I Named Him Simon

Every December, at the community Christmas party celebrated at the Monhegan Island School, Santa would enter right on cue as the room erupted into a chorus of “Jingle Bells”. He'd take his seat on stage and each year, when my name was called, I would whisper into his synthetic beard, "I want a pony."

And when I was 13, I got one. I named him Simon.

Our time together was numbered. My parents made this clear: when I went away to boarding school in the fall he had to find a new home. But for nearly one glorious, terrifying year, I called him my own. In the winter he lived in a little barn at the Ice Pond, home to another island pony years before. In the summer he would be rowed across the harbor, alongside his mother, aboard a wooden float to Manana Island. This is where he ran free.

As months passed, our respective departure dates loomed closer, and, as the seasons shifted so did his male parts and motivations. It is at this time castration techniques is the highlight conversation in my world. He boards with his mom. There is no vet on Monhegan. Choices have to be made. And soon.

August 2019. I am now 46.

I have just unloaded Tote #2 of 2, filled with my beloved Breyer Model Horses. Due to an attic-clean-out my mother insisted needed to happen NOW, they have finally left their island home/attic after 40+ years. Nostalgically, I reach in and pull out a white, majestic-looking white stallion (or mare? I can't be sure, the molded genitals are vague) and then I see it: precariously stuck to her/his left pastern, barely hanging on, is the cracked, decayed-by-time remains of an official orange castration band used to dock the tails of sheep, and long ago presented to me as an option to dock the manhood off my sweet Simon. I had taken this tiny little rubber (torture) device home and fitted it over the foot of this plastic horse where it has remained, slowly broken down and forgotten over the last 3 decades. A decision was made. There would never be a castration by rubber.

Simon's departure from Monhegan is a quiet memory. I led him, through blurred vision, down the plank, and loaded him onto the deck of the Laura B where I tethered him to the rails and made myself small into the curved gunwales. Together we sailed in silence to Port Clyde where a trailer was waiting for him to take him to his new family. Shortly after, I was led and loaded off to boarding school, both of us now departed to our respective new homes. His would be somewhere upstate and mine would be the White Mountains.

I do not know what became of Simon but this I can be sure: when we parted ways all his parts were still whole but a part of me will always be missing.