Those boots were made for walkin'

Dad emailed this photo to me yesterday. It accompanies the early pictures of Timm the adventurer, who as a child fantasized the riding-out, who yearned for the cowboy myth of the outdoors man, the one who rode nature like a horse, like the fish-rider of our O'Cobthaigh crest. Timm and I grew up wearing the same boots – literally and figuratively. My early-rising habits stem back to childhood, when I would wake early in the morning to bolt downstairs to watch Roy Rodgers on TV. I had a rocking horse and all of the cowboy accoutrements.


So yearned Timm. The story behind the picture of Timm in his boots is that we vacationed in Colorado when Timm must have been four or five year old, staying first at a dude ranch where we got to ride horses. Timm was obviously entranced; tiny as he was, he rode his pony with gusto and authority.


The boots he's wearing in the picture were once mine; I had outgrown them and Timm had yet to grow into them, yet he was adamant about wearing them. In the photo Timm is sitting in an outdoor church service, those overlarge boots ready for the next adventure, droopy on his feet though he would surely grow into them. (A note on his doodling: that was another trait we shared. I would accompany Dad to churches he substitute-preached at in the ‘60s, traveling to suburbs around Chicago; I become an accomplished program-doodler, filling the spaces between Invocation and Benediction with scribbled sermons of my own.)

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A difference between Timm and I: I didn't last long on those horses. I had the fantasy of riding as Roy Rogers, but it wasn't soon before my horse had gauged my tenacity and hurried toward a low-hanging branch where I was knocked off. So ended my cowboy career. Timm, for all of his youth, never let go of those reins. We both evolved out our cowboy fantasies but in different directions. In my room I read Tom Swift, the brainy kid-scientist-adventurer, relishing tales of rocket ships and earth-burrowers and ships that could fly over the sea; Timm went in the direction of Tarzan, ever more free in the wild.

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When Timm grew to full height, he hoped that he would be the tallest in the family. He was short of my height by a quarter inch. To compensate (so the family story goes), he began wearing boots. And yes, the tallest person at sister Molly's wedding in 1987 is Timm, and yes, he's wearing boots. Timm didn't grow up to be the tallest in the family - he barely missed that distinction - but he did grow the biggest feet, size 13 triple E's. God did not ordain him to walk long, but he did walk the furthest. And he was built to carry the heaviest load. I gave up on cowboy boots in the early 70's when we lived in Chicago, finding them terrible to walk on icy streets. I took up platform shoes and Converse All-Stars – hipper shoes for sure, but of no use in the great outdoors.