A few days after my father died, I dreamt that he phoned me.
“Hi, there,” he said in my dream.

“Where are you?” I asked. “Where have you been?”

“I’m down here.”

“Down where?”

“Florida,” he said. “I’m in Florida.”

“Why didn’t you tell us you were moving?”

To my knowledge, my father had never been to Florida, nor did he care to move there. My father’s given name was Constantine, but people knew him as Gus, and that’s what my sister and I called him, at least when he wasn’t within earshot. He lived in California. He was born there, raised there. He was a Californian to the core. As am I. But I left there for love, following my then-husband around North America in pursuit of his dream. We finally landed in land-locked Atlanta, nineteen hundred miles away from home. That’s where I was living when I learned that my father had died.
More than fifteen years have passed since then, but sometimes I forget my father is gone. Some mornings I wake up and say out loud, “I can’t believe Gus is dead.” Part of me believes that if I say this with enough force, I’ll remember it for good, and that will be that. But sometimes I still itch to pick up the phone on a Sunday evening and exchange the week’s news with him, as we had done for the past twenty years. Talking about life’s flotsam and jetsam was a way for us to get to know each other, to grow closer as time went by, to diminish the miles between us. Now, I see that those conversations were a way of saying I love you without saying I love you. Such words were not spoken in our house.
I wanted to call my father recently after a spring day spent hiking through Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC. A handsome horse cantered my way, muscles flexing, eyes shining, hair glistening. His hooves created a sound that can only be described as clippety-clop, clippety-clop, clippety-clop, as that sound so often is. The narrow dirt path vibrated beneath my feet as we passed one another. After a beat or two, I paused and glanced behind me — the equine’s gluteus maximus filled my sightline. But his hind limbs did not, and neither did his hooves, so absurdly small, seeming afterthoughts to a grand and glorious design. Half a ton of bone, muscle, and sinew should not clippety-clop. That sound, I thought, is better left to a less massive animal, a gazelle perhaps.
I imagined what my father would say about this disparity. “Now, isn’t that interesting,” he would likely say. “I’ve never thought about that.” I wasn’t sure how he would explain it; but I knew he would welcome the idea, turn it over in his mind, and offer up his thoughts on how this could be so. And then we’d laugh about it, or about something else, like the Golden State’s former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, or another oddity.
As I hiked, I thought about my father’s and my history: formerly charged and fragile, but later tranquil and solid, and as many meaningful relationships are, fleeting, at least on the universe’s scale. And I kept thinking about the horse, this one so alive, and his predecessors long gone. I couldn’t help but wonder how horses came to look — and sound — the way they do.

Thirty-five million years ago, horses’ hooves weren’t any larger than they are today. Instead, horses’ bodies were a whole lot smaller. Back then, Mesohippus, a genus wedged somewhere between the primitive and modern horse, happily cruised around the Northern Hemisphere in a horsy, dog-size, body. His slim legs terminated in five toes. Being of independent mind and spirit, he walked only on the middle three, relegating the two outside phalanges to hitchhiker status. Sure Mesohippus’ provincial-minded ancestors walked on all their toes, but they chose to stay within the confines of the primeval forest, a hiding place resplendent with squishy floors, a perfect place for splayed feet, a penta-toe paradise.
Not Mesohippus. As this little maverick worked his way out of the forests and onto the grassy fields, he encountered predators who chased him hither and yon, as predators are wont to do. So, he figured he better get a move on. And what better way to do that than to turn one’s legs into living pogo sticks, lengthening one’s limbs and shedding those freeloading toes. Before long, Mesohippus was springing across fields confounding his enemies.
Now, after millions of years of helter-skelter evolution, mass migrations, and big extinctions, Equus, the modern, domesticated horse, springs across fields, too, but he also sprints around tracks, hauls loads, herds livestock, patrols cities, and serves as a comforting companion to many. His body is more massive than ever; yet, his hooves, still small, reign supreme. They are the heart of the horse.
I wish I could call my father and tell him about little Mesohippus and his pogo-stick legs, his triumph over predators, his independent mind and spirit, a mind and spirit much like my father’s. My father was trained as a physicist and worked as a physicist, but he could speak four languages, enjoyed taking in Padres baseball games even when the home team lost, delighted in his dogs, and appreciated animals of all kinds, from goats to gorillas to giraffes. He wasn’t a big man, in fact, far from it, but he was physically imposing, especially when angry, as he often was following my mother’s premature death, or when I would speak my mind. For most of his life, his hair was black, his eyes obsidian. He stood five-foot-seven. His legs and arms were muscular, his hands large and powerful. His olive skin betrayed his Mediterranean roots and sensibilities. But inside that seemingly formidable body, beat his heart, his Achilles heel, physically flawed and latently tender.

