CRACKED REAR VIEW

This morning on the way to work, I was thinking about something funny. I was remembering this elaborate prank Jennifer and I had in college that revolved around the punchline of a joke. The joke wasn't even that funny, but was made all the more hilarious to us for that very reason.
The joke was told to me for the first time by Russel John, the improbably redneck I worked with at a summer camp in '96, and I brought it to College Station, after which we worked it into a prank call situation...way past the point of being funny.
So the joke is something like this: This boy goes to the circus, and there is this clown that keeps taunting him. This darn clown just will not leave him alone, calls him names, embarrasses him, teases him mercilessly. It really affected this boy, but he had no idea what to do about it. Every year when the circus comes, this same clown goes after this boy, and he tries all these various things to get the clown to stop, but he can't. He ends up spending years in therapy working on this, and finally perfects his comeback. He goes back to the circus as a man now, and sees that clown, and this time he is ready to show him how all those years of therapy helped him learned the perfect way to deal with him. So when the clown starts messing with him again, he pulls out all the stops, and says....
"Fuck you, clown!"
I was laughing about this in the morning, laughing about an incident involving the punchline and Holly the Ho', laughing about all those college years. I was laughing all day, over other things. Hilarious moments involving me in the parking lot, observed trying not to pee myself with laughter, laughing over lunch, good times in the workplace, smile on my face. At the end of the day, though, there was this conversation, so to speak, that kind of changed my tune. It was a good conversation, but it got my mind rolling as I left work, heading into the traffic and the rain coming down. At first I was fine, playing my favorite tunes and getting deep into Keely Karoake hour like most days drive, but then something broke. And maybe it was just the rain, or maybe it was the deeper damage, but the dam broke and the tears came down.
During this time, there was a missed phone call from Jen, and even though I was on a stretch of road that I don't usually talk, I called her back, because I really needed a girlfriend. I told her what was on my mind, barely able to talk with the emotion of it all. She totally understood where I was coming from, the distorted sense of self that is the remnant of my broken marriage.
"Most people during this time are feeling sad because of what they lost. You're not sad for the loss of your marriage, you're sad for the loss of self you experienced in your marriage. You're sad because you are finally getting away. Thank God you are finally getting you and your children away from that."
We talked about this concept of beauty, the damage to my psyche that was caused by the mental cruelty of this man I lived with for ten years. "All this time, your girlfriends have been trying to tell you how beautiful you are, strange guys in bars were telling you that...I'm sorry it wasn't enough for you. It wasn't enough to overcome the way he treated you."
She told me to go ahead and cry about it, it was part of the healing. As I drove, all I could think about was how I wanted so badly to smash all the mirrors in my house. Hands clenched in fists of rage, wanting to strike out at the memory of him pushing me into those mirrors. "Look at yourself in there. Just look at yourself in the mirror. You're so ugly, how could anyone want you? Just look in there, see it?" And I am mad, not just at him, but at myself for falling into that, for looking in there and seeing what he saw and believing that, for letting that be the image I held in my head as the truth.
And it's all of it that I was crying about, the healing from all of it. During the fall, I was processing this stuff, seeing the sand castles he built in my mind starting to crumble and go back to the sea, the constructs he made to keep me under his control slowly disintegrating under the high tide. I was thinking about San Diego, and an experience that showed me what a liar he was. I was thinking about my parents, and their relationship with me that set me up for later damage. "It's the reason he chose you, honey," the counselor said. "He recognized something in you that was weak and he could prey on."
And prey he did. In some part of my mind, I see that his intention was to make me feel so bad about myself that I would never leave, but that doesn't make sense, in some ways, either, because he placed no value on me. Why would he care if I left, when he didn't care about me when I was there?
That makes me feel like all that time, he wasn't really seeing my true worth, and it makes me angry. It reminds me of the Vanilla Ice Cream guys, and how they saw me the same way - all about what they could get, and nothing about what I could give. In some ways, those Vanilla guys from college had boosted my ego, but they failed to see that there was more to me than this perceived superficial beauty and bedroom skills. None of them ever saw anything I wrote, or engaged me in intelligent conversation, or went riding with me. We never talked about books and ideas and the things that interested me. They never even knew I loved animals. How little they knew me, after all that time of working next to me.
Well, none of them but Ryan. Today I also remembered how I felt when I moved back to Texas, how for some reason coming home made me think about Ryan. In my mind, that was a sad feeling, that coming home emotion, because I thought that no one would ever see me again the way Ryan saw me. Those days were over and done, and I mourned the loss of my beauty, along with all the other pieces of me I left in my past. Over the past months, though, I've started to see that my beauty was simply part of my light that I had been hiding under a bushel all this time. And like Alicia said, it's time to start letting the light back in, and open up the parts of myself that had been closed off from this pain.
When my mom and I were in counseling, we talked about some of these things. She brought up that my sisters had been envious of the way she touted my beauty to them, that they felt insecure because she had been telling them all this time about my "classical features", about my intelligence, and they felt that their worth was unrecognized because of what she was seeing in me. "But don't you think I should have been the one you were telling that, too?" I wanted to ask her, because I never heard a single positive thing from her regarding myself. And it's those broken pieces that upset me today, the fact that those closest around me and who are supposed to love me the best are the ones who destroyed me the most.
This weekend, I was at Jen's house, and there was this man there who knew me during the time I was with him. We talked about beauty, that day, too. I told him how my insecurities, how these sand castles did keep me from leaving, how all I could see about myself was this cracked rear view. I told him how I was scared that man was right about me. Julian looked me up and down, and said, "That's not something you need to be worried about." He told me how hot he thought my pictures on Facebook were, and that made me laugh, the last laugh in fact, because this man I was married to said roughly the same thing. "Funny," he had written, "how that now that we are not together anymore, you look a whole lot better to me."
That makes me want to take some rocks for target practice against the mirrors. It's like we were at the circus, and he took me to the fun house and convinced me those distortion mirrors were my true reflection. It makes me want to come up with a great comeback against it.
Fuck you, clown.

