Again With The Champions

So, sports fans and friends, once again in the pre-dawn gloaming I have snuck into the Virginia Horse Center's Coliseum in search of a wifi called Vote For Obama.  It's the final day of pony club championships.

My daughter's event team is in the middle of the pack right now.  My daughter and one of her teammates went clear cross country, another teammate was eliminated, and the fourth had her second refusal on cross country dismissed when she successfully argued that, when her mare went sideways at the down bank, she crossed her right legs in front of her left legs, not behind.  Forty points-an entire middling dressage test-hinging on how a pony crossed its legs.  But such are the rules, and Katie's teammate knew them.

I wish you could have seen the barns this morning.  Horse show mornings are one of my favorite things in life.  I love the soft light, the horses murmuring for their breakfasts, the scent of hay and the slosh of emptying water buckets.  I love the anticipation.

Here, of course, I'm not allowed in the barns.  This morning I was one of a long line of pickup trucks pouring into the center, turning right, turning left, but only those lucky few with official passes going straight.  I stopped to let my daughter out and watched as she went into the barn, long-legged, square-shouldered, her hair in a bun at the nape of her neck, swinging her bag over her shoulder.  She looked insanely beautiful.  They all do.  Anyone who thinks horses are a waste of time or money should see these 500 teenagers gathered at championships.  See how hard they work, how dedicated they are.  How independent and strong.

Yesterday it rained most of the day.  I stood out on the cross country course draped in a Busch Gardens poncho, watching my daughter and her quirky little former racehorse.  Mickey wanted to run-he always wants to run-but my daughter held him in (you can get penalties for going too fast, as well as too slow).  He was brave to everything, even the Very Scary Bank.  When my daughter pulled him to a cautious trot in front of the Trakhener (yes, a Trakhener, which is to say a hanging log atop a ditch, on beginner novice) one of the women watching with me said surprised, "Is she worried about the Trakhener?"  Surprised because she had not looked worried about anything so far.  "No," I said, laughing.  I'd seen the slight flick of her wrist that meant my daughter had checked her watch.  "She's using up some time."

The lights area on in this quiet Coliseum.  The Games Organizers are chalking the lines onto the newly dragged arena.  Another woman, coffee in hand, is fiddling with the sound system.  In an hour I'll go watch my daughter jog her horse; after that I've got a volunteer briefing.  Then to watch the end of competition, then to take a nap.  It's a long drive home and we'll be leaving late.  It's been worth the trip.

10 Things to do Today at the USPC Championships Trade Fair

1.  Pick up your free t-shirt.
2.  Drop your Point-Two vest off for servicing, or buy a new one (30 percent off!).
3.  Have the fit of your Charles Owen helmet professionally checked.
4. Buy some bling:  belts, boot socks, browbands.
5.  Check out the books for sale at 20 percent off at the USPC bookstore.
6.  Gold glitter bell boots.  You know you want them.
7.  Get your horse's name engraved on a halter or bracelet.
8.  Find the piece of Alicia Daily pottery that most resembles your horses.
9.  Find out what type of Triple Crown feed is best for your hard keeper/air fern.
10.  Join the U.S. Polo Association.  Seriously.

This post is not sponsored by the United States Pony Clubs, Inc.  But it should have been.

Horses Give Hope

Horses give hope.  I've known this for a very long time.  They're domesticated, but not entirely-they can still live in the wild-and you can see this, if you've been around them enough, by the amount of instinctive non-verbal communication they still maintain.  For a long time, the Kentucky Horse Park had a small bronze statue of a running horse over by its Big Barn, on the way to the dressage arenas.  Something about the bronze horse's expression clearly said, "Run, the lions are coming!" to every live horse who saw it.  The statue spooked so many horses that the park finally moved it.

Similarly, horses respond to people's nonverbal communications.  The famed "horse whisperers" a very, very good at controlling every nuance of their body language, aware of how it affects the horse. But horses take in clear messages from us mortals, too.  They know when we're happy, fearful, sad.  They know when we're clueless.  How they respond to us depends on their personalities, history, and training, but they take everything in.

But horses don't care if people are beautiful by human standards.  They don't care if we're rich, smart, or thin.  They're really not interested in how much our jazzy new breeches cost, or whether our boots were custom-made or hand-me-downs.  Horses don't notice race, religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation or anything else humans tend to get riled up about nowadays.

Are you consistent?  Are you trustworthy?  Are you kind?  Are you a leader?  That's the sort of stuff horses care about.

