Joe Fahey

Terri and I hadn’t been living on Strathmore Drive in the city, when she proposed that we get a dog.

“What kind?” I asked. “How about a German-Shepherd” she responded.

When she was single and living in Portland, Maine, she had a shepherd named “Caleb,” who was, by all accounts, the model dog.

I’d had dogs growing up but never a pure breed and never a shepherd.

Our dogs were mutts that came from somewhere which now escapes me.

My sister, Jane, brought home what appeared to be an escaped junk yard dog, that she named “Lucky.”

He didn’t like anybody but her.

When my brother Jim came home from his tour with the poverty program, VISTA, it was a few weeks before the dog would let him in the house without one of us having to meet him at the door.

Lucky stayed with us for a number of years during which we had to pick the mail up at the post office because he would take the seat off the mail carrier’s pants.

His encounters with the mail carrier weren’t by chance.

He dug a pretty good sized hole under a bush next to our house and would lie in it up to his neck and charge out when the mail carrier least expected it.

On some nights he would refuse to come in the house and would lie outside chasing traffic-particularly motorcycles.

My father would stay up all night with the screen door propped open and try to entice him into the house, when suddenly a motorcycle would go by.

The next day I heard him yelling, “You’re no Goddamn good. You stay out all night. You don’t come home. You keep everyone up!”

It took a while for it to register that he was yelling at the dog and not one of my brothers.

Lucky disappeared as mysteriously as he came.

One of the neighbors told us that they thought they saw him go by in the back of a pick-up truck but he neglected to get the license number.

Terri came across an ad in one of the weeklies that said a German-shepherd was up for adoption to a good home.

We made arrangements to visit.

My first impression of Buster was that he was the largest German-Shepherd I had ever seen.

He came into the house and proceeded to go from table to table picking up any toy the children had left behind.

The owners told us that he was only a year old but they decided that since they had a number of small children that they just didn’t have the time to spend with him.

They assured us that he was very good with children and I was reassured by seeing that he seemed quite gentle around them.

Terri and I told them we would talk and let them know what our decision about taking him would be.

I have to say that he was one of the most beautiful dogs I had ever seen.

We both came away with the impression that he seemed quite gentle and, since Terri had experience with shepherds, we decided to adopt him.

We brought him home and our adventures started.

Probably the first thing we learned was that if he was outside off the leash, he went completely deaf.

You could call his name until you were blue in the face and he wouldn’t come until he felt like it.

That never changed.

We both had some real safety concerns about this.

He had moved from the country to the city and the traffic was much denser so the possibility of his getting injured or killed by a car was very real.

Our second concern was that he could get dognapped and wind up in one of those dog fighting rings that seemed to be proliferating at that time.

Since we were both working it wasn’t fair to leave him in the house all day and we learned that there were down sides to that.

Shepherds, in particular, suffer from separation anxiety and during the short period we struggled to come up with a solution, he destroyed a couch in our television room.

The solution would have to come fast.

I got estimates from a number of fence companies but they were not only expensive but there was no guarantee he couldn’t jump the fence.

Strathmore was a beautiful neighborhood and the last thing I wanted to do was put up a chain link fence that looked like the second coming of Attica Correctional Facility.

As it turned out, the solution was across the driveway.

We shared a driveway with Kevin and Denny Harrigan who became great neighbors and great friends.

They had a female chocolate lab named Casey and they were wrestling with the same dilemma.

While neither of our yards alone afforded the dogs much room to run, if we fenced both of them they had plenty of room to play.

We hit upon putting an invisible fence that ran around the perimeter of both our houses and the dogs would be able to keep each other company and have room to play.

It would prove to be one of the most entertaining sagas I ever was privileged to witness.

More to come next week.

Once Donovan passed away, Terri was faced with a dilemma.

She had only two mules and taking one out for a ride would throw the remaining one into a panic because of separation anxiety.

The only recourse was to get another equine.

To my surprise, she wasn’t going to restrict her choice to mules.

Horses were in the running so to speak.

She spread the word among her riding group and everyone was on the lookout for a likely candidate.

Throughout most of 2016, Terri checked out a number of likely prospects to no avail.

Finally in October 2016, she learned from a friend about a Tennessee walking horse that she might sell.

Tennessee walkers are prized for their smooth gait.

When I was considering what kind of equine to buy, my friend and horse guru, Gordon Bellair, was very high on my getting a Tennessee walker.

Instead, because I’m a chicken at heart when it comes to heights, I opted for a mule because they were so conscious of their own safety that they won’t do anything dangerous to themselves and, presumably, me.

If I’d chosen another path, I would probably have missed out on my pal, Donovan.

Terri and several of her riding group went to look at the Tennessee walker and, as promised, he provided a very smooth ride.

Cody came home that fall.

