"There's a want and there's a need.
There's a history between
Girls like her and guys like me.
Cowboys and angels, cowboys and angels."
This is a new song on country stations called "Cowboys and Angels". It's lyrics strike a chord with me because it somewhat describes my relationship with Reed. As anyone who knows me can attest, I'm no angel, but Reed is somewhat of a cowboy. Reed was never a cowboy in the horse riding, Stetson wearing sense of the word, but he is a cowboy in the independent, unrefined sense. No offense to his mother but, when I started dating Reed, he was only green broke. On our first date, he said, "I don't know nothing about how to treat girls, so you're going to have to teach me." I accepted that challenge. It's not that he hadn't been exposed to good manners, it's just that he never particularly noticed them. Even then, Reed was very well read, but he has yet to notice nuances like spelling and punctuation. How people dress and polite social manners are also nuances cowboys do not bother with.
I am usually well, if inexpensively, dressed and have a good grasp of manners--Montana style, so we were considered somewhat of an odd couple when we started dating. Which explains an odd conversation I had with an acquaintance at Bible college.
She said, "But Connie, you're such a lady and Reed's such a . . .a. . ."
I finally took pity on her and suggested, "country boy?".
"Yes, that's it."
Cowboys have rough edges and rough hands. They live by their own code, but it is, for the most part, an honorable one. They can patch up animals, machinery and themselves with equal competence. They don't use lots of words but, the few they use, matter. Somehow, those rough bundles of baling wire manage to snag women who are as unlike them as silk from burlap and both discover they fit together like vel and cro.
It doesn't matter to me that there is more culture in my yogurt than in my cowboy, I'm angel enough to know a good man when I see one.
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