My dad was a cowboy. When he was 16, he lived alone in a cabin near Hanna taking care of his uncle's horses during the particularly harsh winter of '48. In November of that year a man who worked for the Stampede ranch found him walking through the snow across the prairie several miles from his cabin during a severe storm. His horse, Blaze, had left him and he was cold. The man rode him on his horse back to the cabin where Blaze was waiting for him by the door of the small barn. His saddle bags were still full of the food he had bought from the small town 20 km's away.
A week later, the man from the Stampede ranch returned and offered my dad his first job. A few days after that he was on a train, a bunk in a livestock car full of horses heading to the grey cup football game in Toronto. His job was to take care of the parade animals. 70 years later the story he told most is ordering a large orange float in the bar of the Royal York Hotel. The way he tells it is a poem. The ice cream delivered in a cup on a tray with a bottle of Crush on the side. A woman hitting on him. A stable of horses waiting his return for hay and brushing. It must have been impossible to imagine any of this only a few weeks earlier during his freezing walk back from town.
He was several other things in life. A salesman, warehouse man, truck driver, delivery man, entrepreneur and business man. He managed to keep many kids alive. His care and attention ebbed and flowed. Food. Water. Clean bedding. A way of training that required you to be smart. You had to know how to get yourself home in a storm. The jobs he did or the business he created, the ones that worked and the ones that failed, 70 years of them all, ultimately were not what he did in life.
As he deteriorated and was close to death, I showed him pictures from a 1948 Toronto newspaper. He had trouble remembering our names towards the end. But in the newspaper was a photo from the grey cup parade. In the photo was Blaze, a strong looking paint leading the parade. There was Annie. Pete. Snippy. Socks and George. And Coulee. All at my dad's command like it was 1948. He knew all their names. Ronnie and Chester. Raspberry and Sonny. They had all stayed with him for his whole life, maybe not under his mount, but always waiting at the barn. If nothing else, he loved what he did once.
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