Recollections of Old Dan the Horse and The First Day Care Center

Recollections of Old Dan the Horse
And the first Day Care Center

By Poet Laureate, Ed.D. Dennis L. Siluk



Old Dan the Horse((A Minnesota, 1950s Poem) (A Minute Chronicle, in Poetic Prose)Through the fence, I’m feeding Old Dan the Horse, with hay;I can hear him crunching away, ripping it alongside his teeth—A gluttonous sound indeed, as his sides extend in, then out…Our lives—(a horse and a boy) are a farm and a fence;Behind us are weedy pastures, cows and wild flowers.Old Dan, is Old, his life is almost over, mine just beginning.Hard lines run though his body, he is like seven old horses pacing…!(Now, fifty-five years have past, I can now understand Old Dan)No: 2057 (11-18-2007)


Old Dan A Legacy


It really started with Old Dan. But he really wasn't old when I first met him. I was eighteen-months old when I first went to a boarding farm (so I called it back then and still do) called Kiddy Corner, in North St. Paul, Minnesota - back in 1948-49. My brother (Mike) and I would be the first of five-kids to experience this new employment, and form of watching children whom would grow to thirty-children in time - years later the name that would sprout from this new center for children would be called "The Day Care Center [s]"; yes, everything started from this, as we all know, it has to start someplace. But J.R. (Janet Riddler) was really the woman who started all this in the United States; she really was the first. She ended up in court more times than she could count times because of this new and un-regulated care center business; she would tell me years later because of envious County Employees, and neighboring people wanting to shut her down - many things of her struggles to maintain her business (I believe this simply because I had a rental business with 21-families, and most of them, all but one that is, went out of their way to cause trouble, little people like to feel big, and so they use such people in the process, thinking those who made it, killed or stolid or did something rotten to get it, it’s their greedy nature to do so, not all folks are like that, just 90% of us); after her husband had left her, she needed income, and so on her small farm she opened up a day, and overnight center for children, I suppose you could call it: A Day Center, today that would be proper. But she stuck with it - all the way until she got quite ill, that being some twenty –years or so. She paved the way for those who have day care centers today, believe it or not, there just was none. Most folks never heard of her I bet. But it didn’t happen by itself, now did it?
As I lived there off and on for the first five years of my life, for the most part, until I was close to six-years old, during the beginning of the last summer I had started Sunday school, went to kindergarten both near the Kitty Corner Center (living there four to five days out of the week); one the weekends my mother would pick us up, and take us to our grandfather’s home, where she was now living (in an extended family situation) and we'd kind of visit, until Grandpa made some kind of deal with my mother to let us all live with him, as his other children got married and left, one by one, which he had eight children, and my Grandmother had died of double pneumonia, some seventeen-years earlier.
One of my main memories of that time was when my mother came to pick me and my brother up to take us to our new abode for good, I mean for good [that is how I thought of it back then anyhow]. That was one of those great moments in my life, we don't get many of, but the few we get, we never forget. I had to leave a project of some kind at my school to get back to the farm on time so I would not miss my mother, and boy I just stopped everything and I left—I didn’t want to leave my project it was almost finished, and I knew I’d not return the following week to finish it, and take it home, but I just up and left, just like that, after the teacher heard my mother was at the farm waiting, and told me so; thus, I ran, I mean to tell you I really ran, ran and ran some more to get to my destiny; I left it behind and ran, and ran and ran. I always thought about that molding I left behind, but never recreated it.
And when I did go, I mean, actually leave the place, the farm, with cloths in hand, never to return, I had to leave Old Dan behind, a horse I got to love, know, feed, and he even kicked me once. He was ten years old at the time, I suppose in animal years he could have been between 70 and a 100. And yet, I didn't know at the time, but I'd return eight-years later for a visit, stay ten-days [way too long, but it was free, one of them things: for old time sake, Janet gave my brother and I]. But he wasn't old to me then either but of course he was, I just didn’t want to believe it. He was a youthful horse I got to ride as a kid, and somehow always remained that way; funny, even though I know that he was old, very old, he died at about 21-years old I think (that is old in horse years). He was never old to me, he was my first riding horse, and I'd ride much in the following years. I fed him grass many times through the wooden fence. He was very tame, loving.

Certain things, animals, people, like Old Dan stay in a person’s memory the rest of their lives. It tells you something, or should, that all living things get old, and die, it is he way it was meant to be, way God created the universe, us, them… and perhaps it is good, things otherwise get boring.
(Originally written, June 7, 2004, rewritten, shortened and renamed 1-3-2008)