every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates
cowboy boots
oh, I can't wear them any more, but I have worn them most of my life. and a pair sits right there, waiting, just in case this bilateral sinus tarsi syndrome heals or goes away. and I think I have another pair, a spare pair, hiding in here somewhere, just in case I wear the first pair out. yes, I appreciate cowboy boots. I have ever since I woke up on Christmas morning when I was four, I think, and there were a pair waiting for me under the tree. talk about privilege! there we were in northeastern Brasil in a twenty-year drought, and somehow there were Christmas trees for American families. I have no idea how. but we had one and under it a pair of boots waited, just my size! I didn't know what they were, but I knew they were magical. "Cowboy boots," one of my parents told me, and I sort of understood. I knew cowboys were the American version of vaqueiros, and I knew vaqueiros wore sandals, and shoes, and sometimes low-cut boots, like our engineer's boots, although I didn't know that name for them until years later. I think I had seen the high-top boots that patrones wore, rich men who each owned scads of land. but I didn't care. they were mine. they were magical, and no one else anywhere around us had a pair. I wore them to bed, I wore them to play in, I wore them to town, I may have worn them to church! I think I learned how to polish shoes because I had cowboy boots. and then I outgrew them. geez! how unfair! how unmagical! and one night the tooth fairy took them, and they became magical again. but she didn't replace them. neither did Christmas. I figured out that cowboy boots must be a once in a lifetime thing. and life got complicated, you know how it is. You turn five, and your parents drag you off to another country where people insist that you get saved and you have to go to school - nothing can save you from that! - and the school forces you to read books you already read two years before and makes you sit in the corner when you not only read "Run, Dick, run" backwards but you insist it doesn't make any difference which way you read it, it's still stupid, and then you start the second grade and, dear God!, they make you read the same stupid books again! and you finally get to go back to Brasil but you don't get to go back to the little town where you lived before. instead you live in a city and someone takes you on an airplane ride so you can see how goddam big the city is and how you have no hope of escaping from it. but you find two hundred different ways to walk home from school that each take you through some neighborhood you're not supposed to walk through and you learn more than you can figure out and your parents go nuts at each other not you and you wind up back in that country with the crazy schools but at least you get a job and can make enough money to save some for bicycle parts and model airplanes and - ooo! - cowboy boots! life may not be so bad after all. that kind of complicated. but you wind up with your own cowboy boots that no one can take away from you and you wear them everywhere except to church and to bed. and you outgrow them again! but this time you know what to do, you save until you can buy some more! and you do that again and again even after you allegedly "grow up" and no longer outgrow them, you just wear them out. yes, that kind of "I appreciate cowboy boots".
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