Doing things the 'cowboy way'

We just finished our annual Wharton Cowboy Christmas festival and I was discussing the success we had with our 9 a.m. gathering, "Cowboy Church around the Chuck Wagon" on Sunday. My son, Mike Blakely, had a similar Sunday experience at Luckenbach this year with his annual festival. I asked how it went, since it didn't start until noon. He said it turned out really well. He even got a note from the Luckenbach management that read, "Cowboy Church was wonderful. The bar did great!"

Those cowboys do things a little different. They may have breakfast tacos and coffee with a tequila chaser. They go out Saturday night to sow some wild oats then go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure. They take their hat off when introduced to a lady but leave it on while taking a bath.

Some of them, like my friend, Thomas Michael Riley, have turned to music as a profession, writing songs about the cowboy life, even dabble a little in real estate and supplement their diet with venison steaks and boar hog sausage.

And so it was that Thomas purchased a big, old house with some big, modern rooms that had been added right after the Civil War. He rented out some of the facilities but all of them were attached to the same water

and sewer systems, which were installed just after the Spanish-American war. One day the septic system backed up and seriously threatened to aggravate the Ozone layer and Greenpeace movement.

Thomas, not wanting to call a plumber when he knew a cowboy could fix this problem, poured every chemical known to mankind into the backed up murky waters and only succeeded in creating a kind of Salvador Dali painting with streaks of mauve, magenta, burgundy, fusia, and muckeldy dun radiating from a dead whirlpool frozen in place. Some say it looked like a chicken that had flown through an attic fan. Safe to say it was clogged tighter than Uncle Charlie's Sunday shirt collar. The two guys ran a snake through the trap to no avail. So Thomas rented a power auger, a rotor-rooter type of device designed to snag and extract clogs. It latched on to something, some say it was moaning a hideous death cry, but that could have been the Jose Cuervo kicking in from the Folgers special.

Finally, out came the hairless, bloated, bug-eyed carcass of a squirrel that had taken a wrong turn down the vent and ended up drowning in the sewer line. Thomas looked at his buddy with that squinty evil eye and said, "You have GOT to start chewing your food."

Doc Blakely is a humorist and motivational speaker who resides in Wharton.