner galloped to the finish line, I remarked, “Franklin could have won that.” A guy at the bar asked, “Who is Franklin?” “My wife’s mule,” I answered. He looked at me like I was out of a psychiatric center on a day pass. If he only knew.

The other characteristic franklin possesses is that he is very dominant. In fact, it would be fair to say that he is the king of the barn, something he lords over the other mules.

I’ll get to them next week.

v

This morning the Syracuse Post-Standard published a story about a couple whose possible deportation to Guatemala became the ongoing nightmare in their lives.

According to the news account, the couple fled violence in that country and entered the United States illegally.

They have been living here with the knowledge of Immigration Control Enforcement (ICE) authorities and have been allowed to stay as long as they checked in with that agency and stayed out of trouble.

They have three children, age’s elven, nine and seven, who, because they were born here, are United States citizens.

The father is a painter, the mother cleans houses and they pay taxes and have stayed out of trouble.

Their lives changed dramatically after Trump was inaugurated.

The husband was taken into custody by ICE a few days before Christmas in 2017 outside their home in Syracuse.

He spent two months in detention and is now free on $5,000 bond.

His wife, who has been reporting to ICE in Syracuse faithfully since 2013, has now been ordered to report to the ICE facility in Batavia, New York which has a detention facility and court to process deportation cases.

Neither parent knows when they might be taken into custody there, be separated from their children and removed from the country.

Also this week, we witnessed the deportation of Miguel Perez, a United States Army veteran, who served two tours in Afghanistan to Mexico.

Perez’s case involves a denial of an application for citizenship due to a felony drug conviction following his military service.

He attributes his conviction to drug and alcohol addictions that were a product of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that he suffered resulting from his combat experiences.

Now, age thirty-nine, he entered the United States at the age of eight and has lived here continuously.

His parents, sibling and two children are all American citizens.

There are several facts that are undeniable in both these cases.

In the first case, Guatemala is and was a violence wracked country and the home to some of the deadliest gangs and cartels in the world.

It is little wonder that people fled without waiting to go through all of the bureaucratic channels necessary to enter this country.

In the second case, it is undeniable that thousands of veterans who served not just one tour but repeated tours of combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere are suffering from PTSD and its attendant consequences of drug and alcohol addiction.

It is equally undeniable that the Veterans Administration has been woefully inadequate providing treatment for these condition as far back as the Vietnam War.

According to the Post-Standard article, in 2016 there were 1,103 arrests by ICE in the Buffalo region which serves Syracuse. 160 involved non-criminals.

In 2017 there were 1494 arrests and 396 were non-criminal.

There is one fact that seems to cloud the debate over how these cases should be treated.
It is that entering the United States illegally or overstaying a visa is not a crime but rather a civil violation of the immigration Law.

Re-entering the country after having been deported is a crime.

According to the2019 Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Control Enforcement Budget Overview, more convicted criminal illegal immigrants were removed each of the last three years of the Obama Administration than during the first year of the trump Administration.

During the first three months of this year, ICE deported 56,710 people.

Forty-six percent of them had not been convicted of a crime.

Like many of his claims, Trump’s claim that they are targeting and removing illegal criminals from this country that the prior administration didn’t, rings hollow.

This morning, Trump while entering Easter worship services, pronounced that DACA is dead.

There is one class of criminal illegal immigrants that hasn’t had to worry.

Nazis who entered the United States and who lied on their immigration applications are living and dying in the comfort of their homes in this country.

Jakiw Palij, who confessed to being a guard at the Trawniki labor camp where 6,000 people were exterminated in one day and participated in the Warsaw Ghetto liquidation was stripped of his American citizenship in 2004 by a U.S. District Court.

Yet, he remains living in his house in a Queens’s neighborhood in New York City.

His is not an isolated case.

John Klaymon, who served in a Nazi allied SS Ukrainian auxiliary police unit, was stripped of his American citizenship in 2007 and died at his home in Troy, Michigan seven years later.

ICE and the Justice department offer the excuse that Germany, Ukraine and Poland will not accept these criminals back although none of these countries are on a list of countries classified as “uncooperative” in these matters maintained by ICE.

One would think, that at a minimum, these war criminals would be in detention rather than living and dying in the comfort of their homes with their families.

We should ask ourselves what it says about us, that we have become a country that will break up families and remove people who have committed no crime other that fleeing the violence of gangs and cartels while tolerating the monsters living comfortably in our midst after exterminating millions of innocent people in the Holocaust. ?