Thinkin Big (eBook)

Bein a cowboy has always been my first love, with boxingcomin in a close second. Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong times. All this fast lifestyle of the '905, with cars zoomin down highways, drivers talkin on their cellphones, and no time to just shoot the breeze. Give me a sorrel quarter horse, with a hot summer Oklahoma trail, a bandanna to wipe my brow once in a while, and a dip of water from a horse's trough, and I'd be livin high. I know where this cowboy love comes from - my great-grandfather, Uncle Pete we called him. He was a hell of a hand - that's cowboy talk for a 'true' cowboy. I owe him my life for that piece of cowboy he left in me. Uncle Pete, Peter Hawkins, lived to be 100 years old, born in1865, died in 1965, his father, I been told, had been a slave, livin to be 122 years old. I guess they both knew how to live right, seein all the hard times they beat - slavery, poverty, the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression. Man! We could all stand to learn somethin from these men. My great-grandfather was part Choctaw, and though his skin was a deep, rich black, he had the features of an Indian, with high cheekbones and those dark eyes that could stare right through ya. Uncle Pete married a short, round, full-blood Choctaw woman with two long silver braids hangin down to her elbows, touchin the dirty white apron that she always liked to wear. Pete must have been tied to the Oklahoma land of the Choctaws even more than his full-blooded wife, Mary, because every Sunday he insisted on ridin his red sorrel to FountainBaptist Church, the Indian church that stands to this day and is known to be the oldest church still runnin in Oklahoma. Rain or shine, sticky summer heat or wintry, icy, chilled-tothe- bone cold, Uncle Pete would get up at 5 a.m. every Sabbath day, slide on a pair of old cotton pants, ratty long underwear, then a second pair of ragged pants, a second shirt, this time maybe a checkered cowboy shirt, and another, and another, and another, and another. By the time the cock crowed, Great-Grandfather would have SIX pairs of pants on and SIX shirts, and no one knows how many pairs of socks he'd slide up his skinny legs before loadin himself into his cowboy boots. He used to say, 'What'll keep you warm in the winter'll keepya cool in the summer.' And it wasn't just on Sundays that he'd carry around such a load on his 5'5' body, it was every day. The townspeople who're still alive to share their memories of Peter Hawkins will tell ya the same thing. What's so amazin, though, is that he never had a foul smell. And it gets me how an old man like that could wander all around the countryside on his big ole horse without knockin people over. Uncle Pete would put his six layers on, load up the black plastic raincoat he always carried on the back of that horse even when there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and head off toward theold Indian church 13 miles away, a stained cowboy hat plastered to his head, a left cheek full of cheap tobacco. Plop, plop, plop, him and Nip would go, out from the bottoms where he lived with his six children and Choctaw wife, through the small town of Gibson Station, past the cotton farms of his relatives. It must have taken him several hours to get that far goin that speed, butUncle Pete was never in a hurry. He got his joy from hearin a meadowlark callin out across the prairie or seein a hawk glidin over him lookin for a field mouse to snatch up. Bloop, bloop, bloop, old Nip would go, fartin along the grassy trail that was all smashed down, carryin his master to the small Indian church where he'd worship with the Choctaws and Cherokees.