GRAND CANYON #1 - Straight Shots

BEAUTY IS PAIN?

In one week, I will be on a beach in Florida, soaking up some rays and knowledge. I decided it would be a good time to use the rest of my gift certificate for the nail salon (see previous post - "Just What the Doctor Never Ordered). There is a good likelihood I will be getting some beach time with my friend from another work site that I might want to work with some day, so having professional looking nails seemed like a good idea.

This time the place was dead, so I had two women working on me at once, one at my feet and one working on my hands. They of course went for the upsale at once (see Anjela Johnson's Nail Salon jokes). They tried to sell me the deluxe package, which I declined, but then one looked up and suggested an eyebrow wax. "Show off your eyes, make you look pretty", she says. She then says something in Vietnamese to her coworker, which I think was a comment on my appearance, and the one working on my hands quickly looked at me with pity in her eyes, which guided me to think it was not flattering. I was not really concerned with this, and I mentioned to them that getting my eyebrows done "always hurts a little bit".

"Oh honey, but beauty IS pain."

My immediate thought was, So that's what I've been doing wrong these years! Which was a joke to self, really. In my honest reflections, I know that I am not as pretty as I used to be, and in my darker moments, I mourn the loss of my beauty. When I say things like that, people assume I mean that I don't feel good about my appearance, but it is not that at all. I am comfortable with what I consider as my "reasonably attractive" appearance. Like most people, I have good and bad days. I can put on the shine and look nice, and I can look downright ugly.

However, I can tell that I am not as attractive as I once was because of the way people respond to me. We like to tell ourselves we don't judge people on their appearance, but it does factor in to the way people treat you. People don't treat me the way they used to.

