Finger Dancing with Spurs On

I’m not sure how she could say it so pointedly when her nose was that far up in the stratosphere.

                                                           

“I don’t read westerns” she announced with her usual flare for the dramatic. And she wasn’t the least bit apologetic about it. She informed me that, of course, she read the classics. She read popular new releases. She read what all of her gal-pals were reading. She read what she thought she should be reading…based on popular culture and what she might be asked about at the country club. But she certainly wouldn’t lower her standards to read westerns; despite the fact that it’s a genre that’s been around for at least two hundred years.

I could have been offended by her comment but I simply looked at the source and brushed it off as just another inane comment from an uninformed soul in search of a reason to feel good about herself. She wasn’t the only one to make a negative remark about westerns. With labels such as ‘horse operas’ and ‘formula fiction,’ the genre has been the favorite whipping cowboy of the literacy elite for years.

I’m not here to defend the genre of westerns. I don’t have to. While it may never reach the hallowed status of classical literature, it still fulfills a need for good storytelling to people who appreciate a good yarn. It’s really as simple as that.

If there is a western formula, it’s really quite simple: believable colorful characters, compelling plots and intriguing dialogue all wrapped up in a vivid setting. Its audience is world-wide; ranging from the United States to the U.K. to Europe, from Australia to Asia, from South American and Africa to the Middle East. Westerns answer a universal thirst for homegrown heroic myths.

I never started out to be a writer of westerns. Back in the 70’s I was deeply enmeshed in that genre and enjoyed reading many different authors from Louie L’Amour to Clay Fisher. I even wrote two westerns myself to see if I could do it and that turned out to be a Near Death Experience.

 

But over the years, I’ve come to enjoy and respect good writing no matter what the genre. Westerns are no different. There are the classic western writers such as Jack Schaefer (Shane) and Louis L’Amour (Hondo) and the current ones such as Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) and Cormac McCathy (Blood Meridian). Good writing…just like good story-telling doesn’t hold claim on any specific genre.

This prejudice against westerns has always been a cyclical thing. It seems to come and go every dozen years or so. Back in the 1940s director John Ford paid homage to the western frontier with a series of black and white classics such as ‘My Darling Clementine’ and the Fort Apache trilogy. In the late 50s and early 60s, there was a plethora of western television series. Then in the mid-to-late 60’s, the Italians got into the act with Clint Eastwood and their spaghetti westerns like ‘The Good, the bad, the ugly.’

By the mid-70’s, western paperback novels were on the dying cusp as a popular genre.  Bantam Books and other publishers continued to publish them for several more years but gradually they disappeared entirely from the book shelves. Reading tastes change. Nowadays publishers seem to celebrate some woman who has figured out how to get laid in fifty different positions or how to fall in love with a werewolf or how to play games with people’s lives.

But what goes around comes around. I assume that in x number of year’s westerns or some new variation of that theme will come back into popular culture…for the uninitiated. For the rest of us, the western has never really left our consciousness.

Presently I’m working on a sequel to my first western (Apache Death Wind) while I’m editing another book (Debris) and creating a non-fiction ‘single’ for distribution on Amazon. Writing is writing and each story takes me into a world I relish and truly enjoy getting lost in.

I am less interested in the historical aspects of the old west as I am in using it as a background for telling an interesting story with intriguing characters caught up in real-world (circ. 1800s) situations. I couldn’t ask for a better setting for my stories.

In both fiction and reality, most of these men out west lived by an unwritten code of honor. They respected ‘respectable’ women, kids and animals. Their word meant everything and “I can’t” wasn’t a part of their vocabulary. There was an appreciation for the land, honor in hard work and little expectation that government or someone else was going to do the work for them.

I find it ironic that in an age when so much of the public worships the Sunday afternoon man-boys who act like children on the playing field, when pre-adolescent children make millions by wailing about lost love and young adults who can’t act pretend to be movie-stars, we somehow scoff at the iconic image of the men and women of the old west.

Who is more real here?

I’ll go with the cowboy anytime.

