the horse whisperer

There is a strange science to the regular customer. Most 'regulars' come to be from work or home's proximity to the cafe/bar/grocery that they frequent. But for others, it's precisely the departure from an ordinary routine that makes a different kind of regular, the 'visiting regular.' We have a lot of these, and it's a collection that defies any demographic formula (other than "not Republican".) Among my favorite visiting regulars is at the moment is Steve, the ranch hand and marine technician, cowboy-mountain man-horse whisperer.

Steve found us about a year ago. He first started coming in on his trips downtown to meet with his lawyer, over a worker's comp lawsuit. I think. This is what I gathered. I never learned the whole story or the outcome, and if I did, I've since forgotten. We started to call him "the cowboy," for obvious reasons--with his 6 foot plus frame, levis, boots and deep slow drawl, he is just the kind of over 40's handsome, rugged dude you'd expect to see in a Marlboro ad. He drinks 12 oz vanilla lattes and tells us of his adventures foraging for (edible) mushrooms, teaching his horses to pick blackberries off bushes, or fighting with the city over unpaid parking tickets. When he learned that my grandfather was an amateur mycologist, he would come in at least twice a week with samples of white truffles (or false white truffles) and stories of huge crops of chanterelles. I would try to keep up with him and flag mental notes about where the good mushrooms are, where it's now illegal to forage, and how to spot real white truffles, in case I ever make good on my life's goal to carry on my grandfather's legacy, but at a certain point, your attention level has reached maximum saturation and the brain begins to act as a sieve. Because you soon realize with Steve that there's an endless supply of information, but a finite amount of attention on your part.

One day Steve came in to tell us that he got a new job working on a horse ranch out in North Plains. He tends to the land and the horses, getting them ready for the riding ring on weekends and defending them against predatory cougars in the nearby hills. Like his blind luck finding mushrooms, I suspect that Steve has that kind of 'horse whisperer' vibe with animals. He is, in my romantic vision, the stoic ranch hand living a monastic existence in North Plains who becomes Loquacious Cowboy Steve when he steps through our door. It was only today that I learned he has a 'real' job, as a marine technician. I think this is like a mechanic for boats, and he did go into some detail about what he does. So much detail that again, I failed to keep up and instead thought of ways of composing Steve's profile for the blog.

I actually started this post last night and at a point where I was really struggling with what to say, I remembered the airplane bottle of Pendleton whiskey he gave to me before our vacation in August. Uncharacteristically, I was saving it for a special or desperate moment and now it had found me. Only, I couldn't find the bottle. Jeff appeared honest when he said he never touched it, and either he is a better liar to my sleuth, or I had in fact hidden the bottle from him, only to lose it permanently. This morning I told Steve how I lost the bottle hiding it, but he suggested that perhaps I had drank it in a vicodin haze, thus forgetting about it altogether. Really, it's the only logical explanation, but I am going to keep on looking anyway.