In my younger years, I learned how to use the power of my sexuality to get what I wanted from people. It was a trick in the toolbox of manipulation that I wasn't really aware of how to use until college, but then I perfected it. I would go to bars with no money in my pockets, knowing full well I could get drinks by flirting with men. My attractiveness worked on women as well, helping me to impress during interviews and work the networking ladder. It was especially helpful in getting me out of speeding tickets. I talked my way out of thirteen tickets during the years of my physical prime, but nowadays, the cops take one look and they start writing the ticket before I even start talking.

I know that some of it is age and life experience. I see the biggest differences in my appearance in my face and my weight. I can see it in my face most clearly. When I look at pictures of myself from five to ten years ago, I see how much smoother the skin on my face was. There is an absence of lines and blemishes that seem to appear around the time I had my first child and increase exponentially through the years despite my skin care regime. I am carrying fifty, sixty pounds more than I was back then, which I can blame on having two kids, my metabolism slowing down, the lack of a proper exercise schedule, poor diet, and/or my overriding desires for cheeseburgers. Stress and hormones haven't treated me well.

Even so, though, I don't feel bad about the way I look, I just notice things are different for me. I think there are nice features about myself that still get noticed. When I met Indy's girlffriend for the first time, she slid into the seat next to me and said sweetly, "You're really pretty." I smiled at her and replied, "Thanks, so are you!" I had put on the makeup and the nice dress that night, but most days I don't bother, because I am not that concerned with my physical appearance. I would rather someone find me I was smart or interesting than attractive.

Perhaps, though, these girls in the nail salon are right. I coasted along in my prime years off of what God gave me. I never really had to work at being attractive, and I haven't really ever endured pain for the sake of it. The closest I have come to feeling a true understanding that "beauty IS pain" might be some brutally intense physical workouts. I have an obsessive mind and sometimes it focuses on exercise, and during those times, I lost thirty to forty pounds pounding the streets, treadmills, and stairmasters of various gyms around town for a year or so before losing interest and moving on to the next obssessive behavior (which very possibly could be cheeseburgers again, leading me into some vicious get fit-get fat-and-back-again cycle).

I haven't sacrificed for beauty, and in some way in the back of my mind, I think maybe we shouldn't have to. I mean, what is the function of beauty anyway, as I am fond of asking? At the heart of this is a philosophical debate that I could elaborate on but will choose not to in the interest of brevity (brevity, she says? What does she know about brevity, laughs my inner jokester). In my opinion, the function of beauty is to find a mate. Does it really matter if anyone else finds you attractive other than your mate? Does beauty simply rely on external factors, or is it a combination of a number of features? Does beauty exist in a vacuum?

In thinking about beauty in the terms of relationship with one's mate, let me examine two statements made by my husband regarding beauty. One day we were looking through a tabloid magazine, and there was a page with several fresh-faced Hollywood women. He went through and pointed out which ones he found to be more attractive, who were not the more conventional choices. "You wanna know why I picked these ones?" he said, "It's because these women are smiling. These ones over here look unhappy. To me, what makes a woman beautiful is when they are happy inside, and you can see it on their face. This is a woman you want to be around."

I thought of another time he made a statement about beauty. Those who know our recent history have heard the story about our Great Flood Story, when we had to be rescued by boat when a river flowed into our campsite in the middle of the night. We had only made it to safety by pushing each other through the shoulder-deep water to our vehicle and climbing on top. As the waters raged around us, I held my ten month old baby to my chest, hair dank with river water in the dark of the night, and prayed that God would help us get out safely. My husband said later, "You never looked as beautiful to me as you did at that moment."

Clearly my husband has an unconventional idea of beauty, or perhaps he, as others do, understands that beauty is "more than skin deep", that "beauty is as beauty does", and half a number of the other cliched statements we make but yet have trouble living by. Over the recent years, I have come to see that my husband's attraction for me has less to do with what I look like, and everything to do with how I act. A smile and kind words goes further with him than fresh makeup and a tight sweater.

