every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates
cowboys
I never got over my infatuation with being a cowboy. I admired vaqueiros in Brasil. it probably will not surprise you that my father's disdain for them and for the way they lived only endeared them to me more. my aunt told me that the cowboys I read about in books and in stories didn't exist and probably never had existed. they were just story cowboys. for a while that ruined me. my aunt knew everything, or at least everything about Texas. but then a bright idea struck me. cowboys just lived in a world different from hers! they must exist! how else could we make movies about them? then I found Louis L'Amour's cowboys, Sergio Leone's cowboys, Clint Eastwood's cowboys! yes! I also met cowboys in bars along the highway between Las Cruces and Albuquerque in New Mexico. they told me stories about cowboying in New Mexico in the 50s and the 60s. nope, their stories had nothing to do with those of Louis or Sergio or Clint, but they were good stories about real decisions with life-or-death consequences. I read stories in National Geographic about "real cowboys now" and they too were not stories like Sergio's or Clint's, but were still stories about rugged life, hard work and desperate times, but mostly they fought weather or climate or markets. so when I say cowboys, I mean both real cowboys and Clint's cowboys. I love them both. how wonderful to live in a world where both exist!
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