Shaky form

So the other night I was planning out my future with my daughter, Olivia, who is 8-and-15/16ths-years-old. She turns nine exactly six days from today.

That's right, my life. Not Olivia's

Olivia already has her life pretty much planned out.

She's going to be an artist, and while she doesn't want to travel, she does want to move around.

She explains all of this with a toss of her long, blonde hair and blue eyes that see right through you with confidence and grace.

It's a scary thing to watch.

My future, it turns out, is far more shaky.

See, we were talking about riding horses, an aspect of life I'm not very good at.

Olivia recently got a pony. It's a white one and it's blind in one eye and can't see very well out of the other. She named it Sparkles. I thought it should have been named Glaucoma, or Cataract, but I guess that wouldn't look very good on a ribbon.

The pony suits her perfectly. She rides it like a breeze. Or at least it runs like it's always going to the breeze—because of that one bad eye, it's always got its head cocked to the side so it can see. But still, she looks good on it, I have to to admit.

Meanwhile, my form needs some work. I can barely stay on a standing horse, never mind one that is moving. So we got to talking about riding lessons.

"Maybe I should learn how to ride English and do dressage and stadium events," I said to Olivia. "Or maybe I'll learn Western and become a barrel racer."

Olivia gave me a look.

"Maybe," she said, pausing slightly, "you should stick with what you're doing. What is it that you do again? Take photos? It's a wonder you can even focus."

If any other kid on the planet had said something like that to you, you'd have them by the neck. But Olivia has this way of whacking you with a sledgehammer, and as you set the cast on the broken bones of your ego, she's off doing something else, like drawing a horsey riding toward the sunset, as if nothing had transpired.

It's the sort of thing you don't forget.

She is, of course, right. When I started out in this business, I couldn't focus. A split pentaprism sounded like a painful affliction, and when my editor said check your aperture, I thought she was getting a little too personal.

But I learned, sort of.

The other day I took a team picture and nearly all of them were out of focus. The boys cross country team looked as if it were in a dream or at the bottom of a pool, drowning.

Fortunately, one turned out.

Thank God for autofocus.