I knew a woman with a backyard barn and a horse she was riding in lower level dressage. She had the usual array of equipment and took regular lessons, working around her “real life” job. Her husband—as husbands go—was fairly supportive of her interest, and when it came to her birthday, he wasn’t that surprised when she announced that all she really wanted was a formal arena to ride in. The husband was in the construction business, and he knew architects and engineers and workmen who were handy with heavy equipment. And so Tina was quite thrilled to see her dream arena taking shape, and she was eager to tell both friends and acquaintances of her good fortune. You would be, too, if you’d been trying to train in your bumpy pasture with a few cinderblocks painted as letters.
A businesswoman in her own right, Tina was known at her local bank. As the actual birthday approached, one cheery teller inquired, “What is your husband getting you for the big day?”
“A dressage ring,” she replied.
The teller paused, briefly furrowed her brow, and eventually offered, “Well, dear, jewelry always makes a nice gift!”
The aforementioned husband’s guilty pleasure was to acquire objets d’art—items of dubious merit to anyone but a true connoisseur of Twentieth Century roadside kitsch. A metal Sinclair gasoline sign featuring an old style Dino the Dinosaur. A full size working Texaco gas pump—the gravity-fed kind with the five gallon graduated glass cistern on top of the pillar. Hand pump the container full with a long lever, twist the valve, and let the fuel pour down through the hose and into the tank. Or perhaps you’d have admired the pair of pedestaled brobdingnagian open-palmed hands, remnants from a defunct massage school or perhaps from a Pentecostal parish whose pastor had met his terminative serpent.
Perhaps his most ingenious acquisition was another present for his wife. One day a large truck arrived unannounced to deposit two huge cast iron bollards by her paddock fence. A bollard is that mushroom-shaped cleat that you’d usually see on the end of a pier. Tina now possessed two of them. The husband’s reasoning: she was always hoping that someday her ship would come in. If it ever did, he wanted her to have something to tie it up to.
In a not very related matter, I was teaching a clinic lesson recently, sitting beneath a tree while my pupil labored in the sweltering Florida heat. A row of her “company loves misery” friends shared my shade, cheering her on. Next to me sat a woman fooling around with her new iPhone. Glancing at the screen, she thought she’d just received a bizarre text message when she realized she had accidentally activated its voice recognition software for outgoing messages. She had been silent, but the phone was close enough to me to pick up my instructions to the rider and dutifully transcribe them into print for transmission.
According to its little Apptillian brain, here’s what I had just said: Short at little black or red without your back kidding around that’s right so late your torso out of my truck now Ryderwood a little and then simply objectified say good bye have anymore in Alaska by slightly straight down in the In principle I would be more amused than worried, but I have read of recent developments in the field of “emotion recognition software.” If the paragraph above is as close as it could get to what I was saying, I wonder how far from reality might a computer go in interpreting how I’m feeling?