My editor asked me to stop writing about corgi racing. I have instead written about corgi racing again, and I want to explain why, and to do that I have to tell you about my Uncle Denny.
Uncle Denny was not a smart man. I say that with love. He was a man of enormous confidence and no discernible plan, which is a combination that produces either a senator or a person missing part of a hand, and in Denny's case the situation resolved in July of 1994 in my grandmother's side yard.
He had gathered twelve bottle rockets. He had gathered them into a bouquet. He had twisted all twelve fuses together into one central braid, the way you'd braid a horse's tail if you hated the horse, and he was holding this arrangement in his bare fist, and he was smiling at us — at me, at my cousins, at my mother who was screaming — with the serene expression of a man who believes he has thought of something no one else has ever thought of.
And here is the thing I have never been able to shake. Here is the thing that put me on the rail at the Talladega Fairgrounds fall meet thirty-one years later.
In the half-second after the lighter touched that braid, nobody in that yard knew what was going to happen. Not Denny. Not my mother. Not physics, I don't think, which had frankly been given very little to work with. Twelve independent propulsion systems, one shared ignition, zero governing authority. They could go up. They could go out. They could go in. Every possible future was live at the same time and they were all going to resolve in under two seconds and there was nothing left to do but stand in the grass and receive whatever came.
That is the corgi start. That is exactly the corgi start.
I have watched eleven cards now, and I am telling you that the moment before the gate lifts is the single most electric interval available to a person in the state of Alabama. Because a horse race has a shape. A horse race is fourteen animals who have all agreed, broadly, on the direction of the thing. There is a consensus. There is a professional understanding.
There is no consensus in a corgi box.
There are fourteen small, low, aggressively confident animals who have each independently arrived at a completely different theory of what is about to occur. Dog four believes this is a race. Dog nine believes this is a rescue. Dog eleven has locked eyes with a toddler in the third row and has begun a private negotiation. And in the two hole is Ambassador Peanut, 60-to-1, a two-year-old sable with one ear that has never once stood up, who appears to believe he has been brought here to be honored.
I bet the Ambassador. I will always bet the Ambassador. We'll get to that.
Twelve fuses. One braid. One lighter.
The gate goes up at 4:15 and the yard explodes.
Nine go straight, which is more than usual and got a genuine cheer. Tugboat and Sir Lumpy go sideways into each other at twenty feet and become, briefly, a single wider dog, a four-second entity that the stewards later ruled was two dogs, which I think was a coward's call. Custard reverses entirely and runs the course backward with tremendous commitment, ears flat, absolutely flying, finishing dead last in a race he was winning by his own accounting. Duchess of Waffle House stops at forty feet to address a smell and never resumes.
And Brisket — the five-year-old red female out of Sylacauga, seven straight now, a dog with the affect of a woman who has already read your obituary — goes down the middle in 6.74 and never acknowledges that anything else is happening around her. Her handler is a woman named Deb who owns a tanning salon and refuses the word owner. "You don't own her," Deb told me. "You get assigned to her." Deb did not blink during this exchange. Deb has a laminated card.
Ambassador Peanut finished tenth. The ear did not go up. It has never gone up. I lost sixty dollars and I would like to be extremely clear that I have no notes.
Denny survived, by the way. Eleven of the twelve went more or less upward. The twelfth went into the carport and my grandmother did not speak to him until Thanksgiving. He kept the hand. He did not keep the eyebrows, and he never got them back, which gave him for the remaining nineteen years of his life a permanent expression of mild astonishment that I only understood the meaning of when I first stood at that rail.
He looked like a man who had seen something take off in twelve directions at once.
I know the feeling now, Denny. I go every Saturday.
Mabel Barkley covers whatever she wants, apparently. Her editor has requested a meeting. She has requested a press credential for the winter card.