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| Photo courtesy of www2.dupont.com |
A Story From the Life of Julie D.
Ghostwritten by Nick D.
First Memories
Venturing over five hours in the car, I had become irritated.
“Are we there yet?”, I said for probably the 20th time.
“Almost”, my mother replied, perhaps a little impatient with me. I was a five year old, and my patience was lacking. We were on our way to a national calf sale in Wilmington, Delaware, called the National Ayrshire Breeders Convention. As a five year old, I was in a state of awe; this was the first time I would see the great innovations such as the elevator and the even greater invention of room service. How my family was invited to participate, I have no idea, but it was a big deal to the family, we were a small dairy farm in the even smaller town of Dansville, New York.
As we rode into the city, seeing the lights and the hustle and bustle I had never been around, I did my best to take it all in.
“Wow!”, I exclaimed as we arrived at our hotel.
I walked in a state of awe, for this was the single most elaborate sight I had ever seen. My mother even complimented the ladies dressed in their lovely gowns. It was evening, and as we walked to the elevator, I mistakedly said to my mother,
“Why are all these ladies in the hallway? They should be going to bed if they are wearing gowns”, thinking that when my mother had been speaking of formal gowns, I thought she meant nightgowns.
“Those ladies are in their formal gowns to attend a dinner, not their nightgowns”, she corrected me with a way for never hurting my feelings.
“Oh”, I said, a little embarrassed.
“I don’t think we will be going out to any dinners tonight, though”, she said, for it was dinnertime. Instead of going out to dinner, she said, we would order room service.
Conceptually, room service nearly blew my mind, for I had never in my life had food brought to me, much less in a hotel room. I enjoyed myself, and went to bed for the big day tomorrow.
Finally, the calf sale came about, the very reason we were there. Mom took the time to explain to me that this was a very big deal to the family, and that I needed to behave as to not interfere with our calf selling at its highest potential price.
“Stand still, dear, I need to fix your hair”, she said to me, fiddling with everything that I was wearing, from my shoes, to my dress, to my hair in the small hotel bathroom. After what seemed like hours of preparation, we finally made our way to the large convention.
Arriving at the sale, the enormity and formality of the place overwhelmed me. Why someone would dress up to buy a calf I have no idea, but I then clearly realized that my mother had seemingly overdressed me to go along with everyone else. Furthermore, I pleasantly discovered that a newspaper story was being done at the sale, and I was going to be featured in a picture. The sale then began, and the stress was relieved, with our calf selling at an unbelieveable third place in the entire event. This made the car ride home jovial, and put the whole family in good spirits for quite a long time.
However, while the newspaper cameraman was taking a picture with me and our calf at the sale, a tragic event took place that has burned its ugly, nasty mark into my memory.Standing with my back to one of the calves up for sale, I turned around to look in horror at the calf. It was too late.
The calf licked me.
Dressed in my uncomfortable formal clothing, at the biggest event I had ever been to, while I had numerous people looking at me from the newspaper, I could not think of anything more embarrassing or uncomfortable. If you have ever been licked by a calf, you know that a calf’s tongue is not the soft, moist tongue of a dog. It is dry, scratchy, stinky, big, and overall NOT something you want touching you at any point in time. What made it worse was that for the picture, I was encouraged to put my arm around the calf, and I could not move when it started licking me.
After the newspaper finished up, I cleaned up, and we resumed our stay for the next few days, thankfully less chaotically. We then ended our visit, returning back to Dansville with fewer calves than we came with and a story worth telling.
In my whole life, out of all the memories that could be my first, this is the one. I don’t remember my first steps, or even my first day of school. Instead, I remembered the moment when I was the most excited and most stressed, not my moments of achievement. Maybe this is a gateway to what’s most important in my life. When you ask most people what the most important event in their life is, they will most likely say their wedding. However, it takes a whole lot more work to do something like graduate college, get your first job, or even retire. Although the world sees this event as a small, perhaps somewhat humorous event of my early childhood, I see this as a defining event of my early life. After this, I would go on and work with cows for the most of my career, as a dairy cow photographer. Maybe instead of focusing on our accomplishments, we need to step back and focus on what’s really important to us, and not what the world thinks is.