Once Cody became part of the herd, there was a change in the pecking order.

Cody is younger and bigger than Franklin and established himself as the barnyard boss.

Where once Franklin was able to bully Donovan out of his grain, he now found himself on the receiving end.

I can’t say my heart broke for him.

Like all of her other equines, Terri spent a lot of time doing ground work with him in the round pen learning commands.

Cody proved to be an apt student picking up the commands quickly.

He was so responsive, that during a gathering of her riding group at our house, she remarked on how pleasant it was to not have to play tug of war with a 1,500 pound mule on the other end of a rope who didn’t want to come.

“Who knew?” she said out loud.

After a pregnant moment of silence, her friend, Laurie Bobbett, said “We all did,” to a roomful of laughter.

While the third equine would appear to have solved the separation anxiety that would have arisen with the mules, Terri wasn’t done acquiring a herd.

I should have recognized that in the way we accumulate animals.

We now have two dogs, two cats and three chickens.

Occasionally someone will ask me if I have considered building an ark.

The truth is that I have.

The problem is that I would be tempted to set sail without them.

Earlier this year, Terri and her girlfriends went to a horse sale and she spotted a paint horse.

She was told that he came from Kentucky but the reality is that he could have come from anywhere.

He’s a nice, quiet, responsive and obedient guy who will be occupying the fourth stall that is being readied for him.

He is presently being boarded at Terri’s riding instructor, Meg Titus’s barn.

His name is Finn and he’ll be arriving home soon.

I don’t know if he is the last of the menagerie or whether there is another set of animals in our future.

The only prediction I am prepared to make is that when I ultimately go on to my great reward, those mules will be fighting over my recliner.

This also brings me to the end of my series on our animals.

I hope you enjoyed it.

I don’t know what I’ll be blogging about next weeks.

If it’s about current events, public officials or politicians at the state or national level, we will have segued from half-asses to complete asses.

When was the last time we got to do that?

Once all of the mules arrived home, they settled into a somewhat mundane existence punctuated by their periodic parties and escapes.

Franklin became the boss of the pasture, a role which Donovan was willing to abdicate and Tulip never expressed any interest in.

Donovan was content to hang out, eat grain and hay and was agreeable to the riders who wanted to saddle him up.

According to the woman I purchased him from, he had been part of a “hack line” at one of the resorts in the Catskills who ferried guests interested in a trail ride through the adjacent mountains.

He gave every indication that this had been his lot in life. Once saddled up, he was perfectly willing to munch grass in the yard while he waited for the other equines to join the trail ride.

In fact, munching grass became his focus in life.

If we went out on a trail ride, there would be an endless repetition to it.

He would walk six feet, stop and eat grass.

Walk another six feet and stop and eat grass.

There was no solution to this pattern.

You could kick his haunches, tap him with a crop, whatever, he would move another six feet and stop for grass.

I came to the conclusion that if Donovan and I had to ride to California, like they did two hundred years ago, we would both be dead from old age by the time we reached Ohio.

At the same time, I came to enjoy the ride, if you could call it that.

He would dutifully follow the other mules or horses and never let them out of his sight even if we stopped for grass.

Despite being the world’s most nervous trail rider, I became confident enough on his back to bring along a camera and take pictures of country and scenery you might never see.

Sometimes, we would be on a trail ride and others wanted to gallop.

Donovan and I didn’t.

“Make him run,” I’d be told. “He doesn’t want to run,” I’d respond, “I don’t want him to run either.”

In time, he became our go-to mule.

Friends would come out with their children and when they saw the mules, the first thing they would do is look at Tulip and ask Terri and I, “Do you think my kid could ride that smaller one ?”

“I wouldn’t ride that smaller one,” I would reply, “but I would put them up on Big D,” I’d say pointing at Donovan.

They would look at me skeptically and say “Are you sure ?”

Once I informed them that my two-year-old granddaughter had been up on him in the round pen, while we walked along with her, for a few turns, they were sold.

I can’t begin to count the number of little ones who had their first mule ride on Big D.

Little ones weren’t the only people who got bit by the trail riding bug because they got up on Donovan.

We had many friends who had not ridden in years or ever before, who took a ride on him and then started to take lessons to learn more about how to continue.

He never gave anyone anything but a memorable and enjoyable experience.

My riding teacher, Nancy Cerio, described him as “push button.”

She was right.

As Donovan began to age more, his balance became unsteady and he would start to stumble more frequently.

I also began to suspect that his eye sight was dimming.

It became increasingly clear that a trail ride would leave him very tired and sore.

It dawned on me that if he were to fall with me on his back that we were both going to get really hurt.

It was time for both of us to retire from trail riding.

He became a pasture companion and stuck close to hid herd. If you took either Franklin or Tulip out for a trail ride he would bray loudly over and over again until they returned.