I went ahead, though, and agreed to a little bit of pain for my beauty today, telling them that since it was my wedding anniversary, I did want to look nice, and so perhaps an eyebrow wax might be beneficial. It does seem rather odd to me, though, that today's standards of beauty involve the removal of hair from places God allowed it to grow. I think if God intended for us to perceive beauty as freshly waxed, shaved, and plucked body parts, then wouldn't He just stop it from growing? Of course I am being facetious, but at the same time don't understand a society that places value on false appearances - fake tans, nails, breasts, hair. Why can't we be happy with the way God made us, individual yet all beautiful in our own natural way?
I could write an entire essay on what I think is wrong with cultural standards of beauty and how it affects women and their self esteem. But not tonight. Tonight I am going to shave my legs. I am going to style my hair, put on my makeup and jewelry, and prepare to go on a romantic date with my husband to celebrate our ninth wedding anniversary. I'm going to put on my cutest outfit and bring out my most beautiful self. Before I walk away from the vanity, though, I going to put on the finishing touch, the one last special touch - a genuine smile. It might be the sexiest thing I'm wearing tonight.

Just What the Doctor (Never) Ordered

There it was, on the open top of my husband's dresser, a pink envelope with my name on it. I had no recollection of what this was, and opened it up to find a Mother's Day card from last year from my own mother, with a generous gift certificate to the nearby nail salon and a smaller card to a nearby bookstore. I was very excited to find the bookstore certificate, because I am in bad need of some new fiction (remember in my Dick Francis review how I mentioned I don't really enjoy mysteries? I've been reading the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, for pete's sakes, for lack of anything else in the house to read), but I noticed the expiration date on the nail salon certificate, and that it was one week away. Use it before you lose it, right?
So here I go, picking up the phone to make an appointment for only the second manicure/pedicure of my life. It just feels so foreign to me, because I never would spend money like that on myself. It feels frivolous to me. I know lots of girls do it, but I am just not oriented that way. I always liked that about myself, the fact that I was low-maintenance, not overly concerned with falseness of appearance, someone who puts others before herself. I am much more likely to spend forty bucks on entertaining my children than sinking it into something that feels like a vanity to me.
After this weekend, though, I am completely changing my point of view on this. As I sank into the leather chair and rested my feet in the tub of hot water, I began to feel some of the tension of the week slide off of me. It has been a rough week. My car broke down mid-week, crashed and burned. I was without sufficient funds to replace it but desperately needing transportation to make my daily hour long rush hour commute both ways. I was in a tough spot. I had to rely on my parents to help me out, something I hated to do, something that made me feel like an absolute failure. I had gotten myself emotionally worked up about it without any real release. Well, except for those two margaritas the night before this - boy, that felt good, but seeing as I passed out as soon as we got home, the reward was short lived.
I remembered the last and only time I had been here, and how the chatter of the Asian women who worked there made me feel very comfortable and relaxed, although I had no idea what they were saying. This time, I was introduced to the massaging action of the chair, and as the chair kneaded the tightly wound muscles of my shouders and neck and the woman rubbed my calves and feet, I began to allow myself to relax. This is huge for me, a letting go that I seem to have a hard time doing.
I read something once about Virgos, my birth sign, that made me laugh. It said that because Virgos are so uptight and tend to be nervous and high-strung, they should avoid intense cardio workouts and instead pursue yoga and meditation for their physical health. It went on to explain that cardio workouts bring a soul's energy up to a higher level of excitement, but the Virgos need to force themselves to relax and instead calm their energy down. I think it is so true, but because I don't like relaxing, I have avoided yoga and instead tended towards the cardio they suggested my sign should avoid: running, stairmaster, swimming, team sports.
As the woman dipped my feet in the paraffin wax and smoothed away my skin, I wondered why, with all the doctors and therapists I've seen for my "nervous" conditions, no one ever suggested yoga, centering exercises, meditation, getting pedicures, massages, or simply practicing relaxation techniques. They always rushed to the prescription pads, wanting to give me muscle relaxers to calm down, or antidepressants to take the edge off, without really looking at the root of the problem. The problem is not that I have a chemical imbalance, but simply that I never learned how to calm myself down. I joke with my friends sometimes that even my hobbies start to stress me out, because I begin to take them too seriously. I frequently bite off more than I can chew, take on more than I should handle on my own, thinking that I am simply strong enough to bear it all. I push myself too hard and don't ask for help when I need it. I go and go and go until I fall down or freakout, and I know it takes its toll on my body.
