the main attraction

It's notably humorous to be in an environment surrounded by people with 'unexpected' bodies, cognition, and social acuity, and still be recognized as the odd one.

I'm greeting riders in the participant lounge, and a tiny boy with Downs' Syndrome peers up my empty sleeve, curious where my arm got to.

I'm waiting to assist a young man with limited verbal ability to mount his horse, and he turns his face to Finneas and plants a firm kiss on my tiny arm.

I'm standing in the middle of the arena, honing my teaching skills, and a young woman who was barely able to overcome her own fear to get on the horse, points toward me and calls out, "What happened to your arm?"

No matter where I go, I'm still different. But it's OK, really; because I like being myself.

But maybe it's not about being different; maybe it's just about recognizing that we are not the same, that we each have something unique to offer.

More than being odd, the program participants are starting to recognize me as familiar. As I enter the pre-riding zone, they run toward me as if I were the Pied Piper of horsemanship; but it's not horses they are anxious to see.

On the trail, one rider, eyes fixed on me, twists his head almost completely backward to get a longer look. I'm certainly amused, and strangely flattered, that in the midst of all the excitement, I'm still the main attraction.

I stifle a smile.

"Look where you are going," I call after him, "or you are going to fall off your horse."

OneArmGirl

new york dreamin'

I hit the big city this weekend. New York City, that is.

I have friends who just had a baby and moved to Queens, which apparently, is kind of a big deal in these parts, even though it means next to nothing to the rest of the world. I told them I could relate because I saw that episode of Sex and the City where Miranda and Steve move to Brooklyn after they have Brady. Everyone laughed politely.

I braced myself to leave the Connecticut countryside which I only recently started to consider home (and I use that term very loosely) and head to the urban jungle.

I've not had a particularly good track record with the city. Not specifically New York, just any urban sprawl; it's loud and hectic and generally overwhelming for me. There was that especially meaningful season in my life when London almost killed me. Incidentally, London Almost Killed Me is a very believable band name.

But I decided to take the train, which gave me plenty of prep time to contemplate the horse country I was leaving and look forward to the mass of humanity I was approaching. I literally went from marshy boat land--literally saw a guy in a hard hat sitting in a boat under a bridge, reading a book--to tenement buildings.

But I need to back this train up a bit...

Several years ago, one of the above mentioned friends, who also happens to be an accomplished dancer, introduced me to an NYC dance company that features dancers with disabilities.

I'm sure I've mentioned the Heidi Latsky Dance company on this blog, but it really bears repeating. After I saw a promo for The Gimp Project, I was hooked. But living in New Mexico, I felt far from the kind of experimental dance scene which I longed to be a part of.

Knowing I would be in the home city of HLD this weekend, on a whim, I sent off a missive to the email address I found on the web site and, within the hour, Heidi herself emailed me back.

And, as they say in another famous Big Apple show...yada yada yada...I had lunch with Ms. Latsky this afternoon.

Suffice to say, it was surreal. We talked dance, disability, politics, angst, pity, sex...and somehow I managed to ingest a spinach and bacon salad. Heidi coined the phrase 'unexpected bodies' for physical disabilities and she wants to do a live person exhibit on disability at the MOMA. She wants me to be in it. What.

I suddenly felt like Phyllis from the Farm, ready to run for the hills. But what I heard myself saying was, "I love it. I would totally do it."

I also heard myself saying that I was craving collaboration and I could see she was getting excited.

"Whatever you want to do," she said, "whether it's a collaboration or something that's just you, I will help you."

I wanted to cry, to be honest.

Back on the city streets heading for the Subway at Times Square, pressed on by throngs of people, I'd never felt so safe and light. If the sidewalk fell away in front of me, I was ready to jump.

[Then, I swear to you, an orange cloaked Tibetan monk walked up and handed me a golden ticket...but when I declined writing my personal info in his little book, he took the ticket back.]

But it's OK, I think I already have mine.

OneArmGirl    

waxing poetic

On Sunday I went to a local fair. Walking through the entrance, a cornucopia of carnival before me, the familiar ferris wheel pinnacling the midway...I felt a wave of deja vu come over me. Not deja vu of former events in my life, but historical, like the deja vu of an earlier America.

And then I ate a barbecue pork sandwich and a foot-long eclair that would certainly offend even the most open-minded of the French. But if not to eat fried fatty meat and cream, why does one go to the fair?

Clapping wax

Why to ride the rides, of course. Or, as I like to say, to practice not vomiting while trying to remember why you thought getting on something called the Tilt 'n Swirl was a good plan after eating the aforementioned cheesy sandwich. And furthermore, why you paid $5 to do this to yourself.

Honestly, I've never been a huge fan of carnival rides, but not until recently did I come to appreciate the freakishness of the fair scene. Granted there were no freak show tents, not even a clown, creepy or otherwise, to be seen, but the aura of the freak show lives on under striped tent tops where carnies still tempt walkers-by with promises of huge blow up alien dolls if you can toss a golf ball into a dixie cup.

But I wasn't tempted till the wax dip hand molds booth. Dip my hand in wax to make an almost instant mold? I had to do it. But dipping my right hand wasn't odd enough for my tastes--Finneas was going under. The hot wax tender wasn't sure about getting Finneas into the wax without accidentally waxing my head too, but I hadn't come this far to walk away without an empty wax hand mold.

So down I went. A casual observer might have surmised that I was attempting to hot wax my entire arm and shoulder--and even now I'm wondering why I didn't just jump into the barrel for a cheap leg waxing. But in the end I came away with a little wax Finneas replica and, because I mentioned it would feel left out, the woman let me wax mold my other hand for a 20% discount. I chose purple and pink to color the wax...I don't know why.

