At the outset of the new year, I have decided that the best way to move forward into the future is by understanding how I got here to begin with.  These stories have been kicking around for years now, and, having gotten some encouragement to do something with my writing, this is my first foray.  Happy 2016!!!!

In the summer of 1967, my father had just finished his PhD. at University of Illinois, and secured a position at the University of Oregon in the Classics Department. He was excited for his professional opportunity, and my mother felt nothing good would come of putting more distance between us and the warm embrace of family and the aroma of potato knishes in Brooklyn.  My parents had both grown up there,where anything thirty miles west of NYC was considered the jungle. The people in small town America might as well have been cannibals.  Illinois was already on the far edge of the known universe. It was probably terrifying. Braving likely encounters with savages, hydras, and hostile aliens, or at least rednecks, my parents packed up our metallic green Dodge Dart, a U-Haul trailer, our black and white Fox Terrier, Lucky, and three-year-old me, and set off across the wilderness of the Great Plains for Eugene.

During breakfast in a rustic restaurant somewhere in Montana or Wyoming, just a day or two after we started from Urbana, my mother’s greatest fear came to pass and the course of my life was set in a brief encounter.  It is one of my earliest memories. And according to my mother, she knew that the experience was a seminal moment for me.

A tall, muscular, handsome cowboy in full regalia; boots, jeans, belt with big oval buckle, cowboy shirt, and cowboy hat walked into the restaurant.  Gary Cooper had nothing on this guy.  My blond Shirley Temple curls turned slowly, saucer eyes following his easy, unhurried trajectory across the room.  The gravitational pull of his magnetism almost sucked the eyes out of the sockets of every woman, and certainly several men in that room.  Surely my jaw must have been halfway to the floor.

For me, it was just the first time I ever saw a real-life cowboy. But he was like Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Cary Grant and Brad Pitt rolled  into one gleaming icon of western Americana, as impressive as Mount Rushmore, and as breathtakingly perfect in his natural form as Yosemite. As he approached our table he met my gaze, flashed an electric, crooked smile, tugged the brim of his hat, his thumb tucked behind his belt buckle and said in a deep voice, “Howdy, ma’am.” as he passed.  I gulped.  It was at that moment that my mother, almost 50 years ago now, knew there would be no nice Jewish doctors marrying into the family. That’s all that happened. True story.