Bed Time Story

Tonight, before I go to bed, I will tell you a short and sweet bedtime story. It is a bedtime story about a bedtime story and it goes like this. . .

Once upon a time there was a mother who loved to read to her children. For this particular night's selection she picked out a recent library find with an surly cowboy on the cover. It was called "The Toughest Cowboy." She had her six year old on one side, her two year old on the other & her 4 month old balanced on her lap as she dove into the dusty tale of an ornery, boot-wearin cattle driver named Grizz Brickbottom. Grizz's story is of the tall tale variety, with funny names, colloquial accents and humorous exaggerations like "he drank a quart of Tabasco sauce every day and flossed his teeth with barbed wire."

As the story starts out, Grizz is is "scraping the gnats out of his nostrils with a spur and leaning back against a cactus" listening to a cowpoke named Chuck Wagon sing himself a cowboy love song. It goes like this:

"Oh, how I miss my one true love.
Oh, how I miss that silky hair,
That lovely smell,
Those kisses so sweet. . ."

(The mom actually sang these verses as a song with her best "Soggy Bottom Brother's" Southern Twang. It was in 3/4 time and not unlike the cowboy waltzes she used to pretend play in the Arizona deserts of her childhood. But that's another story. . .)

This is when Grizz looks around at the other cowboys picking their teeth with their fingernails and decides he needs a new type of companion: "He realized something was missing in his life. Someone with silky hair. Someone with a lovely smell. Someone who would give him lots of sweet kisses. He needed. . ."

And here you turn the page and it says in really big letters

"A DOG!"

The mom started to laugh as she was truly thinking that buckaroo was wanting a lady friend of the human variety. You know, a traditional girlfriend. The mom turned to her six year old son and said, "Did you think he was going to say a dog?"

"No," said her son. He seemed to be in thoughtful contemplation at the plot twist.

"What did you think he was going to say?" she asked, wondering how he would describe a girlfriend.

Her boy answered in sincere solemnity. "A mom."

It is good for a mom to realize she is her son's first "girlfriend." And truthfully, we didn't even finish the story since my sleepy boy found the plot too long. But his mama is going to remember the "Toughest Cowboy" less like a tall tale and more like a melt your heart romance.