At the Gowanus Harvest Festival at The Yard today kids lined up for free pony rides offered in a narrow clearing between a grove of lithe trees (what are those beautiful trees?) and what looked like an old loading dock that made a pleasant seat for a long line of kind-looking twenty or thirty somethings.
Two horses were led around by representatives of Brooklyn's famous Black Cowboys, yippee yi yi yay!! One horse was white and brown with spooky blue eyes, the other brown with tender dark eyes. My son rode the one with the blue eyes, bravely, because his last pony ride, at a harvest festival held at Bethel Woods upstate, didn't go so well. The horse he was riding peed, then shivered mightily, and my boy lost his hold and fell onto what most have been very thick sod. He was fine, but not up for another ride. I was traumatized.
The blue-eyed horse my son rode at the festival today jumped a little bit as he first started to walk but then seemed calm. It didn't go so well with the little girl who rode that horse next, a few steps into her ride he started to buck and the little girl went flying off, luckily caught by her father. It was terrifying for everyone.
The man leading the horse started lecturing the onlookers, complaining that the father of the little girl had crowded the horse and that was why he spooked. If that were the reason, then the horse that my 2 year old rode should have done the same thing, because I was walking along beside her the whole time. In fact, the whole thing is my fault because I was doing that, I think. If I hadn't, then the family going next wouldn't have thought they could. But I did ask, and was told I could, and really, after what happened to my son, it wasn't negotiable. Did that make me the gadfly of doubt?
The mother of the girl who fell got on the naughty horse and rode it around with confidence, to show her child that it was OK. Then in a bit, the father put the girl on the horse with her mother and they rode together.
I wouldn't have done that. I would have grabbed my kid and run away. I did do that, I grabbed my daughter off the other horse afraid that all the ponies were going to go nuts and stampede. But that mom made her daughter get back on the horse with inspiring conviction, the beautiful and courageous expectation that children be strong, or maybe it was insane neglect, I don't know which.
We didn't stick around for the bonfire, we took our tired, grumpy children home to watch TV and eat fried chicken. I hope it was good times.
*Above, a mural at the Grecian Corner Restaurant painted in 1975. Long live its painter, Park Slope native Garrity Hugh Collins.
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