Let me give you a bit of my background. I was riding horses almost before I could walk. My father was a cowboy from South Dakota (he also earned a degree in Metallurgy from The School of Mines in Rapid City, SD. He went to work for a steel company in Chicago, where I was born. We were then transferred to Connecticut). and when we returned to the Midwest during the summer (summer’s in Fairfield were unbearably hot and humid, so my parents craved the dry heat and cool mornings and evenings of South Dakota then — and only then–) to visit relatives, there were always horses for him to ride. So he plopped me up behind him and, while the horse took off at a gallop, stopped on a dime, and turned quickly, I hung on for dear life. I did not have the reins. Nowadays that would probably be called child endangerment; back then, it was called ‘fun’. (It has dawned on me since that my Father might have preferred a son!) So, while I learned nothing about how to control a horse, I learned a great deal about how the back end of a horse moves, as well as what to expect when a horse bucks or rears. This was either a terrifying or an exhilarating experience, depending on the circumstances. I never let go; I never fell off. I learned to love horses and to respect their power and speed.
Fast-forward to childhood days — my parents insisted I take lessons in everything but — you guessed it– horseback riding. I pleaded, I whined, I threatened to leave home (with a suitcase packed full of my horse books, not the lightest way to make a getaway), to no avail. My mother hated horses; my father insisted that all you had to do was get on them and ride. And so, I found myself doing just that, whenever the opportunity presented itself.
Extended family in Shelton, Connecticut, had a large farm. In addition to nearly 100 cats (that is another story) the Parrotts sheltered other animals that were in distress or had been given to them. One of these was an albino Arabian horse called “Sandy”. Sandy had blue eyes and pink skin — a pale horse– and, because of his coloring, could not be shown. Sandy lived with two cows in a pasture across the street from the Parrotts rambling 1600’s colonial house. Whenever we went to visit, I got to ride Sandy around the pasture. (Ironically, as I was tightening Miles’ girth during a dressage lesson the evening Hurricane Sandy was closing in on the New York metro area, including my home town of Fairfield, CT, I said to my instructor, “that’s funny — the only horse I was allowed to ride with any regularity as a child was named ‘Sandy’.:-0)
Not satisfied, when my parents forced me to attend ballroom dancing classes at the Patterson Club in Fairfield, CT, in order to meet ‘the right kind of young men’ (from the top of Greenfield Hill, not from the bottom of the Hill, where we lived) I quickly assessed my dancing partners in terms of whether or not they had horses, as the Hill was full of horse estates and lovely horse paths through the woods. And so began a cycle of what I would call ‘white-knuckle Western riding’. I waited for everything to come naturally, as my father insisted it would, but to no avail. When one day I found myself on a runaway Paint galloping along the Merritt Parkway, with pine trees on one side and the oncoming New York-bound traffic on the other, I realized, as I managed to bring the horse to a halt, with one foot in the stirrups and one hand on the reins, that my ‘riding skills’ had brought me to a dead end. I dismounted to loudly chastise the horse, then rode back to the barn with my buddy Frank from the Hill shaking his head in disbelief (“this horse NEVER acted this way before, it must have been YOU”)…and decided that someday I would learn how to ride correctly, whatever that meant, and whatever it took.
During the next phase of my life, my love of horses took me to various racetracks, where I came to realize that, despite the danger to horse and rider, I was caught up in the thrall of thoroughbred racing. When Canterbury Downs opened in Shakopee, MN, I even considered it a gift especially for me, as one of its founders was the man responsible for bringing me to Minnesota. With family in LA, I also made a point of going to those great tracks whenever I could. I dreamed someday of buying an off the track racehorse.
And then I discovered therapeutic horseback riding. A wonderful organization used a barn not far from me. I became a side-walker, and then a leader. I took every class they had during the winter. I did ground conditioning twice a week in an unheated indoor arena, re-training the horses, after an 8-week vacation, in how to stand at the lift, move with the leader, and how to withstand every sort of desensitizing known to man. And whenever the opportunity presented itself, I got to ride their horses — usually with just a pad and overgirth. I decided to become a TA, and realized that if I wanted to become an instructor I needed to learn how to ride correctly. And so my childhood dream, after all this time, was about to become a reality. Or was it? :-0
Because I had started out Western, I first took Western riding lessons. After I few lessons I said to myself, ‘well, yes, you sit in the saddle. Loose reins, floppy legs, I get it. But isn’t there more to it than that?’ So then I tried Saddleseat equitation. I discovered that those horses are not imo very well-treated (in their stalls 24/7 for the most part, high heeled shoes, and worse) and decided that if I ever had a horse it would never be treated that way. But I did learn something about how to trot. And I discovered I had a bete noir living inside me that I had never dealt with — the posting trot. I was not able to please my instructor, I discovered, as she cracked a whip in the center of the arena, crying ‘three to five miles an hour, go faster!’ Every time she cracked the whip, my lesson/showhorse went up a bit. Finally, after a lesson with a broken girth strap (“Oh you’re probably just making that up, she sneered, during the lesson, later did ‘apologize’ when she saw it flapping) I decided to take a break. Bemoaning my situation and bad luck, it seemed, to the barn manager of the therapeutic group, she cheerily suggested, “Well, you need to do dressage!”. “You must be joking,” I said in disbelief. “That’s much too fancy for me.” But off I went, in anxious trepidation, to study with an instructor she recommended.
At a lovely barn I will call “Crosshairs” I found myself riding a fabulous lesson horse who I later realized was doing all my work for me. The instructor, whom I felt I had no alternative but to nickname “Cruella” because of the harshness of her Germanic-style dressage (my interpretation, its either a ‘1’ or a ’10’) and more, I found myself thrown into the extraordinary world of ballet-with-horses. Every bone, every muscle of both rider and horse is scrutinized, analyzed, practiced, and, ultimately, scored. I said, “Whoa, Nelly!” This was the complete opposite of my white-knuckle Western experiences. Could I possibly do this? I would, I decided, or die trying. :-0
Hooves R Us 
Beautifully written, and , a great story, thank you.for sharing.