I was having a hard time even accepting this gift. I was watching the woman work the dead skin out from around my toes and shape my cuticles and it made me feel so uncomfortable I wanted to tell her to stop and just go on home. Strangely, though, it started to make me think about Jesus. I was thinking about how in our Wednesday night Bible Study, we were talking about the events of the night of the Last Supper. Do you remember what Jesus did before the meal? He took off his robe, pulled on a towel, and began to wash the feet of each of his disciples. I remember our leader posing the question to us, "How do you think this made the disciples feel?" We had decided that probably felt pretty strange to them, pretty humbling. This man who they looked up to as their leader, the Messiah, the Anointed One, the one they wanted to serve, was instead serving them.
There is some controversy to this in some churches today. Some feel like this is a ritual Jesus wanted us to continue literally, and hold ceremonial foot washing ceremonies where they gather together latex gloves, antibacterial soap, towels, and small tubs and host a gathering where some wash others feet. Some feel like this was something that was relevant to the times, but has lost the relevancy today, and really what Jesus was saying was for us to take care of each other, even if it means humbling ourselves to do it. As Matthew 23:12 reads, "And whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted." As Jesus humbled himself to wash the feet of his followers, he said to them, "Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you." (John 13:1-7).
Does an example mean we take it literally?
Some people even incorporate foot washing into their marriage ceremony as a way of demonstrating perhaps what Jesus was trying to demonstrate - that in order to love each other, we have to love each other selflessly. We have to be willing to serve each other.
I, though, like Peter in the Gospel of John, am uncomfortable being served by someone else. Sure, we both have our same reasons. As I am thinking about this, however, a woman comes in. The Asian nail girls greet her by name, and she take the chair next to me and begins to soak her feet. Before my lady is finished with my nails, this lady (who has been very helpful to me, helping me understand what was expected of me next) announced that she had to come back later, because she had a massage appointment. As she walked out, I thought how she was a woman who was taking care of her need for relaxation. She had no qualms about being served by someone else. I found that inspiring.
Just then, I overheard one of the other customers near me telling her manicurist that "I thought I had found my path, but God had other plans for me." She was telling of a story in which God revealed his plan to, instead of having her teach children, tell her to get her real estate license and work alongside her husband. I found that comforting to think about as well.
Sometimes I think my source of stress is that I am worrying about the road I am on, and if it the one of destiny or the one of my own free will. Is my free will standing in the way of God's plan for me? I wish for signs to appear pointing me in the right direction, or assuring me that I am following it. What this woman said, though, made it all feel simpler, like I was falling backwards into the gentle hands and plans of the Man Upstairs. God will decide the plan for you. All you have to do is listen, and if you are not on the right road, he will let you know.
After these moments of clarity in the leather chair of the nail salon, I decided I was going to try to keep myself in this "pedicure bubble", where nothing could bother me. I had pretty pale pink perfect nails, and nothing could touch me. If I could stay here, I could stay relaxed.
Determined to keep my "bubble" intact, I tried to relax into other recreational opportunities. We did some fishing, I got some nice wilderness hike geocaches in, grilled some food in the backyward, went to the park. In order to preserve my bubble, I just enjoyed the hike while grabbing three geocaches, and didn't let the fact that if I don't get at least ten caches a week, I do a backslide on the Grand Poobah List give me a moment of performance pressure.
I wish I could stay in that frame, and I decided to make that my goal. I made a mental list of that I want to do more of, and what I wanted to do less of. Making a point to take care of my mental well-being by playing more classical music, worrying less, enjoying the moment fully, giving in to the massage chair, and letting go.
As I left the nail salon, it was with the realization that I had enough money left on my certificate to come again. I asked about the date and the woman assured me she would honor it.
"Don't wait too long, though."
I think I have, but I don't think I will again.



