What Eb Tanner said to Joe Kinney ca. l897

St. Patrick's Day often makes me think  about my grandfather, Joe Kinney, a railroad man of German and Irish descent, and what was said by my great grandfather, Eb Tanner, a Mormon patriarch and dry farmer in southern Utah, when Joe and eighteen-year old Itha, Eb's oldest girl,  appeared at the family home after eloping the night before:  "Joe I couldn't feel worse if you took my best horse."

Whenever my mother tells me this story, she always adds, "Grandpa Tanner loved his horses."