"Son, you can beat a dead horse but you can’t make him drink," my dad once told me. I was young, but not that young, and I suspected my dad might have twisted these up intentionally.

"I don't think that's the saying, Father."

I sometimes called him Father rather than Dad because I thought it made me sound proper and more refined.

My dad on the other hand has an endearing but very prominent southern TEXAN ACCENT. And rather than just admit that he’d hastily smashed together two sayings that didn’t really belong together or make much sense, my dad then spent the next five minutes trying to defend his haphazard creation, claiming that this is what he had intended to say, and explaining its deeper meaning and hidden truths. Our whole family does this, we amuse ourselves at other peoples' expense by occasionally pretending to be dumber than we actually are. Some people might call this silliness, I just call it family.

"See Ryan, the horse can't drink cuz he's dead."

"Got it Dad. I mean, I comprehend Father."

There’s another saying that I didn’t even realize was my dad’s own twisted creation until much later as an adult— it was a something about putting a horse out to pasture to find the glue factory. As a kid, not realizing it was another of his amalgamations, I even imbued it with a whole didactic meaning of my own. I thought it symbolized setting forth an impossible task for someone, especially one destined to fail, like expecting a horse to locate a glue factory out in a pasture. I thought this was akin to telling someone to spin straw into gold, etc....

Or any other impossible task (like trying to make sense of my dad’s unique colloquialisms, for example). My dad would often say to me, “Ryan, it’s like I’ve always said….,” and then proceed with a random nugget of incomprehensible wisdom I’d never heard him say before, or since.

I quite liked my dad’s combination of those two things, though, the pasture and the glue factory, and I enjoyed my mental images of a hapless horse forever destined to search around in the pasture for a nonexistent glue factory. And anyways, I later came to learn that it was a much happier ending for that horse than were he to be sent to either of those two places separately.

My father also taught me that you always put the car before the horse (yes, you're reading that right, car not cart), and when I questioned him on it he said, "Think about it, Ryan. Cars go faster than horses, so you always wanna put the car in front, before the horse. Otherwise, you'd run the horse over with the car." Then he'd laugh, he knew this wasn't right.

"That makes sense, Father."

A lot of my dad's convoluted analogies involved horses and, you know what, as an adult, writing this... I'm starting to wonder if perhaps my dad didn't just have a general confusion about all things horse related? Now I'm recollecting an especially confusing idiom where the horse had gifts inside its mouth for some reason, and to this day, that one still doesn't make any sense. "Don't look at him! Not while the gifts are in his mouth!"

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You can read more about me and horses HERE.