Trip Down Memory Lane Part 2

The Dressage Girls

I have often wondered what the value of a university education is. Being from a working class family I thought about it in simple direct terms: to learn some skill and then get a job that utilizes that skill in the future. At Otterbein College I had it all wrong. It was about who you knew and how you signalled that you were a part of that club.

As I attended there I increasingly came to understand that there was an entire social currency which I knew nothing of. Some of this was a result of the large public high school that I had attended in Toledo prior to Otterbein. We all lived in the same working class neighborhood and there wasn’t any large variation in social class. Perhaps your mother worked as a cashier at Kroger or was a nurse or perhaps she was a homemaker and your father held on to his respectible factory job at the Jeep plant. Maybe your parents had a local flower shop or diner or car repair garage.

If your parents were doctors, or university professors, or bankers, you probably didn’t live in that neighborhood and you almost certainly didn’t go to that high school. You probably lived in the suburbs of Ottawa Hills or Point Place and maybe attended Central Catholic (actress Katie Holmes is an alumni of there) or St Joseph’s Academy.

At our high school thus nothing was based on who your parents were or who was funding a dizzying array of scholarships, endowments and grants. Virtually everything was based on your own merit. Start High school had an excellent baseball team and an extremely good basketball and football team to boot. Despite this the school was in no way dominated by jocks as my brainiac high school sweetheart became the alpha of our social network by scoring a perfect SAT score. We beat out the longstanding Jesuit private boys academy to win as Quiz Bowl champs in both my Junior and Senior year in high school as an exceptional District 9ish type of upstart win. My artwork being accepted at a Congressional Exhibit was equal cause for acknowledgment and recognition. In my senior year of high school I ranked 33rd out of 333 students and won the senior keys as the top performer in Art, Science and Choir along with a seperate award as the best vocalist.

In short I came into college with a naive, American Dreamish type of ideaology that talent plus hard work and perserverance was the recipe to get ahead. What a fool I was. My talents were poorly placed in the arts.

I had no idea what type of designer jeans were in style or what kind of car you needed to drive to signal your membership to the club. I was happy if my jeans fit comfortably and would be thrilled for any old car that reliably would get me from point A to point B. There were a dizzying array of proxies for wealth and status and of course you needed to know names of the wealthy and powerful families to boot.

Prior to coming to Otterbein College I had given absolutely no thought to the socioeconomic background of a girl who kept a showhorse at the stables. It radically diverged from my working class priors. My job as a stable hand was simple enough. Every morning except Sunday, which was my day off, I shovelled manure from the stalls into a bin while the horses were walked around the barn for exercise. I cleaned their hooves, did some light grooming, and fed them whatever their specifications were. Most just got hay but some were supplemented with afalfa and oats especially if a show was coming up.

There were about 20 horses at the stables and two which stayed in the paddock out back. I don’t recall any Lusitanos but most were not just any old nags. There were two throughbreds including one named Thunder that I took a shine to, several Westphalians and a type of quarter horse mix which was popular for jumping events. On Saturday the horses were rode by us for exercise and sometimes training on some small jumps. I quickly discovered that I didn’t like English saddle. The stable owner was always on my case about my form and really why do squats when posting is the exact same thing but on a horse so it’s even cooler?

The horses were great. But I quickly discovered that I was psychologically incompatible with some of their owners. There were a fair number of owners that I never saw at all in my months there. This blew me away as I had long dreamed of having a horse and liked to imagine spending all of my free time bonding with it. But I suppose for a certain class of person a showhorse is simply a status symbol like a boat or a luxery car, taken out a few times to impress their peers and then locked away.

The dressage girls, however, did show up, usually on weekends. One lived in my singles residence hall and eyed me very curiously when I first moved in there. She didn’t need to read some personal account in English 101 of me slashing some guy under the throat with my knife while he was trying to rip my pants off and my best friend was getting raped upstairs to know that I had come from a rough and tumble background. I worked for minimum wage at the stables and she knew it.

