Horsemanship

One of the responsibilities of the Country Husband is to stand for hours holding a horse, like a Pittsburgh lawn jockey (a friend who lived in Pittsburgh for a time said that they were a politically correct white there). While this nonactivity at a horse show made for a long, boring Sunday afternoon, the reasons it was long and boring were not boring at all. It turned out that the competition was delayed by my daughter’s teacher, with good reason. She had a bunch of girls participating in the show and made them arrive at her house at 6 a.m. to help ship the horses—there were half a dozen of them—in a trailer. However, they discovered that sometime during the night, someone had pulled the valves out of the tires, poured chocolate over the saddles and bridles they’d cleaned the day before, drained the brake fluid, and yanked out the spark plugs. With no easy way to get her horses to the show, my daughter's teacher pleaded for time and got it, hence the delay.

Now, when I heard this story breathlessly told by the girls’ mothers, I immediately thought of a teenage student who had sabotaged some tack before a competition and was told never to come back. But then it was pointed that this was an adult job, and suspicions immediately fell on a neighbor the teacher has been feuding with. Of course, whoever did this was not only punishing the teacher but her students. And messing with the brakes was not just mischievous but potentially lethal. The cops have been called in, but there is doubt that they can prove anything.

I don’t know what to make of this, other than to say that some people never grow up.