I went to the fair recently, supposedly to study horses for my book, but actually I went to have fun. Hot, thick air, too many people, animals sweltering on clean straw with gigantic fans blowing constantly to keep them as cool as possible, the contrasts between huge metal barns and the open spaces with grass trampled almost to death and the sickening but enticing smells of disparate sorts of food mingling together ….
And they had jousting, and a pirate with parrots. If they'd added a fencing competition I may well have embarrassed myself with some sort of inappropriate public display.
Not that sort of inappropriate! I have a tiny shred of dignity laying around here somewhere.
It was in this wonderful but very typical summer setting that I saw him.
I watched the English trot competition for a long while. Girl on horse, woman on horse, woman on very fine horse, tiny girl on horse, beautiful girl on weird horse, older woman on stunning horse whose tail dragged the ground and that walked like he was the king of horses …
And I walked among the stalls where the horses waited for their various events, and watched the mothers with the horses talking to their daughters in various riding costumes and young girls with ponies and a gregarious matron trying to soothe a miniature horse squealing for his best friend (also a miniature horse) that had to go outside for a quick bath ….
In the last line of stalls, I saw him. A boy. A young man, really, large-eyed, dark hair, painfully thin. I realized what I'd seen but hadn't noticed before because it's always been this way at every fair I've been to.
All the participants are women.
And he definitely was not.
It made him exceptional. It made me want to say hi, to learn more about him. I decided that it wouldn't be appropriate to intrude. And there really wasn't anything, other than the difference in gender, that justified that feeling that he was somehow exceptional. He may have been a very fine rider, or a poor one, or just average. He may have come from a background where riding horses was work, and he wanted to compete to see how he measured up, expecting that his training on the job would help him do well. Or he may have begun from infancy in a family obsessed with horse competitions, or he may have owned a horse that he felt ought to be shown and his parents supported him because there really wasn't any reason why he shouldn't. Sometimes it's something very simple and ordinary that puts a person into an unusual situation.
I've been in a similar situation before, feeling like a duck in a room full of computers. From their perspective it made me exceptional, and people treated me like I was something special, when really I was just a duck. But I managed to fit in in my own way, and I suspect this boy does too. That in and of itself is exceptional. So maybe I was right in thinking him as extraordinary in some way. Maybe I should have said hi.
Nah. He had important stuff to do, and think about, and I'm sure he's been pestered enough about being different, both in positive and negative ways. I hope he does well at the fair. And after the fair is over, he and his horse will go home and be ordinary again. Ordinary friends with ordinary things to do, with chores, and fun stuff, and the day-to-day.
I love going to the fair. So many of the ordinary things I see there are exceptionally wonderful.