Sunday, May 27, 2012

Meet the Caffeine Cowboy

                        
Romancing the Bean, A Series of Short Stories   by J.B. Blocker
Cowboy Coffee

  By the time I met Tom Robinette, he was walking with a cane to help him bear the years he carried on those stooped shoulders.  I didn’t know it then, but now I know that years are like gravity.                     
  His short cropped balding head was usually covered by a very worn and venerable cowboy hat. All scrunched up and sweat stained, that hat was usually tilted to one side. Tom would scratch the side of his forehead when he was contemplating serious questions. I caused him to scratch a lot.
  I clearly remember those hands. His fingers were bent and knotted. His skin had the look of fragile leather as they opened and closed in an almost robotic dance I have witnessed often.
  Tom ran the old pool hall in Sunray, the tiny West Texas town were I spent my teenage years. I watched those hands many times as they caressed his pool cue with chalk and then slowly plant those fingers on the pool table to set his bridge. They looked like the roots of an old vine growing out of the green felt of the table and into his long shirt sleeves that were always buttoned.               
  I don’t know why they call it West Texas. We’re the very northern part of the state.  It’s the Panhandle! It should be called North Texas, but that name was taken by the Dallas/ Ft. Worth area. Still, if you drive about 400 miles north and west of Dallas you’re near my home town and you are still in Texas!
  If you keep on driving north past Amarillo, Dumas, and Stratford you are in the Oklahoma Panhandle and another 40 miles will get you in to Kansas. Now, that’s really North Texas! From there, only a barbed wire fence separates us from Canada ‘so they say’.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Cowboy Poetry


i always wear a hat

i often have ideas
that are
much bigger than my brain.

who knows
if my hat keeps any of them from escaping .

i just know that plenty stay inside.
.
i can feel them bouncing around
lookin for a  doorway to reality.

if i didn’t wear a hat,
i’d be scratching my head all the time.

jb