No, this isn’t a post about the Avengers… but that’s a cool idea. I just haven’t seen the new movie yet. I will… so be patient. You probably don’t really need a lot of comic-book fan-boy love right now anyway… That is such a nerd-need, and you are not a nerd… at least, I haven’t been corrected about nerd-things on my blog, which leads me to conclude there are no nerds reading my squishy-goofy-gallywumpas. This post is about my daughter, the Princess.
Specifically, this is a post about the Princess’ hair. You see, the Princess was unfortunate enough to be exactly between two opposite extremes of hair-genes. She inherited her mother’s thick, dark wire-hair, but the wild-hair, mind-of-its-own crazy go-every-direction hair she got from me. She inherits the worst hair-features from both of us. So how do you to tame your hair in the mornings when you have thick, unruly hair that not only refuses to be tamed, but will willingly grab the brush out of your hand and throw it across the room? Well, you apparently borrow your brother’s comb without permission and give the hair 500 rat-nest-dislodging yanks and then lose the comb so that your brother is mad at you for the rest of the day… I mean, the rest of the week… er, the month, the year… maybe the rest of the Princess’ life.
This morning;
Me; “Please don’t eat your brother’s comb when you are finished doing that. Put it back on the sink in the bathroom before we go to school.” (This is a helpful dad-statement used every morning when I watch her battling the hair at the breakfast table, but inevitably the comb is missing the next time brother Henry looks for it. She must eat it when my back is turned to go start the car.)
Princess; “I will, Dad… Geez…. But I can’t believe all the hair I have now on my pants and shirt. How can I lose this much hair every day and not be bald?”
“Princess, you are really, really good at growing hair.”
“Oh, I know it. In fact, I’m pretty sure when I pull out one hair, three grow back to take its place.”
“Wow! That’s like mythological, or something. Do you wake up in the night to find little Hercules-type guys climbing up on your pillow trying to cut your hair with swords?”
“Yeah, it keeps me awake at night. But you know in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Books, the hydra has to be turned to stone or be burned with fire to defeat it.” (I cannot, of course, argue this point as she has read all of the books and is an irrefutable expert on the subject of Rick Riordan’s mythology.)
“Oh, mercy! You mean the little Hercules-guys are climbing on your pillow with torches?”
“Yes, but I got a bunch of little Minotaur-guys to fight them off, so my hair hasn’t been burned.”
“Well, that’s good… but what about all the little cow patties they leave in your blankets?”
“Dad, hair problems are hard. You can’t expect to have it all easy, right?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s right.”
Catch a Falling Star 
The Cowboy Code
When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code. The guy in the white hat always shoots straight. He knows right from wrong. He only shoots the bad guy. He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can. Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of plains.
And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters. People who make television shows never lie, do they? In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.
Daniel Boone was a real guy too. He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers. And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode. He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad. Mingo was always on Daniel’s side. And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared. It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive. Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.
So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code? I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened. Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology? Didn’t they learn the code too?
I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody. But that was never the point of the cowboy code. We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth. We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands. And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be. But Daniel Boone was a real man. Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.
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Tagged as arizona, autobiography, childhood beliefs, cowboy code, Daniel Boone, humor, politics, Red Ryder, Roy Rogers, satire, writing, Wyatt Earp