When Gabriel gets on a pony the most extarordinary thing happens. His face gets stuck on "smile".
I mean seriously, he smiles walking away, coming back the other side, in the corners, on the diagonal, even more in the serpentine, and then back to "normal" smile on the far rail.
And, you know, his smile is astonishingly infectious.
Natalya and I are standing outside the ring next to each other, leaning on the rail watching Gabriel smile — the smile which appears to relegate his riding to an afterthought — and sometimes people come up to the rail, too, to look at their own kids, and when these people get a load of me and my wife, standing there like a couple of kids ourselves, smiling like we just polished off an entire bag of gummi-bears, the sort you get in the movie theatre which are ginormous, the bags holding 3,000 pieces easy, and we are not gonna tell our parents about it, no way, and they are never gonna find out about it either, so yes, like I was sayin' about these people who come up to us: You know what? They start smiling, too.
