280.366 - 2016 project and the pinto

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

the pinto

once upon a time long ago when I was little, I had learned to read by myself so I could read books my parents had set out for me, but I could also read books they had left on shelves low enough that I could reach.  I soon found out that most of those were too mysterious:  old, dusty, with few pictures, and those of frowning fat men or buildings like nothing I saw in wherever we lived in Brasil.  I had to sound out the words and then they still didn't make sense.  if I asked my mother what olumtubuligata meant, she soon figured out what book I had been reading and put it on a different shelf.  but even the books for children had wonderful stories, and occasionally new books would appear there.  one day I found a new book about a Navajo boy and his little sister and their grandfather and their pinto horses.  whoa!  the book didn't tell me many things.  that is, it didn't tell me that they lived on a reservation, or that white men kept devising schemes to steal their land or their horses.  it did tell me that they were shepherds, and that somehow the old man had time to also be a jeweler.  that is, somehow the grandfather tended a herd of sheep and crafted beautiful necklaces, bracelets, and rings using turquoise stones and silver and iron that he found lying about on the reservation.  I came to suspect that whoever wrote the book knew just barely more than I did about Navajos.  but the book did have beautiful pictures of the characters and their wonderful horses posed against wonderful backgrounds of desert land that could not have supported sheep any more than I could have found silver and iron and turquoise lying about in my back yard.  I loved the pictures of the pintos, and wondered why they had no part in the story, but then the story never actually did anything anyway.  the Navajo family had to move to their winter grazing and set up living, then they had to move to their summer grazing and set up living.  the boy found some turquoise when his grandfather had about given up.  the horses and the sister came into the story when necessary, but mostly were not there.  but then the sheep were only there when they needed the Navajo to find, collect, and move them.  it was a dissatisfying book, marginally better than "Run Dick, run."  but it had Navajos and pinto horses and I've been fascinated by them ever since.  like many things that have fascinated me but were not part of physics and engineering, I never actually did anything to learn more about them.  but there you have it, pinto horses, and a book that made a huge impression on a little boy despite being so badly written a little boy knew it.  yea pintos!