When I was around 11, my parents signed me up for horseback riding lessons. I don’t know whose idea it was, but I was eager for them. My brother Steve was enrolled too, with or shortly after me, but he never took to the sport the way I did. I have a vivid memory of him mounted on an ornery palomino named Wasp, unable to control the gelding in any way. Wasp just walked forward, backward or wherever regardless of Steve’s motions.

We took English type lessons, which are lovely and as impractical as super-long fingernails. An English saddle is light on the horse, but the rider can’t use the stirrups to bear any weight. The bridle is softer in the horse’s mouth than a Western rig, but the rider has to use both hands on the four reins. English riding lessons are posture exercises, leg work for the posting the rider does when the horse trots, indentured training with the goal of someday jumping, similar to the way ballet training holds the promise of toe shoes.

I loved it. I happily put up with the protocols in order to feel the horse move beneath me under my control. I liked the sensation of bending back in the saddle till my head touched the horse’s rump. I clucked naturally to the animals, I looked them in the eyes and cupped their velvet muzzles. We got along.

The lessons were at the livery stables in Bonita, through the lemon groves just north of our house and down the hill to the beginning of that unincorporated community. I could still ride my bike to those stables now if they hadn’t built the freeway – I got to know the route well a year or two later, when I had friends there – but I’m sure Mom drove us to those lessons.

I don’t remember why we stopped, but I got to continue riding. A year or two later, when I was in junior high, I made friends with Alice and Susie and others who lived in Bonita, and they owned horses. Alice’s family had a retired polo pony named Polopony (accent on the second syllable); we rode him double. Susie’s big gelding was named Bubbles. There was another girl we hung with, someone we didn’t like much but she had two horses, and I can’t remember her name. But I remember Dingo. The nameless almost-friend rode a young part-Arabian herself, but she had a spare ride, an old quarter horse named Dingo, who became my friend. Dingo was a plodder except on the short course up by the water tank, where he’d beat all others. Mostly we just walked around. But no saddle was required. Even a bridle was optional. We spent time together. We swam in the pond together.

I don’t know what it is about teenage girls and horses, but I had it. Most will pooh-pooh when I say it wasn’t about sex. It wasn’t. It was friendship with a big warm protective mammal, present at the first time of self-aware transition.

By the time I was 14 I was okay being a teen. I no longer needed a horse.