More than once I wondered if the neighbors and passersby thought that he was being tortured because there was no doubting his anguish from being separated from his fellow barn mates.

Now, the rides for children who were visiting, fell to Franklin and Tulip who performed this task agreeably.

Some adults took Franklin out for a trail ride if Terri went along on Tulip but there was still no telling what Tulip would do with a stranger up on her back.

In August 2016 old age caught up to Donovan and he went on to his great reward.

It was one of the saddest days of my life because he was truly one of the sweetest animals that God ever created.

He’s buried in the pasture and Terri planted wild flowers on his grave.

Now each spring when the flowers bloom we are reminded of how lucky we were to have had him in our lives and we retell the stories about the jailbreaks and his Animal House Party.

He still provides both joy and laughter.

More Next week.

I was sitting in my home office early one morning a few years ago when I heard the clopping of hooves outside.

I was pretty sure it wasn’t Santa’s reindeer in the middle of May.

I jumped up and looked out the window to see the south end of a mule going north on the road outside our house, along with two other mules.

After swearing under my breath, I called the office and told my staff that I would be late and to tell the lawyers who were scheduled to appear, to go on to the other courts they had appearances in that morning.

“What’s wrong?” my court attorney asked.

“There’s been a jail break,” I answered, “”I’ll explain later.”

I went outside where Terri had a bucket of grain and a lead rope.

Since there were horses a few barns north of us, we didn’t have to go far.

The mules were racing around our neighbor’s property and did their best to elude capture.

I knew we had no hope of catching Tulip or Franklin but since Donovan was close to my age, I was confident that he wasn’t going to run forever.

Sure enough, he started to tire and began getting increasingly interested in the bucket of grain.

As he stuck his nose in the grain bucket, Terri threw the lead rope over his head and he decided to go quietly.

With Donovan in custody, we started to walk south to our barn. Mules being such herd animals, it wasn’t long before Franklin and Tulip fell in behind us.

When we got back to the barn, it became apparent that the three of them had gotten out through Donovan’s stall.

That was how we learned that despite his age, Donovan had a talent for opening his stall door if it was left just so slightly ajar.

It wouldn’t be the last time.

Later that year, we decided to have an addition added to the barn and hired our Amish builder for the job.

It was a cold December night that had a mixture of snow and drizzle falling.

I was driving up our road when out of the corner of my eye, I saw three mules standing on a neighbor to the north’s lawn.

I swear that they almost seemed to wave to me as I drove by.

I went home and discovered that one of the workmen who had been building the addition to the barn had left a gate open.

Terri and I drove to the neighbor’s property with a bucket of grain and only Donovan was there.

Franklin and Tulip had decided to explore the woods behind the homes on the road and you could hear them crashing through the brush.

The danger was that it was both dark and rush hour and if they suddenly broke out onto the road, they could get hit by a vehicle.

Terri saddled up Donovan and went into the woods and was able to herd them home.

It was a nerve wracking experience.

The most memorable jail break involved them not even leaving the barn.

Terri and I had been out on a weekend night and arrived home pretty late.

As we were getting ready for bed, she said “I think there is someone in the barn.”

I listened and didn’t hear anything and suggested we get some sleep.

After a few minutes I heard the noise too.

“Maybe we should take a look,” she said.

We went out to the barn, opened the door and Franklin and Tulip were standing in the middle of the barn eating hay.

It was also clear that they had managed to get into the grain room and eat in there, until their hearts and stomachs were content.

The most mysterious part of this was that although Donovan’s stall door was open (he managed to do it again!), he was nowhere to be seen.

Since both barn doors had been closed, I knew that he hadn’t gotten outside.

Needless to say, it isn’t hard to miss a sixteen hand, almost two-thousand pound mule in an enclosed space.

To say the least, I was perplexed.

Suddenly, we both heard a noise in the tack room.

We opened the door to discover that Donovan had managed to get into the room, shut the door on the other two mules so that he could consume all of the horse treats stored in there by himself.

He looked both content and pleased with himself.

We put all of them back into their stalls and surveyed the scene.

I don’t know how long they had been out of their stalls but the place was a complete mess.

It looked like a party scene from the movie, “Animal House” and the phrase “partying like its 1999,” kept going through my head.

We agreed to clean the mess in the morning, since it looked like it would take all night.

The next day, as we were cleaning up, Terri said, “Look at this.”

I walked to where she was standing and saw my riding helmet lying upside down on the floor with a large pile of horse manure inside it.

“It looks like Franklin finally got back at me for all that hissing,” I said.

“No,” she answered, “that was in the tack room, Donovan must have done that.”

“And I thought we were so close,” I told her.

When I’m leaving the barn now, you can hear the loud clanging of the stall doors as I make sure they are all securely locked in.

