Pondering Thanksgiving

I was pondering Thanksgiving and wondering how odd it was how so many people are thankful for things that I would never care that much about and how odd the things are which I am thankful for.

For me Thanksgiving is the Hebraic Christ initiated Feast of Trumpets, the harvest time or remembering the Promise Jesus will return and change all things for good.
I am though not that thankful for the poison food which will be ingested by Americans literally inflaming their bodies to auto immune diseases in those chemical turkeys and those things called potatoes now.


The modern era has never had that great of appeal for me. I found the 50's with it's hoodlum motorcyclist distasteful, the 60's filthy hippies disgusting, the 70's mellow crowd a waste of space, the 80's burn out burned out, and the rest of these communist years I have endured absolutely nothing to file as genuine.
The only reason the 40's were any value was the World War and the 30's due to the depression which scattered Americans about. The 20's with the flappers were simply lewd.

So I enjoy roaming about in history and feeling it alive in me. I am thankful I found another rare photograph of a couple I am in love with in George and Libby Custer. I never believe Elizabeth Custer can be any more beautiful and then a photo appears capturing this Michigan girl set free on the wild plains in Cavalry battles and I just wonder how such beauty can be of this earth.

I would that people could all experience the great suffering of the Great Plains which sets a soul free. There is nothing like them in sheer violent power to kill you without notice in storm and then to hold you close for a few moments to make you believe they really do love you.

There is nothing like crossing a divide in the day or night in those expanses, riding a horse, the either sweet dampness of spring dried grass, the sharp bite of Arctic frost or the dust laden earth as you plod along looking for a herd to round up or having your rifle ready in case you jump a buck.
It is all community there in animal and human with nothing separating the two. On Saturday while helping out on a ranch, I had two range horses decide to have fun, in one ran by me full speed, so I moved back to not be kicked which she had no intention of, and the next thing I knew I was being exploded into by the other horse running by, in which I ran along for a bit until I decided horses are faster than me, and if I got kicked, well that was something I would not like.

Nothing happened as they were just playing, but by Sunday I felt like an NFL lineman had tackled me as 1200 pounds of horse packs quite a punch.

I love that life out there and it is why Jackie Kennedy sent John John to the ranch country for a time to make a rounded man out of him. Such an untamed people they are who at times will sleep on the floor so you can sleep in their only bed, or, as one cowboy I saw in a Bandito motorcycle gang bar was busy spending his money a blonde stripper named Honey with more silicon than the computers in the world.

There is something about the tamed untamed which is so American. Buffalo Bill was such a gentleman who once went on a scout for the Army in only bringing whiskey and no food.
He found with his mess mate though who only brought brandy, that they made out better as they ate at other officers quarters and they came and drank at their tent.

My paternal Great Grandfather met Buffalo Bill on the plains. Grandfather had just came to America and as in the process of cutting wood to load grain on a barge as that was the only way to move a harvest then.
He was a founding father with 3 other families and my maternal Great Grandfather was a founding rancher twenty miles over. I am proud of these immigrants in all they made in community and how one actually shared his lunch with the greatest Buffalo Runner in history, Col. William F. Cody.

Seldom do periods of time pass that I do not wonder over the America I travel in knowing the roads were built by horse teams, that the many groves have family dead buried in them, because that is what people did long ago, and I think of how much they invested in the United States to make things all so easy for everyone now that few appreciate it.

My Great Grandfather when he came to America was terrified one evening when he thought he heard Indians, which turned out to be stray mules braying in the night. There is just something about the cries of nature from lynx sounding like a child's scream to that hoarse cough of a deer in the rut at twilight which in a new world are enough to make one wonder what they were doing here.
Indians were interesting those years after they learned they would be hung for harming settlers in they would still show up, but just simply walk into your homes and make themselves at home.
People learned to lock their doors or you always had company.

I think of Buffalo Bill and his 50.70 Lucretia army rifle to the 40.90.420 Sharpes, Teddy Roosevelt's Medicine Guns of the 50.90 Winchester and Billy Dixon's Big 50, which all fascinate me as those old black powder guns simply push your shoulder with a loving nudge compared to the nitrocellulose fast burning powders which strike like lightning and feel like thunder.

