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6. A Girl and Her Horse
There are those who shine very brightly in their high school years. They are the football heroes, the guys who are blessed with incredible good looks and a physique to match. They are at the top of the game. Everyone knows them. Everyone looks up to them or envies them, or hates them, depending on where the observer is in the order of things.
If these stars are girls they become cheerleaders and homecoming queens and every boy who is not a star himself stammers a bit when in their presence and longs for the moment the girl star drops one crumb of attention his way. These are the winners in high school, the people at the top of their game, the people whom even the teachers admire and expect great things to come from in the future.
But there are also the people who do not stand out. They are not blessed with football or cheerleading prowess. They do not possess incredible good looks. They have flaws. They have imperfections that keep them from rising to the top of the high school heap. They stand on the outside looking in. They are not great achievers. Even their teachers wonder how they are going to make it in life. The winners refer to them as losers.
But life is not always predictable — in fact it is never predictable. Sometimes those who shine in high school do not shine again for the rest of their lives. It is as if they had their moment in the sun early, and then must spend the rest of their lives in the shadows. I do not mean that they are failures in life. They are not failures. They usually get good jobs, marry and raise families just like most people do. But they do not shine at these things. They do not stand out the way they did in high school. What made them football heroes in high school sometimes fails to make them any other kind of hero in life. Sometimes what made them homecoming queen fails them in the real life that follows high school.
And the losers? Sometimes they shine later in life. Overlooked in high school, confined to the shadows in high school, they sometimes come into their own later. Not always, of course. But sometimes the roles get reversed in the reality of life.
I was not a winner in high school. I was not a BMOC. I was shy. I was awkward. It was only in my senior year that I began to grow out of these hangups. And I believe that was mainly because of having Christ in my life. Christ takes every loser and makes a winner out of him or her. And, of course, every winner must become a loser in order to come to Christ.
When I graduated from high school in June of 1959, the elder daughter of John and Nellie Hubble was just eleven years old and had recently received a special gift from her parents, a gift she had wanted for some time. The gift was a horse. A gray mare named Becky joined the Hubble family. Becki had a secret she did not reveal until after Linda's dad purchased her.
Linda Rhea Hubble was born on January 25, 1948 at St. Francis Hospital in Beech Grove, Indiana, the first of two girls born to John and Nellie Hubble. Her father, fully recovered now from the injury that had saved his life during World War II, was preparing for his career as a teacher. He probably would have preferred to be a veterinarian, but teaching is what he would do for all his working years.
When my family moved from Windsor, Ontario to Lincoln Park, Michigan in 1951, Linda was just three and a half years old. Her family lived in a small house in Beech Grove, across the street from the elementary school at which she became a student in 1953, when I was helping to write the newspaper in Mr. Hill’s classroom at Keppen School.
Linda’s dad liked to build. In fact, in the summer, when he was out of school, he sometimes did construction work. So it is no surprise that he built a house for his family, a small, white house on Churchman in Beech Grove. Linda lived there with her parents and her younger sister, Teri.
John Hubble, educator, builder, husband and father had another side to his personality. He loved the outdoors. The house he built in Beech Grove was too close to his neighbors. What he really wanted was to be able to look out his window and see trees, not his neighbor’s house. An old farm house on Southport Road came on the market. It came with approximately three acres of land in a rural area that was, at the time, outside the city limits and free from development, yet close enough to Beech Grove schools for his two daughters. John wanted to buy the property.
The photo shows Linda riding Becky, c. 1960.
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There were some problems, however. There are always some problems, aren’t there? The house needed a little work.
For example, standing in the living room and looking down gave a person a good view of the ground underneath the house. The floor boards were warped and blistered, those that were still in place, at least. Plumbing was non-operational. Walls, ceilings, light fixtures, virtually everything in the house needed repair or replacement. But to John these things were not problems. They were things he could fix.
The Hubbles purchased the property and John went to work. Week nights after school, weekends and especially during the summer, John put his blood, sweat, tears — and a good amount of money — into the broken-down farm house. When he finished, he had a house in the country for himself and his family. It is a tribute to John’s skills that over a half-century later, he and Nellie still lived in that same house.Shortly before moving to Southport Road, Linda received a special gift from her parents. It was a horse she named Becky, a horse that brought with her a secret.
Linda loved Becky. She groomed her, trained her, rode her, and cared for her. But soon it became obvious to Linda and to her dad that Becky’s secret was soon to be publicly revealed.
On a Sunday, Becky gave birth to a dark-colored foal whom Linda and Teri named Sundi. Sundi became Teri’s horse, and, along with other girls in the area who also had horses, the sisters were common riders along the then quiet country roads and surrounding areas.
That is what Linda, a fifth-grader, was involved in as an eleven-year-old girl in Beech Grove, Indiana, while I was graduating from high school in Lincoln Park, Michigan in 1959. Of course, I knew nothing of Linda, or Teri, or Becky or Sundi. I knew nothing of the former farm house now refurbished that provided a country home for four people I now know very well. It would be another seven years before I would even be aware of the existence of this girl who loved horses. I had many miles to go before that wonderful day in the library when I first noticed her.
Of course, if I had known her then, I would not and could not have been interested in her. In my senior year I was seventeen; she was just eleven. It is quite natural that I would be attracted to girls my own age, not to a girl six and a half years my junior. I would have been in serious trouble if I had been attracted to the little girl who rode her beloved Becky.
The time for that attraction to shine was yet to come. Perhaps every thing and every one has a moment in the sun, a time to shine and be seen. For me, that time did not come in high school. And for the romance that has lasted for more than fourty years, that moment in the sun had to wait until long after other girls had come into my life and gone.
The idea of a moment in the sun comes from Scripture, after all. Solomon, to whom God gave great wisdom, said, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”
So, at the mid-point of 1959, my high school career now closed, and the future before me, my sun had not yet peaked out from behind the clouds. And for a little girl that summer, who loved grooming and riding a horse named Becky, the sun shone most brightly on days she could mount that horse and ride across the country roads to visit a girlfriend, or to a secluded area where she could sit and dream little girl dreams that might, just might, have included the faceless form of a young man who would one day be sitting in a library when she entered and the sun would begin to shine more brightly for both of them than it had in a long time.