It sounds like Attica at the end of the day.

More to come.

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. ?

During the past several weeks we’ve watched mushrooming legal disputes involving Trump and a number of women that he either had affairs with or defamed.

You can’t make it up.

First there was the affair with the porn movie actress, Stormy Daniels.

Next came the affair with a Playboy centerfold and model named Karen McDougal.

This week, a New York State court ruled that a defamation action brought by a woman named, Summer Zervos, a former contestant on Trump’s reality television show, The Apprentice.

The facts underlying each of these disputes are fairly straight forward.

It is the legal machinations involving them that make them interesting.

In the Daniels case, she alleges that she had an affair with Trump in 2006.

She contends that Trump wined, dined and promised her an apartment and a place on the Apprentice.

In the Daniels case it appears that within days of the 2016 election, Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, arranged a payoff to Daniels in the amount of $ 130,000 to keep her quiet.

Cohen went to the trouble of forming a Delaware Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) whose sole purpose, it appears, was to serve as a vehicle to launder the payoff money through.

In exchange for the payoff, Daniels had to sign a Non- Disclosure Agreement (NDA) in which she had to refrain from ever discussing her relationship with Trump or providing any details about the affair including photographs and paternity information.

The agreement that was prepared by Cohen had an alias for Trump and an alias for Daniels which each was supposed to sign.

It was apparently signed by Daniels using the alias but not Trump, which has led Daniels to declare that it isn’t valid.

Cohen, moreover, claims that the money used to pay off Daniels came from Cohen’s home equity loan, not from Trump or the Trump Organization and that Trump had no involvement in the negotiations.

If that scenario is true, Cohen could find himself facing disciplinary proceedings in New York for ethical canon violations.

On top of that, the money paid could be viewed as an undisclosed and illegal campaign contribution designed to effect the outcome of the election since it came so close to the 2016 Election Day.

Trump’s attorney, Cohen, has attempted to drag the dispute into arbitration which would get it behind closed doors and out of the public’s view.

In doing so, he removed Daniel’s lawsuit from California State court to the Federal court there.

In order to do so, he had to file an affidavit from Trump revealing that he is the party in the case, which would seem to put an end to trump’s claim that he was not involved with Daniels and not the party to the NDA.

If the point was to shield Trump from this controversy, Cohen hasn’t accomplished much.

What makes the matter screwier is that Daniels gave an interview to a magazine years ago in which she disclosed her affair with Trump in some detail.

Last night, Daniels gave an interview to 60 Minutes in which she disclosed that she had a single sexual encounter with Trump.

Considering Trump’s history it seemed like an underwhelming revelation.

Thus the question becomes what is there currently to hide?

The legal wrangling in the Karen McDougal case is just as strange.

McDougal claims that she had an affair with Trump at about the same time as Daniels and that he made many of the same promises to her that he made to Daniels, an apartment, gifts etc.

In May 2016 during the election campaign, the affair was reported on social media and she decided to sell it to America Media Inc. (AMI) for $ 150,000.

AMI is the publisher of that journalistic gem, the National Enquirer.

Once AMI acquired the exclusive right the story, it promptly buried it, a practice known as “catch and kill.”

Why would AMI and more pointedly the National Enquirer spend $ 150,000 to bury the story?

It turns out that AMI’s chief executive, David J. Pecker, is a friend of Trump’s.

AMI contends it killed the story because it couldn’t verify some of McDougal’s claims after consulting with none other than Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney.

Sumner Zervos, a contestant on Trump’s reality television show The Apprentice, is one of the ten women who came forward during the campaign to report that Trump had sexually harassing her.

Trump, it will be remembered, declared that all of the women were liars and would be sued after the election.

While Trump hasn’t sued any of the women, Zervos has sued Trump for calling her a liar.
Trump’s lawyers lost a round in New York State Supreme Court where they tried to argue that Trump was immune from the lawsuit because he was President of the United States.

Alternatively, they argued that the lawsuit should be postponed until after Trump left office.

Their objections were bizarre since their client had brought none other than Paula Jones to the Clinton-Trump debate in 2016.

Jones was the litigant who successfully brought an action against President Bill Clinton for sexually harassing her while he served as Governor of Arkansas before he was President.

The Supreme Court ruled that Clinton was not immune from being sued for something that occurred before he was President and that defending the lawsuit, while he was President was not unduly burdensome.

While being deposed by Jones’s lawyers, Clinton lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky and, as they say, the rest is history.

This past week a lawyer for the woman accusing failed Alabama Senate candidate of pedophilia came forward to report that two Moore supporters offered him $ 10,000 to drop the woman as a client and declare that he didn’t believe her.

In addition to the money he would be introduced to Steve Bannon.

One circus leaves and another one comes.