Four Weeks in Purgatory

Campaigning Under a Polar Vortex

We landed in hell at around 2:30 on that January afternoon. It was an overcast yet sunny day. Outside the terminal, the wind was blowing hard and there was a 45 degree below zero wind chill. Welcome back to Minnesota under the polar vortex.

The weather wasn’t as advertised…it was worse. After being born and raised in Minnesota, I was used to blowing wind, biting cold and snow so deep you had to do chest-presses just to get over those miniature dirty white mountains.

I’d been there many times before. In grade school, delivering newspapers at 4:30 in the morning and trudging through the snow at twenty below zero. In college, unloading trucks at a wind chill of 80 below zero. Years later, I’d occasionally find myself running in white-out conditions because I hadn’t gotten in enough mileage for that week. The unrelenting cold has always been a pain in the derriere and on the extremities. But we were there for a purpose and a little blanket of sub-zero weather wasn’t about to deter us from our objective.

My wife and I had just left the warmth and comfort of Palm Springs to support our daughter who was running for State Representative in her district…64B in Highland Park, a neighborhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota. We were going to be back home for two weeks in January. Then another two more weeks in March just before the district convention which would decide who was running for that position of State Representative. It would be a total of four weeks in purgatory.

The return trip home for a total of four weeks meant I wouldn’t be writing…anything. I wouldn’t be exercising at the gym. I wouldn’t be running trails or bike riding. There were a lot of things, board meetings, neighborhood gatherings, etc. happening back in Palm Springs but they were all on hold for now. We were needed on the home front.

The campaign was shaping up to be a very tough contest for everyone involved. It was Melanie’s first plunge into running for state office; a veritable baptism of fire. A lot of folks who might have been able to help her had already committed to one of the other candidates or didn’t want to get involved at that level. There were six other very qualified candidates, most of whom had done this kind of campaigning before. The ‘good old boys network’ was supporting one candidate and long-time party activists had attached themselves to another one.

Our daughter, who was stepping into the election ring for the first time, was earning her SHK (School of Hard Knocks) bruises, blisters and kudos as she went along. There were good days and bad. It was a roller coaster of emotions with loving support, financial commitments, surprise turndowns and disappointing phone calls. It was a newspaper article that called her simply a ‘stay at home mom’ as if that was a bad thing while it ignored her deep involvement in the community. But through it all, Melanie persevered and kept to her grueling campaign schedule.

To be honest, Melanie had worked for a large law firm and spent considerable time at the capitol working for the same representative who was now leaving office. She knew the rules of the game and the enormous time-commitment it took. We were simply back in town as back-up babysitters and sounding board and encouragement coaches. It’s what parents do for their kids…no matter the age of their kids.

Two weeks of campaign work along with babysitting for most of that time wasn’t as much a chore as it sounds. It meant precious time with my daughter as I chauffeured her for door-knocking in the neighborhood. It was stuffing envelopes and fund-raising. It was squeezing in time to see grandma in Wabasha and stealing time for coffee with an old friend. It was making up new nighttime stories every time as I put Brennan and Charlotte to bed. It was making snow angels with them and playing King of the Hill in three above zero weather.

 We did another two weeks in March which pretty much followed the same pattern. The weather wasn’t as bitterly cold but it wasn’t Palm Springs blissful either. The travel put some real roadblocks in my seasonal participation in my writers group, the Palm Springs Writers Guild, city activities and neighborhood involvement. We never really had a chance to get involved as we had during other seasons. Perhaps next year.

When we were done and the campaigning was over, we slipped away on a Sun Country escape …until spring and another return flight again. We did what you’re supposed to do when one of your kids needs help. We’d do it again…in a heartbeat.

           

 

Oh yeah, Melanie didn’t get the endorsement…but it certainly wasn’t for her not trying. She lost that race and yet won in so many other meaningful ways.

Through this process, strangers and simple names on a card became ardent supporters and life-long friends.  Melanie went from a stay-at-home mom to someone with real campaign chops and war stories to tell. She went from Speech and Debate in high school to real-world campaigning in front of standing-room-only audiences. She went from mothering her kids to formulating political positions and strategies in neighborhood, city and state political circles. She went from a virtual unknown four months ago to a known and respected entity in the world of politics in Saint Paul and Minnesota.

