Ode to The Cowboy, part 1

I have been stalking this woman for months now. No day is complete unless I have entertained myself with her captivating stories. She had me from the get go because a) she’s funny and b) she lives in the country. Oh, I’m so jealous. In light of an approaching anniversary she has been sharing the story of how she met and married her cowboy.

That has me reliving my own love affair with a cowboy. Keep in mind this is a PG site (my entire life is a PG story ANYWAY). I’m using the term “love affair” in the most innocent and beautiful of ways. After all these years I still remember that breathless-heart racing-mind numbing rush of emotion that hit me whenever I looked at my cowboy.

It was a Friday night in the 19th year of my life. My attached-at-the-hip-best friend, Liz and I were dragging main, because it was, well, our job. We had stopped at the 7-11 at one end of the drag to do something vital like buy gum and go to the bathroom. We walked out the door to my bomb car and noticed two guys who were noticing us. In an interested kind of way. A girl just knows these things.

[What follows here is important information necessary to 'set the scene'. The whole “Flower Power, Love Child, Hippie, Power to the People” era had just recently made its way to our neck of the woods. It took about 5 years for West Coast changes to make it to our little berg. So, our wardrobes consisted of well worn, very bell-bottom jeans with patches, peasant blouses, long very straight hair and beads. With the exception of the peasant blouse business, this was a unisex wardrobe. All the guys at this college had long hair, bellbottom jeans and flip flops. Until my sophomore year. In came this influx of cowboys on rodeo scholarships. I had never seen such a thing! Those poor guys would be so cute if they’d, you know, wear Levi’s instead of Wranglers and let their hair grow for heaven’s sake!]

Back to these boys at 7-11. They were wearing big cowboy hats and grins, oh my gosh, their grins. So we grinned back. And they asked, “Can we have a ride back to the dorm?” Here it became my Christian duty to help – it was nearly winter in Colorado and all. Their jackets didn’t look warm enough to protect them from the elements. Clearly I was being called upon to entertain one of those “angels unaware” that the King James Version told me about. I’m nothing if not obedient so I said “Mmmmmm, but I don’t know you…..smile, wink…” “I’m Hunky Cowboy and this here is Gorgeous Cowboy”. Now that we were friends, we all crawled into my car (girls in the front, boys in the back) and backed out of the 7-11 and immediately pulled into the dorm parking lot. (I didn’t say they had to walk far). We talked for hours that night and I knew that the world as I had carefully defined it had just taken a 180 degree turn.