(“Unless you could find a Hungarian émigré adept at shadow puppets, you were plum out of luck!”)

The sub-novice dressage aspirant (me) in the previous blogpost had enough self awareness to wonder what in the world Pamela Fitzwilliams and Michael Handler could possibly have been thinking as I blundered through that scholarship audition 40 years ago. With so much water under the dam and over the bridge since then, I can pretty much tell you the answer.

First of all, they were (are) reasonable, mentoring types. If you are under the spell of a tear-you-down-so-he-can-build-you-up guru, then all bets are off. There are no guarantees if the person in question doesn’t really have your best interests at heart. But if your coach, instructor, trainer, confessor is mature enough not to use you as a vehicle for his own gain, then he’ll also suffer your foolishness with no more than a bit lip and a semi-permanent nervous tic.

I can pity them both slightly because before the internet and social media age, they’d have had to wait for a cocktail party gathering to clink glasses and giggle over the antics of their hapless would-be prodigies. It was a more innocent time then. We had many more how were we to know? excuses. I had never seen a turn on the haunches because where could I have seen one? On YouTube? Sorry, not for another 30 years. On a DVD? Not even on videotape for another ten years or so. Unless you could find a Hungarian émigré adept at shadow puppets, you were plum out of luck!

That I happened to parrot back a bizarre cavalry/Gordon Wright hunt seat equitation mishmash of shoulder-in aids wasn’t as bad as offering a more pernicious recipe to inflict on poor Duffy. And even in our current, more enlightened times, you’re going to find that judges, clinicians (who aren’t so self involved that their heads are about to explode anyway), and teachers expect goofy stuff to happen. It’s what our livelihoods are based on—the job security/ long term employment thing—we can shake our heads, but it’s not like we’ve never seen this stuff before. As the last blog showed, I’ve lived it! Years later, I heard that Colonel Handler used to encourage hazing of his own son at the Spanish Riding School and for the longest time only let his son lunge the horses. You think Michael hadn’t had a chance to develop some empathy?

When someone “gets it” in a lesson, sometimes a little chill still rolls down our spines. As riders unravel the mysteries with our help, we can feel like Jay Herbert. Remember Mr. Wizard on TV? “OK, Johnny, today let’s talk about building a road!” “So, Johnny, today we’re going to explore static electricity!” In our most self congratulatory mode we hear the music rise in the background as we surrogate Carl Sagans explain the dressage cosmos to our rapt viewers.

Some triumphs are absolute, some are relative. They’re all why we bother to do this. It sure ain’t ‘cause we’re getting rich! We take our affirmation in various ways. Twenty-plus years later I ran into Michael Handler, and he casually mentioned he’d been keeping track. . . . And that he’d made the right decision. A few years ago Mrs. Fitzwilliams (I still couldn’t bring myself to address her as “Pamela.”) turned up in central Florida and watched a lesson I was teaching to a trainer on a three star event horse. That she was interested in what I had to say and how I approached his problems was a message to me that she, too, took her pleasure in seeds she’d sown which had taken root and grown.