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Lately I've been feeling a little insecure about whether or not I'm a "real" cowboy, or an imposter.  Truth be told, I broke in my first horse when I was just 9 years of age.  Of course it was just a pony, and a lilliputian one at that, but size shouldn't matter. 

Then, at the age of 10, I was trampled by a horse.  A horse, of course, if you consider a 3-week-old colt a horse.  But let's just say, for the sake argument that neither of these events makes me a real cowboy. 

I can stand on my cowboy status as a result of having had a grandpa and grandma who owned and raised cattle most of their lives on a Texas-sized ranch near Wolf Point, Montana, where I frequently visited with my parents and sibs. 

And I was raised on a farm in the prairies of Saskatchewan.  That's not so far from the Calgary Stampede, which I never attended, but that's beside the point.  My dad moved us around a lot.  Sometimes I lived on the farm, rounded up cattle, fed pigs, chickens etc., other times I lived in the city.

My dad raised a special exotic breed of cow from France, called Maine anju.  Of course that's a little too highfalutin a breed for most "real" cowboys to raise, but, wait, there's more.   

One New Year's Eve night, a Sunday night, while we were in church (all good cowboys and cowgirls go), the herd of about 90 got into the building where we housed the wheat, and got themselves bloated. 

It was 40 below zero farenheit (they now use calcius in Canada), and we had to stay up all night, shoving bottles of medicine down their throats before the liquid had a chance to freeze, and chasing them around all night to keep them alive. 

Now if all of this is not enough to make me a real cowboy----that and the fact that I'm a resident of Bakersfield, and a fan of Trouts, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Homer Joy, Rockwell, Jerry Rothberg, Jeffrey Michaels, The Buckaroos, Hank Ray, the Crystal Palace, then what do you consider a "real" cowboy? 

The clincher for me was when I walked in to Zingo's on Buck Owen's Boulevard (where all "real" cowboys go for lunch, and somebody I passed, said to me, "hey, Tex." 

There's nothing like a "Tex" message to remind you what being a "real" cowboy is all about.