(“There goes another rubber tree plant.”)

Remember the lyric from “Early Morning Rain, ”Big 707 set to go? It was written in 1966. Note to the composer: Sorry, Gordon, they’re not so big anymore. In fact, they mostly fly cargo to Third World Countries and refuel some Air Force bombers . . .

Things like this happen in my world too. When I teach, I try to stay semi au courant with my cultural refs that are supposed to reveal the Mysteries of Dressage. I know my students’ demographic skews White, “Mature,” and not disadvantaged, but I’m aging faster than (if you will) my client base. So I’ve gotten over (as my grandmother did) referring to the car as “the machine.” I don’t make as many references to sitcoms which didn’t make it to syndication and went off the air before 1970. But as much as I update, I am still left behind. I was teaching a teenager on a somewhat inattentive, “out to lunch” horse. Trying to be in the mode (one entirely hep cat), I proposed to her, “He acts like he’s on Dial Up. You gotta upgrade to Broadband.” Except being 15 years old and growing up in the city, she’d never heard of Dial Up! . . . and there goes another rubber tree plant!

Today these unrelated items flutter through my brain. My first question: When did submission become a bad word? It never was meant to carry coercive, negative connotations. Fifty years ago the old AHSA Rule Book specifically said that Submission did not imply “a truckling subservience.” But times (and semantic usage) change, and if the term somehow reminds people of frat hazing or date rape or bondage or even slavery, it’s time to find better words. That’s the spirit from which the USEF’s “Willing Cooperation” language arises. But obedience is just as important as it always was. Horses still aren’t supposed to question you. They aren’t the alphas—we are.

Now I’m as PC as the next redneck a#%hole, but I wonder if some of this stuff comes from the bureaucracy’s fear of PETA or from a collective guilty conscience? Does the new wording help people understand what person-horse relationship is supposed to entail as we train them? If so, I’m all for it.

While I’m being puzzled about things, what about riders who absolutely insist that they ride exactly the same number of each exercise to the left as they do to the right? Okay, I get not riding around on the left rein for half an hour without changing direction. I get working to make your horse as symmetrical as God probably never intended. It’s our human prerogative to do stuff like that.

But I’m rolling my eyes when a student when asked to walk and present herself to me answers, “I can’t. I have to do one more shoulder-in to the right to make him even.” Really? Like five in one direction and six in the other could possibly matter? (To which she responded, “But if every day you made one more to the right than the left . . .”) My answer: “So tomorrow do one more to the other side.” Which doesn’t even take into account that since horses aren’t naturally equally strong or equally bendable to each side, maybe they should do more in one direction than the other. I’m detecting some OCD in this person. Are you?

And a little long-forgotten mischief: Forty-plus years ago, I taught at a small club in New England. We had school horses and boarders. We took people to shows and horse trials. We ran small schooling competitions for our students and people in the area. A club member with an artistic bent had created a logo for the sign at the end of the driveway, and to make them more distinctive, we decided to use the logo on all the ribbons we gave out at our shows. It was a simple line drawing of a horse’s head and neck in profile, the neck nicely arched as he accepted the bit.

As is the nature of schooling shows, some of the tests weren’t very good. When a sub 55% ride got a ribbon, before handing it out we would discreetly twist the rosette so it matched the inverted performance that “earned” it. I don’t think anyone ever noticed but us.