I wish I could remember more of the memory that has been my fun fact at parties for the last twenty years. “I once rode a police horse on Pennsylvania Avenue, in front of the White House,” I’ll say, and then add, like a punchline, “but I was eight, and I wasn’t being arrested.” It’s a light, smile-coaxing story, a shiny anecdote plucked from a childhood otherwise unmarked by the extraordinary. But the sensory details, once so finely edged, are as grainy now as the photos my dad snapped of the moment on our then-brand-new digital camera.

We wore windbreakers, my sister and I, so it must have been a misty, cold day for early May. Our hair in the photos is damp, my face solemn, hers split wide in an uninhibited grin. She, two years younger, was the established “horse girl” of the family, but I read every equine-themed paperback I could get my hands on from the library, too.

I wish I could remember how it came to pass, or at least remember more vividly than just the fact that we were standing at the iron fence in front of the White House, peering across an impossibly wide, well-groomed lawn, wishing the famous mansion were closer and easier to see. Seeing it up close would have brought more of my wild fantasies to life. (I would not see the inside of it for another five years or so, and at that time my carefully-chaperoned educational tour would effectively quash all beautiful visions of what the surely-palatial inside of the executive mansion must be like.) For of course mansions were the stuff of stories; the settings where fascinating, bookish people lived, where fascinating, bookworthy things happened to them.

Uniformed police officers rode up and down the street on gleaming, beautifully brushed horses, and my sister and I must have drifted closer to watch. Maybe the one that would form this story had stopped; maybe we asked to pet him, though probably we were too shy, not daring to voice aloud the wish to touch him and to feed him a treat and even—impossibly—to sit on his beautiful back. The only thing I can truly remember is the words of the man who leaned down off the impossibly tall horse and asked in an impossibly deep voice if we would like a ride.

I wish I could remember exactly how it felt, stepping into the stirrup, swinging up on top of the enormous animal and seeing the ground far away below. My first time on a horse, and the horse was sixteen hands tall. Why do I remember that fact, and why not whether I held the reins or the pommel of the saddle? I remember the policeman’s name, and that he wore spotless white gloves. The horse’s name was Springer, and he was a quarter horse, dignified and slow and incredibly warm—I remember the heat of his flanks under my bare, goosebump-ridden legs. The street around me melted away as we walked slowly up and down, along the edge of the sidewalk and back again. I didn’t want to stop, but it was my sister’s turn—and a whole queue of kids was lining up by the fence eager to ride, too.

Maybe it was a PR stunt of sorts; a gesture of goodwill from the metro police to the tourists bringing revenue to the city every summer. Maybe it was the whim of a moment, borne out by a man who perhaps missed his own children or felt inspired to make a little girl’s day into something extraordinary. Who can say? All I can say is that I felt chosen and lifted out of the commonplace.

Nothing so magical as the White House horse had happened to me before, but this sort of thing was almost routine in the books I read. Children in books, of course, always imagined their own lives to be boring and normal, but things happened to them at a rate that would have been astonishing in my own actually-normal existence. Magic wishing coins, benevolent wealthy godparents bestowing fantastical gifts, exploring forgotten gardens on a country estate were all the stuff of stories—and being picked out of a crowd of children for a surreal ride on a giant horse was of this nature, too. If the police horse ride was possible, what else might be out there? If I could be picked up and seated on an animal I’d only dreamed of, if an experience few could rival had happened to glasses-wearing, socks-with-sandals me—maybe a long-lost treasure could be hiding at the bottom of the creek behind our house. Perhaps the chance to solve a mystery that baffled grownups would be waiting for us when we returned home from Washington. If I squinted just right out my bedroom window that night, would I see the shadow of a tinkling fairy and a boy who never grew up somersaulting among the stars?

It hardly needs to be said that none of these things ever came to pass, but the horse at least was flesh-and-bone real. Diamonds found in rock quarries always turned out to be quartz, and missing objects were usually under the couch and not stolen by a roguish highwayman, and we never did stage a full-fledged musical in our backyard, but the horse had happened. Everything else remained firmly fixed to the pages of a book, but the clip-clop of iron shoes on bricked pavement clung to me and reassured my imagination.

This memory is so blurred now, but it’s drifted with me through two decades—my fun fact, my conversation starter when others tell their stories of adventure, of intrigue, of meeting celebrities and traveling abroad and accomplishing great and unusual things. My childhood, humdrum by all other reckonings, is hallmarked and starred by this one misty afternoon in the swampy city where history is made, this one event that could have been lifted from a book and made every imagined story momentarily possible.