While a third book of the trilogy will appear next year, a movie short being produced of the “The Journey of the Stone Man” can today be seen at the author’s website, Edward Mooney Jr.com.
Anyone who can become a teacher of the year in this huge and crazy state is a rare breed indeed. This kind of teacher is characterized by commanding a classroom – not by threats or attitude, or leverage of social tiers – but by compelling classroom presentation.
In my years of teaching I have had the privilege of watching in the classroom a few very rare teachers like Mr. Mooney whose classroom presentation commands a room. I don’t count myself in this level of teaching. Maybe if I could get some genetic engineering inserted in me I could get near there.
But I have also seen some terrible teaching, and I always see a reason connected with terrible teaching – the teacher has little interest in what is supposed to be taught. Also, the terrible teachers at some point always tend to use the same words in describing themselves: “I’m not here to be an entertainer.”
But I have one other great teacher like Mr. Mooney many times perform brilliant teaching day after day. Her name was just Cadence. And Cadence was the one who taught my daughter to ride and jump a high hurdle.
I wrote about Cadence in August of 2008 here during the big Burbank equestrian completion that happens around this time at the Burbank Equestrian Center. For those of you don’t know Cadence, I would like to present her again:
Gentle Cadence
If human beings have become miserable for trading 10,000 years of glorious horseback riding for wretched cars, don’t blame that on Cadence, the great teaching horse of Don-E-Brook farm in Santa Clarita.
As anyone who knows this old West Side horse will recognize, one of the first lessons taught to her first-time student riders is that as long as the child is riding Cadence, the child will never be alone. No, the child will be with Cadence, and they will be closely attached.
This will stand in vivid contrast to practically anyone today who is overcome with road rage. Road ragers are always riding alone. Often they are stirred up by inflammatory music or maybe some infuriating subject on Talk Radio. They are not happy campers and they are very alone and extremely angry – as is basically any the other driver who nonetheless can manage to contain his rage over gridlock and gasoline.
Knowing that no one wants to be this alone and so fearful, Cadence’s trot always gave her young riders a gentle rocking of a soothing boat at sea or an eternal mother rocking a cradle. Back in history, this “cadence” was the way that mustang ancestors surely soothed the loneliness of cowboys and cowgirls on the lonely plain.
My daughter Stephanie started rising and jumping competitively with Cadence in 2004, when Stephanie was aged 13 and the horse was 20 years old. Twenty-years old is terribly ancient to be a competitive jumping horse, but that’s not all. Cadence’s head stood almost a half a foot shorter than most of the splendid sprinters and the former professional race horses that she jumped against. At the annual summer ETI jumping contests in the Burbank Equestrian Center, Cadence would walk into the arena with a swift feminine style that vividly contrasted against the expansive macho striding of the big male horses that were her competitors.
I thought Cadence’s job was basically to just to jump over all the barriers with her and my daughter managing to stay in one piece. But there was going to be a lot more to it than that. It seemed Cadence’s complete program was to teach Stephanie how to flourish as a fellow female in our Southern California culture of cowboys and honchos.
Cadence’s first lesson: Readiness
English equestrian jumping has never been the safest sport in the world, so Cadence’s first job was to always screen her riders for readiness. If anyone came to her who was half asleep or just day dreaming, it would be impossible to even get Cadence tacked.
Cadence fought against being tacked at her Don-E-Brook home whenever someone thought of taking her out for a ride. If it was difficult to saddle her, it would become twice as hard to bridle her head, when she loved to get her big teeth into someone’s fingers. However, I suspected that something was afoot by the fact that Cadence always walked happily to the tacking area. It was simply part of Cadence’s lesson plan that every riding day had to be preceded by a rite of passage in tacking. When Cadence finally decided the rider was ready enough to tack her in spite of all her resistance, she did a little trot step to show that it was time to jump.
All of this whipping up the alertness of her rider at the tacking station had its benefits in Cadence’s safety record. In the years that Stephanie jumped with Cadence, she only fell off once, and that was at the annual ETI tournament in Burbank. At that time, Cadence stopped immediately and waited for Stephanie to climb back on. Then they both finished their run as fiercely as ever. For Cadence, finishing was as important as winning.
Cadence’s second lesson: winning
Cadence was a leased horse that had been temporarily employed out to many student riders at Don-E-Brook over the years. So at first I thought that taking her into any state tournament to jump against highly-maintained privately owned horses would be like going against private retainers with a court-appointed attorney.
However, Cadence didn’t see it that way.
Because Burbank’s ETI tournament offered no cash prizes, there were not that many jumpers who were willing to go through the expenses of travelling to Burbank and boarding themselves and their horses there just to win some flowers and a first-place award. However, for the truly serious competitors, no expense was too much to skip this tournament.
For these reasons, Cadence didn’t have to compete with that many horses – maybe up to a dozen at any given event. But those dozen horses were always extremely competitive.
So at first, when it was time for Cadence and Stephanie to make their run, I counted myself lucky to have had enough dollars that summer to have my daughter simply share this experience with this elite group of privileged horse-owners. Considering the little training we could afford, I thought we should feel lucky just to finish last. Cadence, though, had much bigger things planned.
At their first run, I felt I was seeing a new horse and a new Stephanie. They were in such complete harmony jumping over the hurdles that I could begin to understand how ancient mankind once mistook such harmonious riding for centaurs charging over a plain.
Then in the last lap, Cadence stretched it out. As the clocked played the run out, I thought I was seeing things.
At the end of al the competing runs, it was Stephanie Sharp jumping the 20-year-old Cadence who were named fourth in the state of California. So I was seeing things – a lot of things.
Cadence’s final lesson: graciousness
The time between events at the Burbank ETI tournament can seem especially long during the heat of the summer. Stephanie wisely spent a lot of that time with Cadence at her stall, feeding her carrots and the kind of biscuits that horses need to recharge their energy.
I noticed that this attention paid to Cadence in the look of confidence that gleamed out from the eyes of this little dark horse. I also noticed that as the other big and more muscular horses she competed with were left to themselves in their stalls between events, their eyes in contrast didn’t look competitive art all. In fact, left to themselves in a minimal stall in a strange environment, these big horses from out of town looked confused.
You really had to be there to appreciate this scene. The big horses that were abandoned after their events had that look of abandonment of a person who has just been cashed and trashed. At that time, in fact, America was in the middle of the biggest cash-and-trash mortgage hustle in world history.
I’m talking about the 2001-2007 mortgage hustle that peaked America’s national debt ceiling to over $10 trillion. That mortgage hustle. Somehow Cadence was even addressing that in how she was speaking up for doing business graciously.
In the next event, most of larger horses that had looked abandoned and crashed and trashed between events didn’t even place. They still looked confused. Meanwhile, Stephanie and Cadence came in third in the state of California. At the final lap – perhaps to show her appreciation of the nurturing relationship between her and her rider – Cadence strode into the finish line baring her teeth. Stephanie’s smile bared her smaller teeth.
Chris Sharp- Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. He has recently published a new book titled “Dangerous Learning: The New Schooling in California..” His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.