COWBOY JIM

and 

Other Imaginary Friends

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2019

Sappington, Mo., 1953 is when Cowboy Jim started to emerge.  Cowboy Jim came equipped with a 2-way radio that doubled as Tinker Toys, and a beautiful palomino that doubled as a stick horse.  We lived in a two-story brown brick home just outside of down town St. Louis, Mo.  There were Joanie 7, Melissa 4.5, Anne 3.5 and Joe 2.  I’m guessing Claire was in the oven. Dad was a salesman for Corning Glassware.

I recall a shady back yard with a big furnace for burning one’s own household trash, and a coal shoot to the basement for the furnace.  Mom had paved a small area in the back yard with natural sand stone and had put a fence around it.  This was for Joe, who was a horrible flight risk.  Once, I had walked a few houses down from ours, to find Joe hiding in a dog house with someone else’s’ dog.  He had shed all his clothes, including his diaper somewhere along the way.  Needles-to-say, I was the hero of the day for finding him.

I remember our neighbors quite vividly.  The Powers lived on one side, and they had a boy about Joanie’s age named Cammie (short of Cameron?).  There was a vacant lot between our houses where we played on a swing set.  On the other side was an elderly woman named Mrs. Caskey.  She was really sweet to us, giving us heart shaped lollipops.  Across the street was an enormous white house.  The people that lived there were the Lovelace's.  They had some boys that were much older than any of us.  Down the street towards town were the Pobaninskys.  They had a son my age, named Chris.  He’d come down to play every now and then.  Down the street the other way was a little boy named Richard Strumph, who always had a snotty nose and couldn’t pronounce his “Rs”. Richard had a pedal fire engine, which he'd ride down the sidewalk to our house.  My last memory of him was when he got his head stuck in the little ladder attached to the side of his pedal fire engine, and his pitiful crying until his mother came to his rescue.  Some of the neighbors' names I could pronounce, but I’m still not at all sure of the spelling, since I was only five years old at that time.

Joanie still held onto her two imaginary friends, Pinkie and Lemon that she kept in the laundry hamper in the upstairs bathroom.  She would go into the bathroom and open the hamper and talk to them.  I kept trying to see them, and every time I'd try to see them, Joanie would slam the hamper closed.  I guess it was a private matter between Joanie and Pinkie and Lemon, but I think they disappeared when she went into the second grade at Christ The King Parochial school.  Soon after that, she would come home on the school bus and declare that she HATED SCHOOL!  One day, she came home from school and stood in front of the house crying and kicked off her saddle shoes so hard that one of them flew up and broke a window on the second story.

Anne and I usually stuck together most of the time, being almost Irish Twins, but some of the time, we were just wandering around talking to our own imaginary friends.  Anne would sit on the stairs and talk to her imaginary friend, who incidentally, was invisible.  The dialogue was usually, “I got two eyeths, a nothse, a moufe, and lots of fingers and toes…..And what have you got?  Nuffin’!”

We had an old mahogany Emerson Radio/Record Player that Mom would turn on in the dining room to listen to various radio shows, and sometimes we could listen to Arthur Godfrey, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers or Gene Autrey.  With that, Cowboy Jim started to emerge.  I was becoming my very own imaginary friend. I would listen to those stories and then emerge from the dining room as COWBOY JIM!  

I did have my very own stick horse, and I rode it all over the house.  I was getting pretty realistic about my C.J. status, and one day, while riding my stick horse, (jumping on the bed), it occurred to me that I could ride higher and faster if I climbed up on the dresser and jumped down on to the bed.  So, I climbed up to the top of the chest of drawers, and jumped off, totally missing the bed except for the rail on the end of the bed, on which I caught with my mouth.  My two front teeth went through my bottom lip.  I didn't really cry until Mom walked into the room and saw all the blood. That jump ended up costing my two front teeth and requiring 6 stitches.  Don’t know what happened to my stick horse after that.  The next day, Anne fell down the front steps and cut her mouth in the same spot.  We both ended up with identical bandages. It was hard to tell us apart. 

Soon after, we moved from St. Louis back to Texas.  I continued my exploits as Cowboy Jim for a while longer.  When we packed up and moved back to Texas, my C.J. persona dwindled away.  This left a whole new world open for the imagination, but Cowboy Jim still lurks in the shadows of my memory as a good friend, and memories of grand stories to tell.

LATE LIFE WISHES AND REGRETS

Hindsight 

This is about FLYING PIG WISHES.  I call them that, because Flying Pig Wishes are comprised mostly of hindsight. "A dream is a wish your heart makes."  or so Walt Disney says.  I guess I'm addressing my contemporaries as well as the generations that we've produced.

I wish I'd been the person who ... invented the road reflectors that divide lanes on the highways, or even maybe the words on a pencil that says, "USE TO HERE", or just pencil erasers?  What about the lumbar mechanisms in car seats? And what about personal computers and the Internet?  What about the person that invented SPELL CHECK?  I still think there's room for improvement on that.  And, what if, I'd become a physician, a serious writer, an artist, a musician, or even an ASTRONAUT? 

