October 20, 2024, at the Blauvelt Library, Rockland County, NY—it’s always a charge for me to meet new people who, regardless of their backgrounds, connect in their way to my memoir. Among the people I met at the reading was Tom, a slim, quietly proud 93-year-old fella. He came to the event because the title of my story, Sayonara Cowboy, resonated for him. Tom was a cowboy in California, Texas, and other parts west, and he figured his story and mine might be similar.
While my cowboy connections are only in a boy’s imagination, Tom is the real deal. You could imagine prairie dust on his shoulders, despite the NYC skyline in the library’s backyard. Tom had been a rodeo cowboy. His narrow waist was adorned with an engraved silver belt buckle, awarded for winning a rodeo competition way back when.
Tom didn’t seem to mind that the cowboy he met at the library wasn’t quite what he expected. In case I hadn’t considered it, Tom mentioned that some of the animus I experienced as a newbie in America was probably due to the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. He was born in 1929, too young to serve. For Tom, the hardships of The Great Depression segued into milder deprivations of food rations. Because other guests waited patiently to get their books signed, I cut our conversation short.
Although I only got the basics of Tom’s life story, it’s now embedded in my consciousness and enriched it. With each reading, my virtuous circle of friends and acquaintances expands. My experience with each is different, yet similar. Afterall, we’re heading in the same general direction—along with eight billion of our fellow passengers on Earth—traveling 67,000 miles per hour, in our annual 600-million-mile vacation around the Sun. (Metrics are approximate.)
As hipsters used to say, “It’s a trip, man!”
Finally, a shout-out of thanks to Michael Andrea, Lisa Honig, Lynn Warshavsky, and Claire Morrisey for welcoming Sayonara Cowboy to the Blauvelt Library—a jewel in Rockland County, NY!