Yesterday at Pony Club Championships, I met Jo Anne Miller, the head of Brook Hill Farm, a remarkable organization in Bedford County, VA.  Jo Anne started the place as an equine rescue and rehabilitation facility-if you go to the farm's website, Brook Hill Farm, you'll see the sort of transformations she and her volunteers effect.  Lots of horrible stories with happy endings.  But the remarkable part, to me at least, is that Jo Anne started to rehabilitate teenagers, too.  Specifically some who had been abused much worse than the horses.  The teens in her program, United Neigh, are often ordered into it through the juvenile court system.  Some of them face very bleak futures.  They go to the farm two days a week, are each given a rescue horse to care for, and are taught to ride.  If they follow the rules, they earn privileges.  Jo Anne enrolls the  students in 4H and Pony Club (Brook Hill is an accredited Pony club riding center) and if they do well in the program they get the chance to compete.

This June the team from Brook Hill, none of whom had ever ridden away from the center before, finished first in the Old Dominion Region show jumping rally.  One of their members is competing here at Championships this weekend.  I don't know any details about this child, except that horses might be the saving of her.

Of the kids who have completed the United Neigh program, 100 percent have graduated high school. One hundred percent have gone on to secondary education.  From my work at Faith in Action, I can tell you that graduating from high school cuts a Preston's chance of living in poverty in half.  This is HUGE.

Brook Hill can use donations of all sorts.  Now I know where my orphaned tall boots will be heading.  What a joy, to let them have a second life on the feet of a child who needs and is getting a second chance.

Notes from the first day of PonyClub Championships

I write this sitting not in the kitchen sink (bonus points if you get the reference) but in the Coliseum of the Virginia Horse Center in Lexington,VA.  I'm waiting for the start of the Opening Ceremonies of the United States Pony Club East Coast Championships, in which my daughter will be marching.  I'm ambivalent about the Opening Ceremonies but I'm enjoying the free wifi, even if it is labelled Vote For Obama.  (I suspect that's due to the VHC's directors, the indomitable Brian and Penny Ross.  Ann Romney aside, you'd be surprised how many equestrians are democrats.

Today has passed in a blur of happy chaos, beneath blue skies, the shadow of House Mountain, and some of the best summer weather the state of Virginia can produce.  The riding doesn't start until tomorrow, so nobody minds a bit of confusion, and the organizers have direct senses of humor I'm enjoying.  "Parents.  Twelve o'clock is not a difficult concept.  Get your trailers away from the barns."  "Attention, show jumpers.  We gave up vacation time to put this event on for you.  Do not piss us off."

The two previous times my daughter competed in Championships, she competed in the horseless knowledge discipline, quiz.  Now that she's riding I won't see much of her.  We pulled up outside the barn at 11:15 am.  Her teammates hurried to help us unload, and that was it.  I wasn't allowed in the barn.  I went to a briefing, ate a salad, and made the acquaintance of a lovely woman I'm going to tell you all about tomorrow.  Because the PA has just started playing the Olympic theme song.  The athletes are entering the arena.  We're off.

Summer-go-Round

I'm home for three days.  Sunday night (11:30 pm, seven hours late) we got back from Ireland; Thursday morning (7:30 am) my daughter and I pull out the drive for the Pony Club East Coast Championships.  I arrived home to find one of our large beech trees--probably 250 years old, though we won't know for sure until we cut up the trunk--down in our yard, courtesy of some violent storms that hit Bristol while we were gone.  We also lost half a peach tree and some trees in the walnut patch.

I'm ambivalent over the loss of the beech tree.  On the one hand, it was a lovely tree, and I quite liked it.  On the other hand, it'll cut up nicely into three or four excellent cross country jumps, replacing all my old jumps (from a beech tree that fell ten years ago) which are decaying into little piles of sawdust.  They're still jumpable, but they're pretty wiener jumps now.  The new beech tree looks set to give us at least one solid Training level jump (3'3").

An astonishing number of things absolutely have to be accomplished in these three days, which is why I spent half an hour this morning online looking at the trailers for the movie Catching Fire.  Which comes out November 22nd.  You know, priorities.  I do plan to get busy really soon.  I've had a bunch of highly erudite, thoughtful, and socially meaningful blog posts running around in my head, with no time to type them down, but you won't be getting any of them today.  I did however find a really excellent link I wanted to share, which explains some of what I meant in my post about Trayvon Martin, better than I could explain it.  Here.  I strongly encourage you to read it.

