I was 85 years old, and my children, Maya, Robbie, and Anna, were throwing me a big party at Maya's house, much to my embarrassment. To me, a good time was quiet and solitude, not a noisy crowd of people.
"Dad, do you want a nautical theme or a western theme for the reunion?" Robbie asked, with a sly smile. "Everybody knows how much you love your boat and sailing out in the bay by yourself, but I don't think too many of them know about that year you spent up in Montana working those cattle ranches. Am I right?"
I didn't look up from the newspaper I was reading.
He laughed and walked away, shouting back over his shoulder, "Nautical it is!"
The truth was, not Robbie, or his sisters, or anyone else, for that matter, knew the whole story about that period of my life, because it was before I had met their mother, Julia.
I was eighteen when I decided to move from a small coastal town in Oregon to Montana, to pursue my dream of being a cowboy. My father had been faintly disappointed. He was a life-long commercial fisherman and didn't understand the appeal of the cowboy lifestyle. But he didn't fight me on it. My mother, on the other hand, let me have it. I had been a straight-A student all through school, and she had had high hopes for me going to college, as neither she nor my father had, and "making something of myself." I told her that I wanted to make something of myself in Montana.
And so I went, and I made something of myself. I worked 12- and 14-hour days, seven days a week, mostly on a horse. I listened and learned from the old-timers and gradually earned their respect. I did that dirty, grinding, grueling, fantastic work for four years, actually, not one, as Robbie thought, until I was rewarded by being offered the cushy job of foreman on a dude ranch, teaching city slickers how to ride. I took the job.
On my first day, I was to instruct a young female lawyer from San Francisco who had no riding experience. When I went to meet her that morning in front of the main house, I didn't get a word out before she offered her hand, smiled broadly, and said, "Good morning! I'm Julia."