Wild, unbroken horses galloped across the pages of the books I loved as a kid. I buried my face in the Black Stallion’s mane and raced wild ponies from Assateague Island on Pony Penning Day. I imagined the corner of the garage where I stored my bike was a stall. When I pedaled on the circle driveways I passed on my way to school, I pretended they were racetracks.
In books, the love and devotion of the child characters eventually tames the horses and heals some problem within their families. The parents may be absent—dead, missing, or emotionally distant. They may try to stamp out their children’s wild exuberance.
This is the case in My Friend Flicka. Ken, the main character, wants a colt so badly he spends his final exam period daydreaming about it and flunks fifth grade. His father Rob, a former remount officer, refuses to give him a colt. Rob’s specialty is competence. He’s the kind of father who expects his sons to salute him and shout, “Yes, sir.” Why reward Ken when he has done so poorly?
I identified with Ken completely when I read My Friend Flicka as a kid. The thought that daydreams can be too seductive was lost on me. I felt Ken’s longing. What did deserve have to do with it? Only as an adult did I see Ken’s spaciness as a problem. He needs to snap out of it. He flunked fifth grade. Far from being a villain, his father is right to be worried.
My daughter is a big reader like I was, sometimes gobbling up a book a day. She’s so articulate I sometimes forget she’s just a kid until she mispronounces some word like feral. She doesn’t have my plodding, color-inside-the-lines personality, though: she’s not as anxious to please as I was. She couldn’t care less about things she doesn’t care about, which is pretty much everything outside her fantasy books. This is a kid who picked dandelions on the soccer field—during games. She wants to wear a blue velvet cape with a hood to the pool. Currently she’s doing remote school, sitting slack-faced at the dining room table staring at a laptop screen, sometimes for ten hours at a stretch. What is she really doing? Her body is present; her mind is not. Her father and I are concerned. Sometimes she forgets to check in to her online class and gets counted absent. Last week she had eleven missing assignments.
Instead of doing schoolwork, I suspect she’s flying on the backs of dragons.
In My Friend Flicka, Ken’s parents disagree about how best to help him. Rob wants to lock Ken up and force him to study. His mother believes that having a colt of his own will teach Ken responsibility and reassure him that his dreams are worthwhile, and capable of coming true. When Rob relents, of course Ken chooses the absolute worst colt in the herd. Flicka’s dam is Gypsy, a wild, untrainable mustang—loco, Rob calls her, and he’s right. Witnessing Gypsy’s grisly death impresses Ken that problems are real and consequences can be serious, but he doesn’t worry for himself. He worries for Flicka. Will she be loco too?
In children’s books, kids just get horses somehow. They don’t buy them. They win them in raffles or end up shipwrecked with them on desert islands. Horses come into children’s lives through magic. The stories give kids power, control over another creature, but even in stories parents have the ultimate power. The children must persuade their parents to let them do something, or let them be someone other than who their parents want them to be: themselves.
In My Friend Flicka, Ken shows his strength when he climbs into a freezing stream with Flicka, holding her head up out of the water during a long night. The water heals the injured horse, but Ken catches pneumonia. His sacrifice is so big, his devotion so total, even his dad can see it. Ken’s actions heal the hole in his family’s heart. He endangers his health, but Rob must surrender his conviction that he always knows best.
By standing back Rob lets Ken grow into the responsibility he chooses.
It’s easy to forget that my daughter’s real problem is the pandemic. This would have been her first semester of high school. I don’t know if she understands what she’s missing, but I do. I suggest ways she might solve her problems with school. Why not set an alarm, a reminder that class is about to start?
“I’m trying,” she says, and I believe she is, but what she does doesn’t look like trying to me.
In books, the horses are wild and unbroken. In real life kids are the wild ones, and we parents are trying to break them, to mold them into some semblance of ourselves.
I don’t think my daughter ever read My Friend Flicka—her taste is different. She may dream of dragonriding, but today, this future khaleesi is a prisoner. I look over her shoulder as she doodles. A woman floats in the air, wearing a plague mask with a beak, surrounded by fiery hair. “She’s Gypsy,” my daughter says, “goddess of those born in the wrong world.”
The candy wrappers littering the floor beneath her chair are testament of the hours she spends sitting in it, and remind me of tally marks on a jail cell wall. I can’t compare my experience to hers because I never had her experience. No one has. That calls for empathy and imagination, not fury.
My understanding of the books I loved as a child hasn’t changed. I just see myself differently now. Then I felt Ken’s longing; now I share his father’s hopes and worries. Today is warm and sunny, and my daughter just raced off on her bike with some friends, gliding down the street on her dragon, her blue cloak flapping behind her as she flies.