She gained notable name recognition that no ad campaign could have done better for her. She earned the respect of the other candidates. She created a heightened awareness among the ‘in crowd’ that there was a new player in town. In other words, she won…big time…in the game of politics and life. What more could you ask for?

I can’t tell you how proud I am of that young woman who took a chance, put her life on hold and ‘went for it.’

Was four weeks in purgatory worth it?

Hell, yes!

A Bottle of Wine Won't Cut It

I had an interesting conversation with Rosie who is the manager of our fitness club here in town.

She commented that this has been an unusually busy season for her members to have surprise visitors coming in from cold weather parts of the country. Not surprisingly, these new-found friends are quite interested in partaking of our unseasonably warm weather during the heart of winter elsewhere.

One member even commented: “I just heard from my brother whom I haven’t spoken to in years. He wants to visit with his new bride and I haven’t even met her yet. What am I going to do with them for a week in my small two-bedroom condo?” She’s decided to spend appreciably more time at the gym while her self-invited company lounges by her pool.

Living in a warm weather locale during the winter month’s makes one an attractive target for visitors and occasional guests who love to drop in and savor the warm weather, blue skies and gorgeous mountain views. The same thing is happening to our friends who now live here year-round. They too have seen a steady influx of guests from back home.

The common equation among some of these newly implanted house guests is an attitude that your home has become their home away from home – at least in their mind. They’ve drunk from the jug called “A Palm Springs Lifestyle” and swallowed it entirely. It’s an interesting paradigm and yet nothing could be further from reality.

What seems to be missing for some of these house guests is the simple realization that it’s your ‘home’ they’re staying in. It’s not a Motel Six down the road or some cute B&B they read about in Good Housekeeping Magazine. Some of them don’t seem to understand that it’s not your rental property or your vacation home or even second home. It’s your home…period…and as such should be treated that way.

While all of us here are very fortunate to have a place to stay during the winter months, most of us have worked darn hard to earn the right to be here in the first place. It’s not something we take lightly or for granted and as such we’re very protective of it.

House guests are a different breed aside from family and sometimes family doesn’t get it either.

There’s an old cliché about fish and house guests being tolerable for about three days and after that…

I’ve stumbled upon a simple test that is a pretty good indicator of how our guests are going to perceive their stay in town. It occurred over a couple of years with three different couples.

After picking up our guests at the airport, I drive to the exit gate to pay for parking.

1.      Without saying a word, the first couple whipped out a ten dollar bill to pay for parking.

2.      Once at the gate, the second couple spoke up in the back seat about offering to pay for parking but went no further than that.

3.      The third couple just kept talking in the backseat and didn’t even notice that I had paid for parking.

It turned out to be the perfect metaphor for how these three couples saw their week in Palm Springs as our guests. The first couple saw it as a wonderful opportunity to enjoy all that Palm Springs had to offer and a willingness to show their appreciation for opening up our home to them. They didn’t hesitate to pay for their fair share of our expenses that week.

The second couple appreciated their week in Palm Springs and wanted to reciprocate by taking us to dinner a couple of times.

The third couple enjoyed their week in Palm Springs.

                                   

One of the rituals among desert resort society is to bring a gift when invited over to another person’s home for an event, dinner, a party, etc. Often times, it’s a bottle of wine assuming your hosts drink vino. It’s a time-honored way of acknowledging the invitation to engage with friends. Much like the time-honored ritual of sending a thank you card for pleasantries exchanged or gifts, etc. it’s something that comes quite naturally to some people and not so much for others.

Some folks get it and others don’t. As a friend once commented about frequent guests who like to partake of another’s hospitality on numerous occasions but seldom reciprocate themselves. He said “A bottle of wine just doesn’t cut it.”

Reciprocal action is required if any relationship is going to last. Some people get it and some don’t.

So goes the game of life…and hospitality.