Not A Bicycle With Legs After All

I spent half an hour on an actual live horse and did not fall off. Of course, this accomplishment belongs mostly to my instructor. As it turns out, a horse isn't just a bicycle with legs. Not a canoe with legs, either, though I might be able to make a case for likening one to a sea kayak.

L chose for my half hour a very patient mare, 14 hands high at the shoulder if I remember right. By contrast, I am fifteen hands high in total. I had to stand on tiptoe to curry her. (Is that what I call it? Did I curry her? That sounds so carnivorous.) Babe's not that tall, as horses go, but she's a bulky draft horse. "Horses are perpetual two-year-olds," said L. "She'll test you. They're always testing their limits." Sure enough, while we led her from the stable to the barn, Babe tried to walk me into a couple of walls just to show me she knew I wasn't really the boss. L, Babe, and I were a herd of three, and L was at the top of the herd hierarchy, so Babe wanted to let me know I was at the bottom. I know what to do with that kind of behavior when I get it from my sister's labrador retriever, but it is a different dynamic with a draft horse. Fortunately, L kept Babe on a lunge line once I was actually in the saddle. "Our belief is that no one can be responsible for controlling a horse until they can control themselves on the horse," said L. I was very glad L was in charge, because if L hadn't been, Babe would have been.

It's true, what everyone says about how startlingly high off the ground you are the first time you're on a horse. Surely it must get less startling later.

The eighteen months of Tai Chi I have behind me now made everything easier. As far as I can figure it, proper position on a saddle is pretty much a Tai Chi stance, with the weight on the butt instead of on the feet. I haven't done a lot of Push Hands in Tai Chi, but riding seems to be a sort of partnered Tai Chi form. Push Spines, maybe?

Through the half hour it took us to ready the horse, and the half hour I spent not falling off the horse, and then the half hour it took us to tidy the horse up and put her away, L kept up a constant stream of wonderful chatter. We had the naming of parts, and bits of military history, and the teaching customs L picked up from her teacher, who was in the Chilean cavalry. I've done enough ethnography training that it pained me to have neither notebook nor tape recorder.

Some things are lodged permanently in my head, though.

Much of the rider's task is to keep the horse from recognizing that she is more powerful than the rider is. The moment a horse really catches on that she is larger and stronger than every one of the humans around her, she becomes irredeemably dangerous and has to be put down. The humans are responsible for protecting the horse from the mortal peril of understanding her strength. If the horse is lucky, she stays ignorant throughout a long life of one of the things she is actually capable of knowing.

Now I see how the protagonist of this little novel I've been working on since November will think about her predicament. The horse's problem is not really the problem Stisele has, but this is how she'll try to explain what she's leaving behind, when she finally does defect.

The prequel feels possible again. Not possible before June, but possible.

Hanami

The year of my first hanami, I was seven. It was our first spring in Japan, and we lived on Fifth Armored Infantry Battalion Drive on the US Army base in Sagamihara. A few blocks up the road lived an old couple. Mr. B was a guy who had served his twenty years active duty but had some special expertise that made him necessary to keep around even though he wasn't in uniform anymore. He and Mrs. B had been stationed everywhere an army couple could be stationed around the Pacific. They'd had kids in most of those places--one in Okinawa, and one in the Philippines, and another in Korea, and I think maybe two in Guam. I don't even remember how many children they had, but it was a lot. All of them were grown and gone by the time they took my family under their wings. My mother's parents were both dead--my grandmother just a few weeks before we moved to Japan--and my father's parents were seven thousand miles away. Mr. and Mrs. B were...not in loco parentis in the legal sense, but in loco grandparentis, as it were. They were a little bit loco, more to the point. Which was a good thing.

One Saturday in March, 1977, my parents took my sister and me to the B family's back yard, where we were to be introduced to the Japanese custom of O Hana Mi--that was how Mr. B spelled it out. Honorable Flower Viewing. The particular flowers we viewed were the dozen or so tentative blossoms on a two-foot-tall sakura sapling in a clay pot. The clay pot sat on a picnic bench in the Bs' back yard through a long afternoon of barbecue and sake. My sister and I, being seven and three, had no sake, but we got to enjoy the strange spectacle of my parents drinking to the point of visible tipsiness. This was something we'd never seen before, and it was fascinating. Left me with a healthy respect for sake, let me tell you. Mr. B and my father drank many decreasingly eloquent toasts to the cherry sapling. I wish I could remember them.

This was the day Mrs. B first lent me a book. Over the three years we lived in Sagamihara, she lent me many, many books. This first one had been her children's great favorite, and I'd never heard of it before. It was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first fantasy novel I ever read. She had all seven books, of course, and later for one of my fourth grade book report projects, my mother and I would labor together for days to make a big map of Narnia and all its neighboring nations. The map was taller than me. I think my parents still have it, somewhere in the dragon hoard of their house.

It was our second year in Japan that my family did a proper hanami at the famous park in Ueno, the one you'll see on CNN every year when the sakura zensen, the cherry blossom front, sweeps northward up the islands. The sakura zensen is sweeping away from me now--the cherry petals are falling, and the appleblossoms are opening. Appleblossoms are a different rush of memory. Awash in the scent of appleblossoms, I am always nineteen, and a fencer, and just a little bit lovely. I'll be remembering those things soon. Today, though, I am saying goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. B. One more heavy rainfall, and the cherry blossoms will be gone.

I don't know what happened to them. I don't know where they are now, or if they are. I don't know what became of any of their children, really. I mean, I have an amusing story about the time their daughter L hid in my parents' apartment in Seoul to avoid the amorous attentions of the Prince of Monaco, but that story's not really mine--I was seven thousand miles away at the time. People say the cherry blossom is the emblem of impermanence, but it's also a kind of recurrence, a rhythm. All good things must come to an end, and all good things must come to a beginning. Mr. and Mrs. B lent us their books, their piano, their good sense, and their cherry tree. They made my writing possible. I hope they're still somewhere, maybe somewhere a little bit north of here, watching the petals open.