HAPPY TRAILS, COWBOY

It's been thirty years since I took part in a shoot-out but I still know exactly where the holster would sit on my hips – and I now have hips – and how to sort of crouch and wait on the shout to "draw!".

 Yes, a former tomboy, rootin' shootin' cowgirl.  (Has women's lib done away with such things; are there equal opportunity judygirls now.)

 What brought this all back was the sight of an honest-to-goodness cowboy hat in one of those old timey store's window.  A Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Gene Autrey hat.  Not a Dale Evans, Bat Masterson sissy, small flat top hat.  No, a real classic regulation curved-brim mountain-peaked Old West hat.

 I had to try it on.

 Now the young man behind the counter did not at all understand why I took the hat into the dressing room.  He looked surprised, then a bit suspicious, when I lifted the hat out of the window and moved toward the change cubicle making a myriad of hand gestures so I wouldn't have to explain.

 But any of you who once lived for the next neighbourhood ambush, who rode a horse more real than any actually alive (I remember my horse's name; do you), who sat for ninety minutes each and every Saturday morning in a stale theatre barely blinking, barely breathing – you'll know exactly and completely why I had to be alone to try on that hat.

 It didn't really fit.  My ears seem to oppose any hat I try to wear.  But it felt great.  As I knew it would.

 Just for a second, time was elastic and I snapped with it and felt the plush of the Capital Theatre seats scratching my legs while my soul was up there on the magic screen, leatherclad, galloping, solving last week's dilemma, creating next week's cliff-hanger, wearing a cowboy hat. Exactly like the one on my head.

 I spaced my feet.  Squared my shoulders.  Bent my knees a tich.  Waited on the signal.  Then, in one smooth greased lightning move I drew my pistol.  Take that and that and that.

 Thirty years ago I slayed my enemies like that.  I was aiming at Cayenne Joe (it was years before I realized it must have been Cheyenne) and the Badland Boys.  But I was attacking the bowling alley bully, the math I didn't understand, the fallout shelter talk I understood less but feared more.

 In the dressing room, the other day, under that hat, I popped off the same sort of 'enemies': my own inadequacies that didn't go away with age; the relationships that still hurt; updated fallout shelter talk; old ghosts.

 And just as that ten-year-old stick of a girl child would roll back her head and shout with laughter in the fun of the moment, the conquest, so too this middle-aged, rounded-out, woman-child laughed.  Exuberantly but quietly. (I imagined I would be greeted by 911's finest if the young salesperson heard sounds of hilarity coming from the dame in the dressing room with the cowboy hat.)

 I put the hat carefully back in the window.  Hadn't even checked the price: I didn't want to own the hat.  I just needed to borrow it to release a memory.

 Perhaps I swaggered out of the store.  Maybe I sashayed.  That tomboy my mother despaired over grew into quite a gentle lady.