I have a real job, too, despite all my recent gaity; it's sitting on my desk beneath the piles of bills, marked up in blue pencil, waiting.   I'm thinking about my book all the time, even though I'm not writing it.  Can't decide whether or not it would be worth taking it to Championships with me.  On the one hand, I'll have quite a lot of free time.  (They won't let me bring my horse to Championships, to mess around with.  I asked.)  On the other hand, I'll be at Championships.  Maybe I should just watch the children compete and remember how lucky I am to be able to watch them, how lucky I am in general.

Meanwhile my son starts college a month from yesterday, and my daughter starts her sophomore year in high school a week from tomorrow.  Summer has gone so fast.  I shouldn't be surprised, but I am.  I always am caught by surprise.

In Which I Become Queen of Donegal

If I were to be tellin' you, now, that yesterday morning in Ireland I won a golf tournament while wearing shorts in the blazing summer sun, ye'd be after sayin' I'd kissed the Malarkey Stone.  If I were to add that I'd spent yesterday afternoon rescuing an actual Irish horse trapped in an actual Irish bog, ye'd be excused for thinking' I'd had a nip too much of the whiskey.

But no, I'm tellin' ye,  tis God's honest truth.  So 'tis.  Now the golf tournament may have only been a skins contest among me family on a 12-hole pitch and putt (12 was all they could fit between the driving range and the cows), and I may have been given a stroke per hole, on account of my traditional golfing ineptitude, and my subsequent triumph may have caused certain among me family members to mutter, "sandbagged," and swear never to be givin' me strokes again, but there you have it, a win is a win is what I say.

As for the horse-me not-so-wee daughter and I, along with a mum and two lasses from Belfast, were takin' a trek up the mountain behind Dunfaghy, when of a sudden our guide's horse went hock-deep in an unexpected hole in the bog.  We thought we were on a famine track, see, and yet here was this patch of quicksand.  The mare staggered and fell to her knees, thrashed in deep, went down on her side, and lay still.  And the poor guide, a University student named Katherine, looked at me with the big eyes and said, "what do I do?"  She bein' laid out in the bog herself, like, but fortunately unhurt.  And me daughter with her cool head (unexpected, that), says, "Mum.  Get OFF."  So I dismount my horse, name of Charlie, and give the reins over to my daughter, and stagger through the muck.  And right away I see as how the poor wee mare has her head tied down with the running martingale and all, so I takes that off, and pulls on the reins, and talks to her, encouragin' like, and she thrashes for a bit and then gets to her feet.  And then all that's left is to lead the other horses around the bog-hole, the worst of it, that is, so that my paddock boots will never be the same, may the good Lord have mercy.  And then to comfort the wee ones from Belfast, who were skairt.

But that was my day, and a good day it was, especially after the shower, and the revivin' glass in the hotel bar.  I figure I was Queen of Donegal, at least for the one day.

And if this doesn't convince you why I never write in dialect, then, by Saint Patrick and the angels, nothing will.

Naked to Mass

I  read in an Irish newspaper that as a result of The Weather, people were wearing substantially less clothing in ever more formal places: if The Weather keeps up, the writer predicted, we'd all be going naked to Mass.

The Weather is amazingly unIrish.  It's gorgeous over here.  I laid out on the beach.

Several things about Ireland have hit my notice this time around.

1) not only do they swear more in person, they swear more in print.  Yesterday's newspaper contained the f-word.  On the front page.  In a headline.

2). The posted speed limits are along the lines of double dog dares.  In the history of Ireland, No one has ever been caught speeding, because cars can't go that fast and stay on the roads.

3) No one gets up early.  We shock hotels much more by asking for breakfast at 7:30 than if we wanted in mid afternoon.

4) As a corollary, no one eats dinner early either.  We show up at 7 pm and are the first ones at any restaurant.

5) All the horses are good here.  Most are splendid.

6). Yesterday my daughter and I saw a crazy person and a 15-foot high mechanical cockroach attracting spectators in the town square.  When we enquired, we were told it was performance art.
 Like, dur.

7) No one uses top sheets here-it's all bottom sheets and duvets.  I used to think I'd like to try that, but it turns out I miss top sheets when I don't have them.

8) We saw our first chain restaurant on day 6 of the trip.  It was a Kentucky Fried Chicken.  We drove past it as fast as the car could go.

9). We still didn't come close to the speed limit.