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Cole

I wason the last page of the paper when Ham pulled up in his truck.

I was sitting on the old rocking chair on my porch when he did, and I lifted a hand to greet him.

“I tell you, coming out of the City to see this is quite the change,” he said.

“I don’t know why you insist on living in New York City when there’s so many more reasons to live out this way,” I told him. I intentionally lived an hour and a half outside of New York City, and I thought it was ridiculous for my best friend to make that commute almost every day.

Yet, he did.

He insisted he was in love with the city life on the weekends, and still wanted to have the quiet paradise that was my life during the week. Or really, any time he chose as long as he was willing to make that drive. While I certainly didn’t understand it myself, I couldn’t talk any sense into him. He was set in his ways, just as I was.

“I don’t know why you insist on reading a printed paper when you could be reading any paper in the entire world. You realize phones give you everything right at your fingertips, right?” he asked.

“I don’t need a phone. They cause way too much drama in life, trust me,” I said.

“I’m the one with a phone here, and I can tell you right now that your life is already way more dramatic than mine,” he said.

“Last time I tried having a cell phone, it was getting blown up all day long with people and their problems. I can’t tell you enough how annoying that is, and how little I care to have something on me at all times that gives people the ability to do that,” I said.

“What about social media? How do you keep in contact with all the people you love if it wasn’t for that?” he asked.

“I tend to go directly to the people I love to talk to them. I don’t have to put it on any of these ridiculous social media platforms just to have the whole world get to put in their two cents over how I’m doing communicating with my own family, you know?” I said.

“You’re a nut and I love you,” he said with a shake of his head. “But I really think you would be a lot happier with knowing what’s going on in the world if you were to just invest in something a little more modern than that little flip phone you have going on there. I just don’t see how you can possibly make it through life without any real connection to the world.”

“And that’s why I don’t want one of those things,” I said. “You know how many people have lived before our generation who didn’t even know what a cell phone was? You wouldn’t even think about what I had for breakfast today if you weren’t already online and inundated with pictures of what all these other people are doing with their day. Why don’t you just live your life and not worry about what the rest of the world is doing?”

“Because there’s so much going on in the world today, I don’t know how you can possibly just dismiss this as no big deal,” Ham tried, but stopped himself before he got in too deep with me. He knew I wasn’t going to come to see things from his point of view. There was just no way.

Not with how I felt about cell phones and technology.

As far as I was concerned, the horses and my ranch were my world. Anything that was going on that would affect me and what we were doing here was found in the local paper, and that was good enough for me. I didn’t care what any celebrity was doing with their life. I didn’t care what my friends were doing with their day-to-day lives.

I cared about them as people, but did that mean I had to be openly available for them to tell me what they were doing with their day? Or to randomly bitch at me for something that was going on in life I didn’t want to be part of? It just seemed better to me to not have the means for people to invade my day in the first place than to have a phone and spend the rest of my time trying to avoid the drama.

I would be more than happy to explain this all to him, but I had done it a hundred times before, and the fact that I had my hospital bill on the table in front of me simply put me in a state of mind to deal about things in my own world rather than get worked up about what was going on in someone else’s.

But, I didn’t have the chance. Before I got to the point of once again pointing out I wasn’t going to care about the common things that were going on in the day to day lives of our friends, my phone rang. It was a local number, but one I didn’t recognize.

“If you had a smartphone, it would probably tell you before you even answered the thing who was calling you,” Ham chimed in, but I just gave him a look.

“Or I could answer the thing and find out for myself,” I said. “Hello?”

“Mr. Hudson?” a woman’s voice was on the other end of the line.

“Yes?” I said. “How can I help you?”

“My friend mentioned that you came through her work. Said that you train horses,” the voice said. “I happen to have an equine therapy facility about twenty minutes outside the City, and I’ve recently purchased two horses that could use your help,” she said.

“Oh?” I asked.

“Yes,” she continued. “I’m sorry, I should have told you my name. I’m Raya Winters, and it’s a pleasure to meet you. Anyway, one of the horses is taking to the people who come through beautifully, but the horse who came in as the companion to that horse isn’t doing so well. Scared of everything, flighty. I can’t say mean, but you know any animal is going to defend itself if it’s feeling threatened, and with so many people coming through the facility, I can’t say he’s not going to feel threatened at any given time.”

“And you want me to come down there and give the animal the ropes?” I asked.

“Yes. I hear you’re good at what you do, and from what I see online, it seems you have been able to help a lot of people around here. I would love it if you would take the time to give Romeo some of that help. I want him to be happy here just as much as I want him to be able to help people who come through,” she said.