Confessions from the Closet

I have a confession to make.  I have kept something in the closet for quite a while and I am ready to let it out.  I have always wanted to be a cowboy.

 

CowGIRL never quite cut the mustard.  Fringed skirts and white holsters were not my to my liking.  I wanted the real thing.  As a child I was satisfied with a couple of hours with Roy Rogers.  But no one, meaning me, ever wanted to be Dale Evans. Many years later, after Roy was long gone and Trigger was stuffed in a museum, she became an evangelist and I felt vindicated.

I wanted the smell of leather, horseshit and gunpowder.  I wanted to hear the creak of the saddle, the taste of dust in my mouth and the vista of Monument Valley. My fingers ached for the reins and the saddle horn. But I was in Silverlake.

 I’d never get a pony, a horse or even an old nag.  My best hope was one of those life-sized plastic horses that stood outside of camping stores. I knew nothing of guns, but, to me, the smell of caps exploding was like a connoisseur wafting the finest brandy in front of his nose.

When I was 15 and spending the summer in Mesa, Arizona with relatives while my parents went to Europe, I bought my first pair of cowboy boots. I think at J.C.Penney’s.  I kept those boots for years and actually rode a few horses wearing them—albeit in Griffith Park..

 As for the de rigueur belt with the large silver buckle, I was set.  When I was in the sixth grade my father went on a business trip. Where or why, I do not know.  But when he returned, he brought me a tooled leather belt with a large “silver” buckle with boots on it.  I remember it was size 28.  That meant I could use it until I was in my mid twenties.

So with the boots and the belt—holsters were no longer a viable possibility—I had half the kit.

Hats ran the gamut from the red ones with the white stitching around the sides—which—even as I child I disliked for their inauthenticity--to the stiff pressed felt of the “real” thing. One summer when I was in college, my mother sent me a Fourth of July gift.  Besides the See’s suckers in a firecracker, there was a check.  I used that money to buy a cowboy hat.

To be continued.