Cowboy Up!
small town Americana
My two young boys emptied their piggy bank ten days ago and handed me forty-nine dollars and sixty-two cents.
"Wow, what's all this? Aren't you both saving up for a remote control airplane?" Quarters and pennies slid between my fingers and rained across the wood floor, slid beneath our grey parrot's perch.
"Well, we WERE saving for a plane. But now we want the money to go to the Red Cross to help the hurricane people." My son, age 10, stood, arms akimbo, feet planted as if his shoes sent secret morse code signals to the Superdome itself. I set the money on the coffee table, moved to hug both boys, but was stopped cold by 10's next statement.
"That is, if the president even lets the Red Cross help those people." He said it with defiance, with the kind of black blue cynicism and anger no child should ever hold. I glanced at the pile of newspaper littering the couch, knew he read every conflicting article, knew he heard me cuss out our country's administration on long late night phone calls to my favorite sister.
"Oh, boys. Boys." I hugged them.
The next day I wrote out a check for $100.00 and sent it to the Red Cross in the name of both my boys. I told them I matched them, penny for penny, and I asked that the money be used for the Hurricane Relief Effort. My boy, 10, nodded thoughtfully, but I saw him stare at the pile of news, saw him think things I didn't want him to articulate.
Oh damn, I thought. What the heck do I do now? I can't fix this world, can't make things right. This country doesn't exist anymore. Not the place I knew as a child. Not the simple world I thought I loved.
I grabbed the papers, walked to the recycle bin, wanted to remove the poison even though my boy already bit the apple.
Ah crap, I thought as I eyed a photograph of a mother and three young children wet and exhausted, crying, sitting together among the filth infiltrating every inch of the covered stadium in New Orleans. But then something caught my eye. A notice in small print. An announcement of a small town rodeo just a couple hours from my sister's home. I tossed the papers in the bin and grabbed my phone.
Two days later my sister and I drove my two young boys and her two young girls to a dinky town in the middle of arid nowhere, population 250, for their 45th annual Bean Day Rodeo festival, for our last summer hurrah. My sister and I talked about men and beauty gone wrong and dumb movies and bad homemade food attempts - all the things that make close sisters laugh and children feel a sense of peace. The boys and girls pointed out cows and antelope and a lone bald eagle perched in tall grass, poked each other in the stomach and told bathroom humor jokes.
Thank God, I thought. This will help 10 find some joy, some sense of normalcy. I watched him laugh in the rear view mirror, saw his easy lopsided grin just like mine, knew then he wasn't lost forever.
To Be Continued...
8:20:44 PM 
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