Kathy's recent post on horse art has opened up an old wound—

I used to get into some terrible trouble with my third-grade teacher Miss Kelly, because I literally filled the margins of my notebooks with drawings of horses.

And ladies. Sporting elaborate hairdos. Wearing beautiful gowns. Bedecked in flowers and ribbons and jewelery.

And so were the horses I scrawled across the navy blue lines next to the addition and subtraction and the verb conjugation. They galloped in and out of the three binder rings in their tutus and tiaras. Their long braided manes were tied up in bows. Some reared to stand up on their hind legs, holding a cup of tea in a dainty, silver-plated hoof. Their dresses were special made to allow their lustrous, combed-out tails to tumble in waves down the satin and the lace.

You should have seen Miss Kelly's fire-engine-red lips squish together in a thin line of disapproval each time she stalked by my desk, raising an artfully plucked and penciled-in eyebrow above her cat-eyed glasses.

I drew on, undaunted.

At the parent/teacher conference, she told my parents that I was "Obsessed With Horses". (An affliction otherwise known as OWH and about which public school educators apparently could speak only in guarded whispers.) I don't recall much mention of the fact that I was an A and B+ student.

I quit doodling in the margins.

May I submit for the record—