P.S. Saturday afternoon the Kentucky Derby was marred by the unexpected death of a racehorse, Eight Belles, a filly who placed second, and then broke both ankles after crossing the finish line. She was euthanized on the track immediately after diagnosis. Please watch the tribute I chose to post about her. So sad.

QUE SERA SERA AT THE SKATING RINK

When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother, "What will I be?
Will I be pretty, will I be rich"
Here's what she said to me.
Que Sera, Sera,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Que Sera, Sera

This evening, I took my oldest son to the skating rink. Not just any old skating rink, but Champions Roller Rink, the skating rink I went to when I was a young girl. Even though I have been there since my adolescence, tonight really brought back the memories of who I was as a person when I used to go there.

This flood of memories was jogged by a familiar song, a song they used to play when I was a child skating here: Micheal Jackson's "Thriller". Talk about a blast from the past. I was listening to the song and thinking about the video to it, and how we all thought it was so cool back in the day: the pants, the style, the dance, all that was great about 80's Micheal Jackson.

While I was digging the song and trying to remember my skating moves from back in the day, I was watching the people all around me. There were certain people that stood out in the crowd.

One of them was a young girl on the cusp of becoming a woman. She had the curves, and she had a "rocking body", but she also bore braces and bad skin. She stood out out in the crowd mostly because her outfit, a white crop top tank and black low riding short shorts, was displaying a lot of skin, and because she was fast and graceful. She was the fastest skater in the fast skate round, and during the regular songs, she danced on skates while singing along with the song that was playing, performing for her friends. She could turn around on a dime and started moving backwards, her feet keeping rhythm with the beet of the song, swinging her hands around.

There was another woman there who was older, and slower. She looked to be in her fifties, with long greying hair and lines on her face. She was listening to a headset and watching a pedometer. She was wearing loose jeans and a button down shirt worn loosely. She mostly kept in the back corner near the wall.

And I skated next to my son (although not too close, because he has a wide stance on his inline skates and sometimes moves his feet erratically) and ran through an entourage of memories of my youth spent here.

When I was going to the rink often, it was in a time in my life where the future was still a very magical possibility. I stopped going around the time I started junior high, a couple of years younger than Ms Hot Stuff in her short shorts. I would gauge MHS to be around fifteen years old. I feel like she is at the age where she thinks about sex, but hasn't experienced it yet. With that rocking body and enthusiastic attitude, I am sure it is not long before some boy tries. That's just the way life is. She is about to experience her future.

I stopped going skating when my future was still a dream, and held many possibilities, back when the wonder was always present on our lips. What will my life be like? This was still during the age of Barbie, and all that she represented.

You know, that Barbie was a real 'ho. She was always going out with Ken, and sometimes they did very naughty things in the backseat of the pink Corvette. And we wondered, will I be pretty?, as we brushed Barbie's hair and put on her stilleto heels. We met boys at the skating rink at the end of my days there, maybe got phone numbers! but we never called. We wondered if we would ever ride in cars with boys to dances and parties, if we would ever fall in love, get married, have children and families. Would anybody ever love us? Would anybody find us beautiful?

