Long-Horn Steer and Six AM Budweisers

Buck was dressed in his customary dark blue, 505 Levis and a white button down long sleeve dress shirt, although the sleeves of the latter were rolled up to just below the elbows, giving him the appearance—at least from the waist up---of a business man, hard at work.

Buck had long worn what he’d come to think of as his “uniform”: jeans, cowboy boots, and a dress shirt—white or striped. He wore the same sartorial arrangement today, as he did 15 years ago, when he had been a student in Boston. Back in his college days, his friends used to call him “Cowboy” because he was from California, and in their jaundiced view, everyone who came from west of the Mississippi to attend college in the East was considered a rustic ‘cowboy,’ certainly anyone who came from California and was named “Buck”. In fact, most of his college classmates thought he’d never make anything of himself, but much to Buck’s pleasure---they had been wrong.

In the years after college, Buck had become a pretty successful writer—mostly travel writing and short stories for magazines--even if, to most, he still looked like someone who should be roping long-horn steer and pounding down multiple Budweisers, long before high noon.