Reflecting back, I can recall a few of the "inconveniences" of our generations' lifetime.  The rotary dial on the phone, the long straight cord that enabled us to hide in the closet for some privacy on the phone (easily detected), having to defrost the refrigerator freezer, having to iron EVERYTHING, manual typewriters, typewriter erasers and whiteout, dress codes at school.  There was no central air in any of the schools I went to.  There were big ol' fans, windows and radiators.  We adjusted, but sometimes it was just horribly inclement.
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Possibly, I've almost become the person I was meant to be in this life, and hopefully I've done some good and/or made a positive difference in someone's life.  I HAVE learned that if you can't help someone, don't hurt them.  Just be kind.  Try to give people the benefit of the doubt.  Give back what you have been given or learned.  Be honest without being hurtful.  Teach your children to be good, generous, helpful and kind.  This is mostly accomplished by example.  Well, that's a start, and as long as I'm upright and breathing there's still time.  Live, love, learn, teach and give back.  My path is still open and I'm still here.

TAOS CANYON ADVENTURE!

( And Puck, Puckster, Puckerino, Puckus Maximus)

It was emotionally draining when we had to have our beloved 17-year-old Blue Heeler mix, Hank put down.  We vowed not to ever have another dog.  After all, we would be traveling, and we just couldn’t do the heart break again.  It’s just not fair that we out live our fur family members.  It’s just too hard. So, we just moved on without a pup in the house.  The undercurrent of a void in our lives was always there. 

We had been thinking about a place to retire, and after cruising real estate listings, the Royster found a listing for a house in Taos, NM that seemed ideal for us.  It had been on the market for over 2 years, and I wondered why.  We talked about it and agreed that we would take a roadie to NM to check it out.  We made plans for our trip and contacted a realtor.  Actually, there were two houses to look at. One house sold before we could see it, so that left the one in the Taos Canyon.  Our Realtor drove us 6 miles east of town to a dirt and gravel road, turned right and there it was at the top of the hill.  As we drove into the driveway my mouth quite involuntarily shot out, “So, this is ours?”  Royster shot me a look, and I clammed up until we got in the house.  Shazam!  It had a huge wooden front porch, and a double front door with brass address plate on it declaring the address.

The interior was still furnished, and the house was impeccable.  A single story, two bedrooms, two baths, and a huge studio.  The kitchen was as big as our kitchen in Spring, TX.  It was extremely hard to maintain a neutral facade, because I was totally taken by the the huge utility room/pantry. It became obvious that this house was designed and built specifically for a retired couple.  It was just waiting for the right retired couple. That night, we talked about the prospect of moving, and the house we were quietly falling in love with.  We’d both spent most of our lives in Texas, so this was going to be a big deal.

We drove back to Texas, trying not to get too excited about the prospects of moving into that perfect house.  We got back home, unpacked, had dinner and went to bed.  The next morning, Royster smiled, and asked, “Do you want move to Taos, NM?”  Oh, be still my heart!  “Yes, I do!”  He called the realtor and told her that we wanted the house, and on what conditions and price.  We got the ball rolling.  Within less than a month, we sold most of our furniture (and bought furniture for the living room and guest room and made arrangements for a moving van to show up and take us away to Taos, New Mexico.  The fact that this all took place in less than 4 weeks, from packing up, cleaning our house in Spring, and moving into our home in Taos.  We down-sized our belongings once again after we moved in.

 

We have five neighbors, all of whom stopped by to welcome us while we sat in the driveway watching the movers take our household goods into the house.  A beautiful female red heeler wandered up and sat next to my chair for about 30 minutes.  She was so sweet, and I’m sure she was welcoming us.  That made me miss our Hank so much, and I wondered who she owned.  I later found out that she owned our neighbor, Jill, just below us.

 

This is our third winter here in the Taos Canyon.  Our neighbors have all become our good friends, and some seasonal renters are in and out with the seasons.  They are our friends too.  Still there was something missing.

Over the summer, our neighbor Jill went to the local animal shelter to find a companion for her red heeler, Daney.  She arrived home with her new companion, Puck, and she brought him up for proper introductions.  He was so funny, a little more than a year old, and aptly named for the Sprite in A Mid-Summer Nights’ Dream.  He spent more time at our house than with Jill and Daney.  I think he automatically picked us as family as well, as he spent most of his time with us, playing with his new litter mate, Roy.  After a couple of months, Jill came up to tell us that she had to return Puck to the animal shelter because she couldn’t control him.  Roy and I felt sorry for the little guy and talked about going to get him.  Well…. we did the next morning.  We brought Puck home with us. 

Since then, he’s really been a good dog for us.  He can be very naughty on occasion, by playing “catch me if you can”, and that’s pretty frustrating.  A few days ago, I went out in the cold and snow to call him.  It was time to feed him, and just didn’t show up when I called.  Finally, I looked out the kitchen window.  There he was hiding behind my truck, and peeking around the corner…. laughing.  I could almost hear, “Oh, this is so funny!”  Since then, I’ve bought a dog whistle that he seems to respect, and he comes running home immediately.

Here we are in our third winter.  The temperature is 11 degrees this morning, we’ll get the pot-bellied stoves cranked up and get about our day.  We had 8” of snow yesterday.  Royster has decided to crank up the snow blower and clear out the driveway, and the dirt and gravel road behind our vehicles.  Puckster is curled up by the pot bellied stove in the studio, no doubt dreaming of snow angels and his next meal.  He owns us now.