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ClinicJuly 09, 2006 In most of the dimensions I dwell in if you say you've been to a clinic people will put on their concerned and possibly apprehensive faces and ask if you're OK. In the horse dimension, it means you've had a lesson with someone who isn't your regular teacher -- someone who probably comes from somewhere else. You don't have to have a regular teacher to ride in a clinic. I don't, though I've learned plenty from Ginny, my barnmate, who goes to clinics regularly and rides a helluva lot better than I do. (I almost wrote who clinicks regularly but didn't, partly out of respect to my fellow sojourners in the editorial dimension and partly because I don't know whether "clinicks" should have a "k" in it. Probably yes, because "cliniced" and "clinicing" are mispronunciations waiting to happen.) Denizens of the writerly dimension: for "clinic," think "workshop." Writers say things like "I workshopped with Famous Writer A," not unlike equestrians who say "I clinicked with Member of U.S. Olympic Team." However, writers also say things like "I workshopped my new story," whereas equestrians do not generally claim to have clinicked their green horses. Green horses can be any color. Allie was both green and bay when I got her. Green leather needs immediate attention. Green potato chips should be avoided at all costs. Tricky language, English. So I rode Allie in a clinic this afternoon. The clinician's name was Lucy; I'll fill in the surname when I know how to spell it. I'd watched Ginny ride with her at another barn and been impressed. As clinic day approached, I was excited and also apprehensive: Allie and I took lessons regularly our first four years together but for the last going-on-three years we've made do with informal coaching and a lot of trial-and-error. So the clinic was a little like a midterm: How do we measure up? What does someone who doesn't know us have to say? Not far below my surface is someone who's chronically afraid that she's going to be laughed out of contention. I went through the "what shall I wear" anxieties, specifically "should I wear my tall boots?" Most riders wear tall boots in lessons and clinics; in some quarters it's considered disrespectful or nonprofessional not to come almost as spiffily turned out as one would to a show. I have a pair of tall boots but I only wear them to shows because they aren't very comfortable. (A friend bought them for $50 at a secondhand store then sold them to me because I needed a pair and these fit my wide calves. They fit even better with the gussets the cobbler inserted for $20. Good tall boots can cost $400 and up, and custom-mades considerably more, so I'm not dissing my $70 boots. I'd just rather ride in my paddocks. Well, not to have worried: all went swimmingly. We worked on my main objective: getting Allie to "go deeper" in a "longer frame," meaning she takes longer strides that are powered by the hind legs instead of pulled along by the front. (Explanation will seem inadequate to horse people and incomprehensible to non-horse people. Think of it as an intermediate-level skill that should be mastered before you even think about more advanced work.) Allie worked hard, I worked hard, and Lucy called Allie "the cute one," which pleased Allie very much. So did the oatmeal cookie that she got afterward. Ginny and Megan, another barnmate, videotaped (no tape, it's digital, but "videoed" or "video'd" looks even weirder than "cliniced") all the rides in the clinic, including mine. I watched a few minutes in the small screen of Ginny's camera. I've never watched myself ride before -- well, not since the home movies my father took when I was a kid. I was surreptitiously relieved to see that I didn't look like an ungainly oaf; Allie and I actually looked rather stylish, though we weren't dressed to the nines. One of these days I'll get to see the whole show on DVD, like one of these days I'll get to hear what I sounded like on the radio last Monday. I survived watching myself on TV this past winter -- I even watched several reruns.
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