|
bike trips
2004-09-28 - 10:12 a.m. Aha! Nora's home sick, and I'm about to go home myself. We're getting digital cable because we absolutely need to have this teenage canadian soap opera (degrassi). Otherwise our children will have to move out to other houses where they actually DO have degrassi. I guess I can spare $10.00/month to keep them at home -- I'm trying to think what we can give up. The newspaper? Anyway. It was an exciting day yesterday. Maddy had a riding lesson on Snoopy, who is somewhat difficult. She's getting pretty good, actually. She got him to do all kinds of things. She's quite tough with him. Another girl, Isabel, was riding another somewhat difficult pony called Lila. Lila is very very pretty, but has a mind of her own. So they were supposed to be trotting around the arena, but Lila kept stopping and backing up, and Snoopy was trotting, except that his trot looks more like a canter. So Snoopy would tranter up to Lila, who would be sideways and backing up, and Maddy would have to stop and meanwhile Olivia, who was riding Rose, would be calmly doing whatever she was supposed to be doing. It was sort of pleasant in a disordered, chaotic way. Kind of madcap, maybe. I admit to being pleased in a selfish way -- last week they had the owner teaching their lesson, since their normal teacher was off doing something else. After the class, I heard the owner, C., talking to Erin, their teacher. "Blah blah blah, and that Isabel!" It made me mad. If she really thinks Isabel is so wonderful, best to talk to Erin when I and Olivia's grandmother are not standing there. Isabel, by the way, is much younger and less experienced than Maddy and Olivia. Really, I'm being ridiculous, but somehow it really hurts your feelings to overhear your kid's teacher going on about some other kid. Not even overhear, really, since I was standing right there. She's never said anything to me about Maddy -- not even, "Oh, Maddy learned so much over the summer." However, as Olivia's grandmother said to me in another context, "C. is really a horse herself." It does seem to me that interpersonal skills don't seem to rank very high in people who run stables. It's not universally true, since Erin is quite nice. And anyway, order was restored this week when Isabel was given a tough pony, probably because C. thought she was so wonderful, and then had a sort of hard time with her, and Maddy did a great job on the tough horse she was riding. I'm aware this all sounds awful. It's not Isabel's fault -- she's actually a nice little kid, and she does really well to keep up with Maddy and Olivia. It can't be easy to always be the smallest and least experienced, and she handles that pretty well. And you certainly can't expect the entire world to regard your kid as the shining star you know her to be. Still. I'm feeling exceptionally middle aged today. I think it's partly recent events, but also that I'm reading Diane Johnson -- l'Affaire. I really like her. She write kind of pop fiction, but there's always this theme of the young woman who doesn't quite know what to do with herself, and she's an American, and then she confronts her innocence in France (Europe=Experience=Age) and realizes it's not so awful to be young and American and inexperienced. It's interesting that Johnson keeps returning to this theme. She is, after all, older than I am. But I think lots of people my age have this feeling of not quite having grown up. We don't come home at 5 and have cocktails from the proper glasses, for instance. At my house, for example, we still drink from jam jars. Hmmm. But whether we're grown up or not, we're all approaching middle age now, if we're not right in the middle of it. And after that comes old age, and after that you die, and there's no sense in pretending that you don't. So there. Better take that bike trip across Canada now! Bye.
find me! - 2008-02-12 |
design by simplify.