Get Shorty

How the West was Won

I saw a notice today that Paulette Jiles had died, which is such sad news. Did you ever read News of the World? It’s so good. The television adaptation was okay, but the book is much better—wistful, elegiac, and bitterly funny, the way the best Westerns are. I read it when I was in the throes of a serious Western binge. Have you read Ron Hansen’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford? Amazing. (Reading it spun me off on a cross-tangent of being obsessed with Ron Hansen, a very rewarding obsession. Have you read Mariette in Ecstasy? Oh my god.)

I have always had a thing for Westerns. I grew up when they were television staples: My childhood took place between episodes of Gunsmoke and Bonanza and Maverick. It shaped me. I never dreamed of living in fairyland or in a pink castle; I dreamed of being on a ranch. I wore a cowboy outfit as often as I could get away with it, and I thought about horses all the time.

I grew up in the very industrialized northeastern corner of Ohio, so I can’t say I had any real-life exposure to Western life, but I read every book about Native Americans I could find—I was more intrigued by them than by cowboys. I was particularly obsessed with the Iroquois, and the way they lived in a long-house with all generations of a family together. It sounded idyllic, something maybe my family could try, even though my maternal and paternal grandparents hated each other and would have never, in a million years, cohabited.

I’ve never read Lonesome Dove, but when the miniseries was aired in 1989, I was glued to it, and I think I’ve never cried as hard as I did watching that show. I couldn’t get it out of my head, that elemental sadness that is so much part of the Western aesthetic—you know from the get-go that everyone you care about is going to die, especially if they are a gruff person who finally allows himself (almost always “him”) to show emotion. That’s the warning salvo; he will die shortly. I really couldn’t get over Lonesome Dove, to the extent that I ended up talking about it in therapy. My therapist wisely surmised that I was crying about something else—therapy seems to suggest that life is just a shell game and it’s up to you to figure out where the ball is hiding. My therapist was right, of course. Now I think enough time has passed that I can risk reading the book without needing an intervention.

In the meantime, sweet dreams to Paulette Jiles, who gave us a lot of lovely poetry and a book that I won’t forget.

SHOW NOTES

—I was bored and restless the other day, so I went shopping, which has become harder and harder to do as real-life shops shut their doors. But fortunately, I live fairly close to a nice boutique called H. Lorenzo, where I can always while away an hour or two trying on crazy clothes. This particular trip had a funny twist. As I was parking, I pulled a bit close to the car in the next slot, and of course the driver was in it, and she glared at me. No big deal—I didn’t hit her, just loomed a little too close—but of course we were both going into H. Lorenzo, which is not a huge place, and I was going to have to bear up under her bad vibes in the store. Our dressing rooms were next to each other, so the inevitable occurred, namely, we began asking each other for opinions on the clothes we were trying. Of course, the darling young hipsters who work in the store were happy to offer their opinions as well, but it’s always nice to get a reaction from someone with no skin in the game, and Parking Lot and I began sizing each other up and offering honest appraisals of our various choices. We bonded. The friction in the parking lot vanished and we were just two wild animals sharing in the battle for survival, or something like that.

When she finished trying on clothes and had made her choices, she emerged from her dressing room in her street clothes, and I was dumbstruck by how much I loved her shorts. They were easily the coolest shorts I’d ever seen, and I told her so. Unlike some people, who would just say thanks and leave it at that, she seemed happy to tell me they were men’s shorts and gave me the name of the brand. She had gotten them at H. Lorenzo a while ago, and they were sold out, but armed with the name of the brand, I could try and track them down. Parking Lot was a very expensively-dressed woman who was driving a custom-wrapped Tesla (the car I almost dinged) and she did warn me that the shorts cost a fortune. I wasn’t sure what she would consider a fortune, but the minute I got home, I fired up my computer and dug in. Oh, wouldn’t you know it! One pair left, smallest men’s size, and 1/10th the original cost (they sure were a fortune). And reader, I bought them. And reader, they fit me. Happy days.

More soon, including a giveaway for paid subscribers… xSusan