The Pony Will Always Be Special To Me

Yet another vignette from last weekend's writers' conference...

The Pony is a writer of science fiction, fantasy, and poetry. He discovered his talent a couple of years ago. When I asked if he wanted to attend this conference a while back, he was all for it, even though he knew he was going to have a busy summer. So far, four weeks have been taken up by tutoring elementary students for his A+ program, Missouri Boys State, and an engineering camp at the college Genius attends. He's had several edits to do for his story that is being published in Building Red: Mission Mars, an anthology which should be out in August.

At the conference, The Pony and I sat together for the welcome and the opening keynote speaker. The Pony is a laid-back kind of fellow, but he must always be fiddling with something. We found this out way back in elementary school. His scratchings were almost illegible. He had a heavy hand with the pencil. In fact, he hated to write. He finished his work quickly, and sometimes his idle hands got him into trouble. The school hooked him up with an occupational therapist who suggested that he have something to do with his hands while listening to the lesson, or after he finished his assignments. We got him a variety of stress balls to squeeze while waiting for his next task.

Once a ball-squeezer (heh, heh, I said ball-squeezer), always a ball-squeezer. He outgrew this therapeutic crutch somewhat. The troublemaking waned, but The Pony was still a fiddler. Bending he corner of his paper, twisting his pencil, bouncing his eraser. He needed something to occupy his hands. Lately, he has taken to squeezing a small square of modeling clay left over from his science fair project. He does this absentmindedly while concentrating on TV, mulling story plots at his laptop, or waiting for return texts on his phone. It's a harmless enough habit, though I do not want his clay hands touching my stuff until he's washed them.

During the opening speech, I noticed The Pony out of the corner of my eye. He was working on that lump of clay like he was going to mold a miniature Thinker, a duplicate David, a replica Venus de Milo. Then, to my consternation, he rolled the clay into a perfect sphere, and started stabbing it with the eraser of his mechanical pencil. A dimpled orb emerged, which he rolled between his palms. I'm used to such antics. But the rest of the crowd, probably not so much. Still, I said nothing. He's The Pony. That's what he does.

We separated for various sessions, then reunited for lunch. Again, we parted ways. While standing outside the conference rooms, awaiting the final presentations before the closing remarks, The Pony ditched me! It might have had something to do with my comment, I supposed.

"You know, maybe you should cool it with the clay for a while. I can only imagine what those people were thinking this morning when you were jabbing it with your eraser."

"That? Oh, I made it dimpled, like golf ball. It made the best noises when I rolled it between my hands!"

"You crack me up. They probably thought, 'Oh, maybe that boy is special, and his mom had to bring him along because she didn't have anybody to watch him.' Not that there's anything wrong with that."

"Meh. I don't care."

"Yeah. Me neither. I just don't want you distracting people with you clay-stabbing. You don't have to put on a show."

"I know. Are you done? I'm going to sit down there in those chairs until time to go in."

"Okay. I'll see you later."

Well. What I found out later was that The Pony ditched me to go sit by a young girl who was also attending the conference. "Didn't you notice, Mom? I sat down right next to her. She's having a book published!"

"You're going to be published, too."

"Mine is just a story in an anthology. Hers is a whole book of her own short stories!"

"Yeah, but she didn't win third place in a contest today."

"I guess people saw that I really was special, huh?"

"That they did. Did you get her number?"

"Mom! She's only going into her freshman year!"

I embarrass The Pony far more than he could ever dream of embarrassing me.