My Grandfathers had guns for harvesting game. One had a 99 Savage in 22 Hi Power built by the genius Mr. Newton which I fortunately have. He had a Marlin shotgun and later a 97 Winchester.
The other had a Winchester single shot 410 which my cousin owns and I have his single shot 22 with a silver bolt handle.
I always think of those men and their hard wives who were not in the least Grandmotherly to me. They were tough as old leather and I never was fond of those old women.

During the 30's my dad was sent to live with relatives as the family could not afford to feed him. He never got over that, but considering Grandpa ate only apples one winter as that was all he had to eat and they frequently ate blackbirds when the family was together as there just was nothing to eat, the Waltons of Virginia lived like royalty compared to what those immigrants of America had to deal with in the Great Depression.

Somehow though I only feel fondness for all of that misery. It is like the year I was helping all the ranchers when I was 12 years old bring in their herds when winter came too early in a blizzard that year.
I remember standing there as one old guy was bouncing he was so mad at another rancher who told him to get his cattle out of the pen, so he could load out first.
This went on for some time in my little lynch mob where children were not even supposed to be seen not alone not heard.

Finally in exasperation he looked at me still furious and said, "Well what do you think!!!!!"

Never missing a chance to enjoy a righteous fight, I said loudly, "You never pull cattle out of a pen once you have them caught".

Sort of amazing what being an adult at 12 does for the ranchers about to start a range war in just speaking the Truth ended it all. The cattle stayed put and that prick rancher got his in next and we never saw him again.

I though got to freeze in 15 degree weather the rest of the day, riding horse, busting drifts to get scattered bunches of cattle out, cutting wires and just being cold as the guy whose horse I was on had no cattle at all, but was just helping out.....and his child was busy slapping the horse I was on on the hindquarters giving me a send off which almost killed me.

I look back on it all with absolute fondness and would trade any day to do that misery again as living that life is one to be cherished and thankful for.

So I'm odd in I'm thankful for the close scrapes I have had in life which God saw me through. The horses I have rode and those who rode me. I like the broken things. Those worthless rocks on my desk which I picked up as my Grandmother always picked them up for who knows what reason. I have one sitting here as I type which is quite odd she picked up before I was born, and they have only meaning because they were what she touched.
I still smile that when she died my Auntie Thelma when they divided things up for Gram, she never got a thing worth of any value, but that pile of rocks Gram had piled on her cistern.
Auntie just bawled as those meant the world to her.

I got the give away silverware which Gram's rich daughter threw in the trash and Gram made me go pick out of the dump. Just can not beat an inheritance like that in rocks and junk left to the people you are related to.

I look around my desk and there sits Grandpa's 97 at my knee making me look like some redneck. There is the neighbors Krestol Salve tin I found remembering them from when I was 4 and they were ancient to me then. The cicadas in my jar I found on my walks there. The tea set I drank tea from as a child which was my sisters that I rescued when she sold it on a rummage sale for a quarter and then the Wedgwood patterns from my patricians of not so long ago right next to a Karo Syrup pail which people used to eat around here like they drank water.

It is all like Throw Mama from the Train in Irwin and Mama, but like Padin in Silverado with Stella, a dog and a horse, you never know what the soul will get attached to.

.....and that horse that decided to kill me two days ago in fun, she is usually quoted to when people see her with me in that Silverado line, "Can't you see that horse loves me", because she constantly is nuzzling my face.

Oh well, enough playtime as God has work for me to do in the present, but I do look for the day when on a fiery horse I might be invited to join Libby Custer and the General in a miles long race on those plains which set me free of this world so long ago.

In the nothingness of them, like Theodore Roosevelt, I found me.

agtG

The misery was my company
She was the best friend I ever had
She held me close at heart and did not depart
To teach me the good times from the bad

I suffered long and hard for her
My mistress dark and deep
But as I look back upon that long track
There is not one memory I would not keep

The tears that fall down today
Are the springs of tomorrow's joy
I am grateful for my life was made full
By yesterday's company which only did annoy

So come my friend to the very end
In memories cherished for the pain
The sorrow is gone on tomorrow's dawn
So only the joys now remain