A Blog by Gail Cushman, with input from Cowboy Bob
I received this last week…and thought you might enjoy it. Gail
As I sat drinking my morning coffee and waiting for my eggs to scramble, I read an article about the dating adventures of this blog lady in Idaho and wondered how she is doing. I mean, she had two dates and she gets nervous over a hand closing over hers. I’m not sure she is cut out for this romancing business.
It caused me to think that I should tell a story here, about a widow over in Coyote Point, a little east of here. I am a widower, married for over 40 years, but this lady is quite the experience. I get tired of talking to Slowpoke, my pony, because he doesn’t talk back, and those heifers I am calving don’t do much in the way of intellectual conversation either. So, I fired up my old green-screen computer and found an Internet dating site called oldcowboys.com and started looking around and this nice-looking lady popped up. I will call her Widow Brown for protection of the innocent. She had a nice picture and a nice story, I think they call it a profile (kind of like the FBI’s most wanted).
Widow Brown and I had two fun dates, both about halfway between my winter cow camp and Coyote Point, the first at Taco Bell where she picked the closest table to the door and the second, a high-class diner in Miles City. It was clean, had nice steaks, and good music, Bob Wills on the juke box. They even had a little candle on the table. She cuddled up a little bit and I got a little kiss on the lips, but that was all. I called her up the next week and she said, “Come on over and I will cook us a dinner.” I was confused about whether dinner is at suppertime or at noon, but I said sure.
I drove about 6 hours to Coyote Point and met my lady at 6 o’clock for victuals. She looked mighty fine, smelled good, and put on a spread, cornbread, black-eyed peas, and a roast with cute onion decorations on each piece of meat. After supper, er, dinner she led me to the parlor and said, “Let’s talk,” and she laid it out, the standard kind of talk ladies give after the second date, “No means no, don’t get any ideas,” then she asked, “have you been to a doctor recently?”
I said, “Last winter I got the flu, and he sure fixed that up.”
She said, “Do you have a lot of women friends?”
I didn’t want to brag that I knew a few ladies, but I wondered, what’s this about? She said, “Do you know any in the biblical sense?”
That put me in a quandary because if I said no, she may think I am not much of a man. If I say yes, then she might think I am easy. Maybe I am. I said, “These ladies are my church friends so does that count as a biblical sense?” I kind of dared her to keep going with this line of questioning.
She gritted her teeth and asked, “More coffee? By the way, do you have your Medicare card in your wallet?”
Surprised, I said, “Yes,” and my cowboy brain was really locking up. She just nodded as she continued, “Well, if anything happens to you, just know that I will put your clothes back on and drag you out on the front porch and then call the ambulance, after all, I have a reputation to uphold.” Nothing much happened that night, kind of like ice water on a fresh green sprout, if you know what I mean.
Widow Brown and I are still in touch, but I’m on alert. I copied my Medicare card and laminated it and keep an extra in my pickup where it’s handy. I can’t be too careful.
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