The horse’s hoof is its Achilles heel. Its genesis begins on its twenty-seventh day in utero, an embryonic harbinger to four of its vital parts: the wall, the frog, the digital cushion, and the laminae. The wall is formed from a horn-like material, chiefly keratin. The wall is what onlookers see when a horse stands before them. The wall conceals all, including the third toe, also known as the coffin bone, the toe that Mesohippus favored. The wall may seem static to the uninitiated, but that’s just not so. It grows continuously, relentlessly, roughly three-eighths of an inch per month, but contains no blood vessels or nerves.
Take a peek under the hoof, and you’ll see the sole, nearly planar, except for a spongy, wedge-shaped area, known as the frog. Hidden beneath the sole is the digital cushion, a pillow-shaped structure, and the laminae, delicate, highly vascularized, leaf-like tissue. The frog and the digital cushion work in tandem as a shock absorber, soaking up the concussive force that comes from hoof-to-ground contact. But what’s more, the frog and cushion do something else, something crucial to the horse’s well being.
When a horse places his weight on a hoof, the frog is the first thing to make contact with the ground. When it does, a momentous force is transmitted from the frog, to the toe, and then to the digital cushion, compressing both the cushion and the frog. When the foot is lifted, the frog and cushion revert to their original shapes. This continual compression and decompression bring the horse’s laminae and the rest of its vascular system to life, forcing blood from the foot, to the leg, to the horse’s heart, and back again. In essence, the frog and digital cushion act as a vascular pump.
Should the pump malfunction, blood flow to the hooves is interrupted and hell descends in the form of laminitis, inflammation of the laminae, the tissue that lines the inside of the hoof wall and binds and anchors it to the third toe. Left untreated, the disease ravages the hoof, leading to tissue tears, rotation of the third toe, necrosis, lameness, and all too often the horse’s demise. Laminitis is the second leading cause of death in horses, horses like Barbaro, winner of the 2006 Kentucky Derby.
Just after bursting from the gate during that year’s Preakness, the three-year-old racehorse shattered the bones in his right hind leg. He underwent surgery the following day. My father called me that week and asked if I had heard about Barbaro. I had. I remember well how we talked about a scene from one of James Harriot’s books All Creatures and Small. In it, Herriot, a veterinarian, tends to a horse’s hoof that has become infected. The massive animal leans on Harriot during the exam, not a quick event. But Herriot notes the horse seems to appreciate being able to take his weight off of his inflamed hoof. My father gave me that book while I was in college. “I think you might enjoy this when you get a break,” he said as he handed it to me. And I did. That scene has stuck with me since.
After Barbaro was on the mend, my father and I talked again and laughed about how the horse’s caretakers were allowing him to visit with lady horses. A newspaper photo from the time showed the equines chatting among themselves over a low fence. Girls on one side. Barbaro on the other. Not long after, Barbaro developed laminitis in his two front hooves and had to be euthanized. I called my father. He was heartbroken. “I don’t like to see that happen to animals,” he said.
Six months after Barbaro was lost, so was my marriage. My husband, yes, a physics professor, snuck out in the middle of the night while the dog and I were sleeping. A note on the kitchen counter read, “I’m no longer happy.” He and I had returned the preceding day from a trip to France where he and a female graduate student had spent considerable time together before my arrival. I called my father early the next morning and told him through tears what had happened. “I’ll be damned,” he said. We talked again that night. I can’t remember what we said to one another. My father promised to call again in a day or two. But he didn’t. When I called, there was no answer.
Three days later, he telephoned from the hospital. “I think I’m in trouble,” he said. He had been driving home from an afternoon baseball game when he struck a tree after losing consciousness. He came through the accident with only a few bruises, and no one else was hurt. But he wasn’t the same. His speech was slurred, his train of thought erratic. The doctors suspected he had Alzheimer’s, its roots in heart disease. My father had his first heart attack and bypass at age fifty-two, another bypass ten years later, and a stent installed ten years after that. But in the end, his physical and cognitive decline was swift and unstoppable, a landslide. My sister and I took turns flying out West to visit him during those last months. He could no longer hold a conversation over the phone.
The last time we saw one another, my father was spending time in a rehabilitation facility after a short stint in the hospital. On the last day of my trip, he had fallen down just before my arrival. I found him sitting quietly in a chair beside his bed. A bruise was taking shape on his forehead. A nurse walked in, smiled at me, and then placed a cold compress in my hands. She paused a moment, glanced at my father, and silently slid out of the room.
“Does it hurt?” I asked as I stood beside him and gently pressed the ice pack against his skin. He didn’t answer. Instead, he looked up at me and said, “I love you.”
On some Sunday evenings, I think back to that moment. And I sometimes think about how for thousands of years, horses have given humans their all. The horse has helped farm our farms, wage our wars, run our races, schlep our stuff, mend our minds, and sooth our souls — all on those tiny termini. Some of us, in turn, have tended to their needs and made them part of our lives. But there’s something more to horses and humans than all that, something beyond the practical, something that transcends their strength, beauty, and grandeur, something that resonates deeply between the two. And I can’t help but wonder what Gus would say about that.