Only I find it odd that we should make that connection between attractiveness and love. It is not only attractive people that are loved and allowed to breed. In our society, we have an equal opportunity procreation pattern. There are many people we meet in the world that are not attractive (to us) but have marriages, families, children, people who love them and perhaps think of them as beautiful even if the world does not. You are not barred from the world of love for not being beautiful.

I think MHS is beautiful, and will be loved in part because of that. It reminded me suddenly of pictures I had looked at over at my friend J.'s house the night before, and how I had been fixating on them. J. was like "get over yourself already" and I was trying to explain "but it's subjective, and personal", that I was thinking I just looked a whole lot better in these pictures than I have recently. That girl in the pictures was so far removed from me, she seemed like someone else. I didn't even recognize her bones. But dang, she was a hottie.

I thought about the answer to that question hanging in the air when I was a child: well, was I pretty? For a while, I was, and I still sometimes do all right. I went to the skating rink before I had a boyfriend, and I ended up having many of them. Before I had left junior high, I'd gone through about thirty little "boyfriends"; you know, during that stage where you're "going together", as in "will you go with me?" scrawled in ink pen on a college ruled notebook and passed over to you in class, or in a note at your locker, or face to face on a dancefloor. Most of my boyfriends lasted about two weeks, before my fickle heart ran some other way. My junior high notebook has many a young boy's name scribbled, pledges of undying love. Hilarious.

In high school it was the cars, although it was never quite like Ken picking Barbie up in the black Ferrari. For me, it was more like "dad's landshark" or "the old Ford", something like that. At any rate, there were dates, dates with boys with cars to dances and parties. There was first love, first heartbreak, first fights and first fooling arounds. There was all that and more. Then there was college. Yikes.

I thought about the plans we were making for our lives back then, what did we imagine we'd do. Will I be rich? Will I have all the things I wanted to have? I could never have imagined my having the various jobs I've had when I was a child. I don't know that my imagination stretched that far. I'd had a vague idea I wanted to work with animals, but how?

Geez, during those days, I have to admit, I was much more about Brenda Breyer than Barbie. I played Barbie with my friends, but when I was alone, I had Brenda. I wanted to be Brenda Breyer when I grew up. I wanted to have a stable full of horses, and different riding gear, and make my living the way she did: running a boarding/training stable, teaching horseback riding lessons, "breaking" colts, raising foals. Funny, I did have some of that, though, looking back. Lots of horses in my professional life, at a few times ran a barn for a short time, taught lessons, acted as a breeding assistant and mare widwife. I made more per hour teaching private riding lessons than I have ever made, but the problem was I didn't have enough horse to do that full time. I taught lessons off my horse, and sometimes I "borrowed" a horse (with permission) from the stable owner, and they can only be worked so long. I remember in those days thinking that if I jst had eight more horses, I could make a good living doing that. And sometimes that was my job, but with someone else's horses; three different summers as a camp horsemanship instructor, the one who fed the horses twice a day, who picked their hooves and saddled them for the children, then led lessons with twenty horses and twenty children every hour for six, eight hours a day.

I got a little of what I wanted, but it didn't come to total fruition. I didn't become rich caring for animals, in the financial sense, but emotionally I did, I did realize my goal. I became rich of heart instead. What would you rather have?

As we were leaving, I saw the older lady coming to take off her skates. She sat down next to her husband and he made some smartass remark, and she bit into him with a bitterness. You could feel the tension, her anger, their drama, and that is was a worn and familiar refrain to them. It made me sad and hope to never be like them, and how sad her life must be. Marriage.

Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?

Will I ever fall in love, get married, have a family?

And I had some of that, all that, and I am glad. I fell in love five times, and that's more than most people get. I have a family, a husband that has his moments and two sparkling, darling little boys. I thouht of my old BFF from back in the skating days, and how she is married with three boys, about the ins and outs and ways and means of married life, about the couple I was witnessing, and their failure to redeem their marriage.

I thought about MHS and her shining, precious future, and wished her the best.

Whatever will be, will be