Where are you, Caboy?

Our head wrangler at Young Life’s Woodleaf was Pat Day, whom we called Caboy, not Cowboy, but Caboy. All of us cowboy and cowgirls were posers except for Pat. He handled the horses and all the rest of us around the horses real well. He and the other wranglers would take the campers on trail rides. I saw Pat about 4 years later, in October of 1984, I rode the Greyhound bus from Portland to San Diego to see friends I had known when I lived in the Great State of California.

I remember twice that my heart quickened on that trip, first going across the Siskiyou’s and entering California and then again cresting the top of the Grapevine and entering the L.A. Basin. I have lived here longer than anywhere else, but my ??? is in Southern California. Pat Conroy says in one of his books that all military brats lay claim to somewhere they have been and hold onto it. I think for me it is Long Beach, CA, where I was born. Portland is home, my heart is here with Ruth Ann and the boys, The Fellowship of Pirates and our Mosaic family. But there is always a part of me that will want to be in SoCal no matter how much anyone runs it down.