After observing my wax hands sitting on my bedroom windowsill for a day, trying to evaluate why I thought I needed them so badly and not coming up with an answer, I set them on the desk of my instructor training mentor as a token of my appreciation.

It caused a bit of a stir in the office (which made the entire venture well worth it for me), but there they sit to this very day.

OneArmGirl

yoga parties, horse poop and enlightenment (in that order)

Where to begin?

Last night our full moon yoga instructor said "Whatever position you find yourself in is right where you are supposed to be." I later reflected: What if your foot is in the crotch of a yogi on the neighboring mat?

Fan of reds?

What's that you say? You thought I was in Connecticut to learn therapeutic riding instruction? Well, as so often happens in life, you set out to learn one thing and find yourself receiving a generous helping of secondary experiences; last night's yoga by moonshine being just one.

And when I say 'moonshine,' I'm talking the light of that celestial orb and the lightness of one too many glasses of wine. Attempting the tree pose after pinot noir, I regretted placing my mat next to the pool. Thankfully the only liquid I encountered was coursing through my digestive tract and later released into a dark corner of the horse paddock.

I do realize I am so far behind in posting that I'm now posting for last week a day late for this week's post. Never mind; at least we're here now.

Things are well under way back at the ranch (and I use that term loosely). If it weren't for all the 'yoga moonshine' opportunities, I might have time for lesson observations, paper writing, presentation planning, curriculum gathering, assessment giving, and sleeping; but I'm fairly sure posting to this bloggity blog of mine would still be late.

My sincerest of apologies. I feel terrible that I'm so busy making a difference in the lives of people with disabilities that I can't keep up with my commitments to posting. Too snarky?

But all snarkyness aside, my time here in the Northeast (a mere three weeks, I think), is making a huge difference in my life. Not only am I learning things about people and horses and therapeutic process, I'm starting to assemble the puzzling pieces of myself that I've collected thus far. Who could have known that a tiny arm, vaulting, scoliosis, aerial dance, and horse manure were all pointing to one vocation? Certainly not I.

I was helping Marcell to groom Smokey the pony. Marcell is about six foot and Smokey is maybe three feet if he lifts up his head, but that wasn't the greatest challenge: Marcell continually yelled out various words or phrases of his choosing in maddening repetitions. We tried to quiet him, asked him to use his 'inside barn voice,' all to no avail as he would pick up the obsession only seconds after he was silenced.

I was on the verge of trying to out-yell him, when Marcell's previously allusive eye contact caught a glimpse of Finneas from beneath my short sleeve. He was immediately quiet as he reached out a hand proportionate to his body size and gently stroked my little arm, a bemused smile resting where theretofore so much noise had emitted.

Before long, a small crowd gathered to take in the fascinating oddity, asking and touching and smiling. I basked in the effortless attention I'd accidentally commanded, wondering if I will ever learn. I was exactly where I was meant to be.

And so it seems that as I've been wandering through the planned and surprising avenues of my life, well-intentioned but mostly clueless, someone else knew exactly where I was headed all along.

OneArmGirl

yeah yeah

It's coming...hold your...

explain me how

Ok, for those of you still wondering what exactly I was doing to that poor horse in the last post: I was taking his temperature. Yes, rectally.

I am holding a thermometer in the photo, but you can't see it because I am trying not to let it slip into the vast environs of the equestrian buttocks. They told us this can happen, but they did not tell us how the thermometer is retrieved, and I don't care to find out.

I have to say that of all the things I dreamed of exploring at the inception of this blog, taking a horse's rectal temperature was not one of them.

I surprised myself this week by getting excited about task analysis. Yes, task analysis. I can feel some of your eyes just glazed over. Don't go back to watching It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia on Netflix! Stick with me; I promise it'll be good.

Basically, 'task analysis' means breaking down a specific action into a series of smaller steps. For our purposes, I'm not talking hydrogen bomb building here. For riding, I'm talking a task like getting off a horse––that's assuming one has gotten onto the horse in the first place, which is certainly not a given.

You might say to a more experienced rider: "Sally, I want you to dismount," and get the desired task completion. But for a rider who has never gotten off a horse before, or for whom "dismount" sounds so complex, you might as well tell her to "go to the moon," step-by-step directives may be required: like "take your foot out of the stirrup...lean forward...bring your leg back" etc. This sort of thing is exceptionally important in teaching riders with disabilities.

But I'm actually getting lots of practice with two of my housemates for whom English is a second language. I can't just go off spouting run on sentences rot with American slang (as I am terribly prone), and expect anything more than a blank stare.

In an attempt to streamline communication, I've almost naturally begun speaking a strange old-Western-stereotypical-Indian dialect, comprised of single-verb sentences full of monosyllabic words.

"It's OK I take shower now?"

"Yes I'm going to sleep."

"Jedi...like Star Wars."

My new friends are actually surprisingly well-versed in a language that some of them have been speaking for less than a year. But every now and then communication breaks down. I found bread crumbs had invited a scouting troop of ants and called up the stairs:

"Erika, there are ants eating your crumbs on the counter."

"What?"

"Ants on the counter!"

"What?"

"Ants! Ants!"

She came down the stairs and into the kitchen. "Oh, ANTS." she said.

My Korean housemate came to my room tonight, concerned that she may have difficulty communicating with her riding students. As I was trying to reassure her, it suddenly occurred to me that she and the other non-native English speakers may have the advantage when it comes to task analysis.

If you have less words to use, you use less words--and the right few words can speak volumes. I'm pretty sure a Tibetan monk once said that, but if not, I call it.

Simplicity is a language I'm learning to speak.

OneArmGirl

too busy posting to post

Due to a serious avalanche of lecture hours, homework, and horseplay, today's post will be postponed until tomorrow.

Sorry to be a horse's...