get us off this treadmill!

Oy veh, as my friend Alyssa would say. The clock is wind­ing down to the end of the school year and every­one involved (me included) seems deter­mined to fill every avail­able hour. Let’s see, in the next seven days we have: an art exhi­bi­tion at school, a horse­back rid­ing les­son, a skat­ing les­son, an act­ing les­son, one after-school party, one birth­day party, a play to go to on Sat­ur­day, my own din­ner party on Sun­day for ten, two per­for­mances of the school play, another rid­ing les­son, my writ­ing class, a friend’s going away-Fourth of July party for 80 to help organ­ise, the school Prize Day and a pizza party. Can this be true? Surely by the end, when we step onto the plane to go home for the sum­mer, we will all be in a state of ner­vous col­lapse. And con­sider this: we adults aren’t actu­ally even DOING most of this stuff. It’s the getting-to and home from more than any­thing else.

But there have been won­der­ful bits. The stable-wide Pony Club horse show on Sun­day was, despite the per­sis­tent driz­zle, an absolute delight. The day started off with a bang when Figaro, the largest horse in the sta­ble, threw Avery off and onto one of the jumps. Ouch. Her lit­tle fin­ger still hurts today (luck­ily she doesn’t need it much). She was roundly applauded for get­ting right back on, but Figaro was hav­ing none of it and finally the instruc­tor decided cau­tion was the bet­ter part of valor, and put her on Smokey. This ful­filled her long-held dream, because nor­mally Smokey is held back for inex­pe­ri­enced rid­ers, while Avery’s put on the back of any­thing that moves too quickly for other peo­ple. A nice reward for bravery.

A friend had called the night before to ask if I wanted to take part in a bake sale at the show, to pay some­thing toward the farrier’s inevitable bill, so sure, I pro­duced some really odd brown­ies from a cou­ple of boxes of Betty Crocker mix. Two things proved to be true as a result of my efforts: Thing One is that you really do need the num­ber of eggs the box says you need. My casual, devil-may-care atti­tude of around 1 a.m. the night before the show (“Four eggs, three eggs, what dif­fer­ence does it make?) was proved mis­guided in that the brown­ies sim­ply didn’t rise. They remained obsti­nately slumped, which the rain did noth­ing to improve. Thing Two I learned, how­ever, was that slumped brown­ies are, in the eyes of hun­gry young pre-adolescent horse-crazy girls, much bet­ter than the kind that used four eggs. So there.

Becky con­tributed deli­cious cook­ies and my other friend rice-krispie treats (which vir­tu­ally melted in the humid­ity), and other del­i­ca­cies. Through it all we con­sumed our own lunches, brought in husband-boggling abun­dance (Mark asked, “can’t we just each pack a sand­wich?”, silly man), to be con­sumed under the amaz­ingly effec­tive tent my friend brought along on the shoul­ders of her son, on his way to col­lege. What a way to spend your last day, shoul­der­ing bur­dens in the rain with a lot of girls in jodh­purs run­ning around on sugar highs.

It was so cozy to be there with two of my favorite girl­friends in the world, gos­sip­ing, prais­ing each other’s com­pletely remark­able chil­dren, watch­ing our hus­bands chat and take pic­tures. Once when John and Becky walked to her car to get some­thing, and I watched their backs as they strode away, talk­ing six­teen to the dozen, I thought, “Don’t let any­thing change. Every­thing is per­fect just as it is.” Later that day Avery was to be found in her bed­room, adding the day’s quan­tity of rosettes to the already bulging rib­bon strung around her bed. “I can’t really jus­tify these two being here, since I didn’t earn them. They were just the favors, remem­ber, from my last birth­day in New York.” She’s noth­ing if not bru­tally honest.

Let’s see, what else has been hap­pen­ing? Oh!! Tues­day I met, in per­son for the first time, my blog friend Lara. We have long been cor­re­spond­ing about the enor­mous prob­a­bil­ity that we’ve already seen each other, since we haunt the same gro­cery store, patis­serie, book­store. But finally we made a plan to meet up at her flat quite near to me, and size each other up in per­son. And “size up” was indeed part of the expe­ri­ence, as she is unex­pect­edly tall and quite sim­ply gor­geous, in the way of a par­tic­u­lar sort of Eng­lish girl, I’m find­ing. Per­fectly nat­ural, casual, and yet with the sort of effort­less grace that I think comes from being descended from gen­er­a­tions of inter­est­ing peo­ple. Truth to tell, she’s a dead ringer for one of my favorite British actresses, Kee­ley Hawes. If Lara weren’t such a nice per­son I’d be dread­fully envi­ous, but we got down to seri­ous chat­ting right away and the cou­ple of hours we had at our dis­posal dis­ap­peared very quickly. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: life would be very sad with­out girl­friends. I had a seri­ous case of tod­dler envy when her lit­tle boy woke up from his nap and enter­tained us by say­ing the words for every­thing that crossed his field of vision.

Then yes­ter­day I had a lovely time with my friend Dalia, gos­sip­ing over lunch at Richoux just around the cor­ner, and then we headed to the Cur­zon May­fair to take in “Tell No One,” a really scary but clever French filmic take on the hugely pop­u­lar Har­lan Coben novel. Great act­ing, char­ac­ters you really care about, a com­plex plot with a cou­ple of holes (or maybe I’m just being dumb). If you can take a bit of vio­lence, and quite a bit of fran­tic nail-biting, go see it.

I would close with a recipe, as is my wont, but… I don’t have one! I’ve been cook­ing all the same old stuff lately, but I promise to try some­thing new in the next day or two so I have some­thing to tell you. Wouldn’t want to let you down.