All the summer mornings

July 12, 2007

Dear Julie,

In photos taken when I was 3 or 4 I'm sometimes dressed in cowboy boots, holstered cap pistols on my hips, a real buckeroo. I was crazy about cowboys. They were the good guys. I'm more partial to the Indians these days.

One of my story books had drawings of cowboys sitting around campfires eating bowls of a mysterious, richly dark brown food. Being cowboys, they didn't talk about the menu, they just ate, so my 4-year-old mind was left to speculate about the contents of those bowls.

My conclusion was that cowboys sat around eating chocolate sauce. I probably liked chocolate sauce even more than I liked cowboys.

Some years later the disappointing realization came to me that the bowls must have contained chili or stew and not chocolate sauce.

Other optimistic delusions followed.

Though a weak hitter and so-so fielder as a child, at 10 and 11 I imagined becoming a major-league baseball player. Everything seems possible in the summer mornings of boyhood. They were spent playing neighborhood baseball games, sometimes at Jefferson School, more often at the vacant lot next to Carl Gross' house on Minnesota Avenue.

Left field was the problem with playing at Jefferson School. It quickly dropped off into a ravine overgrown with weeds taller than we were. If someone hit a ball too far the game might be over.

Carl often brought along his little brother David, who was called Big D. Big D was about 3 feet tall and in the field almost hidden behind his ball glove, but he scooped up every ball hit his way and swung for the imaginary fences. Big D grew up to become a fine athlete and coach and teacher, as did Carl. That, I suspect and hope, is how they might have imagined their lives working out.

We want life to be the way we imagine it, filled with chocolate sauce and home runs, and probably more than we know the imagining can make a difference.

For better or worse, I have not imagined my life into the distance but rather have followed E.L. Doctorow's dictum for writing a novel. He compared it to driving a car at night. "You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

Some ways of life are becoming difficult to imagine in 2007. Cowboys. Rodeos and a few ranches in the West have become their last refuge. Refuge from the rest of the world.

T-shirts often speak for teenagers who can't. I had one with a drawing of a cowboy astride a horse galloping through the sky. In the background was the planet Earth. The cowboy seemed to be fleeing from it. He didn't know where he was going. He just wanted to keep traveling the road Cat Stevens sang about, "The road to find out." On that road everything is still possible.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.