(“God was busy doing fan belts.”)

Let’s start with my absolute favorite line (stolen somewhere) which tells you everything you should be thinking about your horse’s self carriage: “There are some people who carry the piano and some people who play the piano.” So take your pick, right?

Observations while traveling:

They do things differently other places… Out through the middle of Missouri I saw hay being baled on the median strip of the Interstate. Come to think of it, a strip a hundred or 200 feet wide by several hundred miles produces a fair amount of good hay!

Don’t know whether they’re still doing it, but I remember seeing cattleguards across the entrance ramps to the interstate in parts of rural Montana. Connecticut warns off cyclists; Montana has bigger “fish” to fry (or exclude).

Meanwhile, a friend returning from Alaska tells of excitedly pointing out what she thought was a moose in the field to her hostess. Her companion pointed out that, no, it was really just a horse which turn out to be more rare up there than moose are.

And forgetting all my many years in New England, I recently found myself on the Northshore—confused—having ordered a cup of coffee to go. I asked for “regular,” as opposed to decaf. Up there, “regular” automatically means with cream and sugar. Something like the sweet tea phenomenon in the South.

Generally, on this site, I stay away from topics that are likely to offend. Without getting too mixed up in the doctrine of free will and its philosophical/theological implications, a “friend’s” recent Facebook post left me scratching my head. He wrote at length about his experience that day—his fan belt disintegrating on a rural highway, marching into the only open cafe in town, and finding a mechanic chatting with the waitress—a guy who could fix his problem and send him on his way. “NO COINCIDENCE,” my friend typed in all capitals, explaining that clearly God was always personally looking over him, ensuring that the mechanic would be standing there ready, and that he would not be delayed by the breakdown. God had even arranged that the mishap would take place where it did so he wouldn’t have to walk too far!

Without sounding disrespectful, this got me thinking: the whole mess in Syria–the civil war, the hundreds of thousands of people displaced, killed, and maimed and the specter of poison gas use may have arisen just because God was busy doing fan belts this month. On the other hand, at least my friend wasn’t inconvenienced.

Last topic: dressage judging is never without controversy. Unless you have won with an astronomical score, fault finding is de rigueur. If you were not the winner, griping is on the low end of the Scale of Indignation. This is true from the Olympic level all the way down to adult amateurs riding Training level. I will write about the former in another post, but right now here is one of the more outlandish ideas being floated to satisfy the “every day” competitor.

The most common complaint is the Unlevel Playing Field– all other things being equal, fancier horses beat less fancy horses. Many of us have come to take this situation for granted over a long period of time. The new USEF Rider Tests were

created to offer a kind of solution, but here is another answer (I’m not kidding). Among amateur golfers there is a system of handicapping—based on prior performance, better golfers have to give lesser ones a certain number of strokes when they compete head to head. As this would apply to dressage competition, the judge would score every horse according to the usual standards. But then based on prior show records, the age and experience of the horse, and perhaps even what was paid for him, a formula would be applied to bring the scores into a “fair “relationship to one another. If you are thinking this is nuts, you’re thinking the same thing I am. There are other ways to accomplish a similar goal. If I don’t have a Wellington horse, I compete at the local recognized shows. If the quality of a student’s horse is substantially below that of riders competing recognized, I take them to schooling shows. I think this whole thing came up because some amateurs were miffed that someone whom they perceived was too better was, instead of moving on to harder competition, staying to clean up against the lesser souls. My reaction—who said life is fair? And if you can’t deal with that, I can get you Jeff Gillooly’s phone number.