I wish that I had found a single horse owner who came to the stables who I had a friendly, personal, positive interaction with. I cannot recall a single one. At best the dressage girls ignored the lowly staff that was taking care of their horses. At worst they berated you for doing something wrong. They were generally rude and condescending. I started noticing that the stable hands had high turnover rates.

There was a mousy girl with brown hair and glasses who was driven with me to the stables each morning to work. I liked talking to her and like me she just enjoyed being around horses. After a competition in which one of the horses had performed poorly, the blond haired owner blamed this girl viciously for the loss.

“You didn’t feed the special oats for show day!” The girl began screaming at the stable hand. The mousy young woman looked at the feeding chart posted in front of the stall. It listed oats for show day, but it was apparently some special kind. “Are you stupid? It’s not that fucking hard!” The blond grabbed a metal bucket which was commonly used to feed the horses oats and threw it at the helper’s head.

I found the stable hand sobbing quietly in a stall as she patted her favorite horse. “Are you okay?” I asked her quietly afterwards. She wanted to be left alone in her pain. I never saw her again as the woman who drove us in picked up only me the next morning. She had had enough of that job.

The dressage class took out poor showings on both their horses and the staff. One became angry and punched Thunder on the snout, causing the poor throughbred to whinny and rear with the whites of his eyes showing. I tried to intervene and give her some horse whisperer advice that she’d probably do better in events if Thunder wasn’t scared of her, but she practically spat at me and walked away in a huff. The stable owner seemed to shrug these things off when I voiced my concerns about some of the girls heavy handed treatment of their horses. She almost laughed when I told her about the girl punching Thunder in the snout.

“I’m surprised she didn’t break her fist.” The area between the nostrils is still a sensitive location on a horse. The thoroughbred became increasingly skittish and hard to control. The friendliest, mellowist horses in the stable seemed to be those whose owners never visited them.

I realized after a few short months that equine mangement was not the major for me. It wasn’t about the horses. The whole group seemed to be in these concentric circles of who you knew and how you knew them. I have no doubt that some of these young ladies had deep seated doubts about their own self worth. Very little in their life was being earned on merit, so competition in these events was the only place where they had an even playing field. That was why they were so competitive and took losses so personally.

I mean take this young woman here, who took the fashion world by storm in 2021 for her stunning looks and was quickly signed by a top model house:

She wowed the runway as a “Gen Z style icon” and “accidental superstar.” Here’s her on the catwalk:

She is also a top fashion designer as pictured here:

Somehow I’m not seeing the Christie Brinkley or Coco Chanel. In case you didn’t know, this is Ella Emhoff, vice president Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter. I’m sure that had nothing to do with it.

If you grew up in an environment where praise is lauded on you even after subpar performance, how do you determine your worth? In some ways the dressage girls dismissal of me turned into my ignoring of them. I didn’t want to be around people that automatically discredited me by merit of my social standing. I certainly couldn’t become somebody heaping fake praise on them to try to get ahead myself. I let them be. It wasn’t my crowd.

I decided I wanted out of the stable hand job and checked Otterbein’s office to see if there was anything I could do around campus instead. They only had one opening which had been unfilled the whole year. I understood why and I took it.

The job was as the recycler on campus. The college had recycling bins which took cans and bottles which needed to be emptied and sorted. Some kids put other trash in them which also had to be filtered out. It was perfect.

I got to be the Otterbein College garbage collecter walking around with a gigantic recycling bin and trash bags. I was highly visible on the entire campus to everyone. One of my old roommates snickered nervously the first time she saw me with my bin, but I loved the job. It did the sorting for me of finding those who were interested in me despite my modest roots.

“Hey recycling girl!” Was a common thing that got yelled out to me on campus. Some boys wanted me to clean up after some fraternity parties. Between them and my new friends in the singles dorms I was finding myself psychologically compatible with some others. I just needed to know where to look for them.

For me going to college had nothing to do with the connections I made or the paths to success tht opened for me. Instead it was about leaarning how to be human. It’s a shame the incentive structure seems to work in the opposite direction.

Buy me a ko-fi