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.