So far, I’ve only shown pictures from others. This week, I’m starting a series of Friday posts based on a selection of pictures I took myself during a walk down Route 66 in Tulsa in August, 2021.
This wasn’t originally going to be a series; it was just going to be one post with just this picture. Usually, I don’t want to add more because I want to focus on just the one idea and how it can generate a thousand others—a picture is worth a thousand words, after all—but as I was going through the folder, I saw so many that swirled around, stirring up things.
Besides, inspiration doesn’t just come from one source, and everyone will see something different. You, for example, may just see an old toy horse, and that’s fine. You may see the world where I see just a grain of sand some time.
In this, I see the old coin-operated horse ride that used to be outside the old department store I used to shop at with my parents when I was a kid. That local department store no longer exists, put out of business decades ago by Walmart, just as the motorized part is long gone, but I still remember the sounds it made when they put in the quarters and the music it played while it pretended to run. I see the story of a retired jockey who was inspired to ride by one of these. Or a story of a kid whose parents were too poor or too strict or too busy to let their little girl have two minutes of imaginary horse-riding time when they’d walk by it on their way out of the store. What happened to her? Did she buy a horse farm? Die of a drug overdose? Become a veterinarian?
John Steinbeck observed that the old Westerns are the last vestige of the knights of the Round Table. Their swords are replaced by six-shooters and their helmets by ten-gallon hats, but the horse remains. So do the code of ethics, the inevitability of good fighting bad. A kid could be the sheriff riding around a mean town on top of one of these imagination machines or an outlaw riding on to the next town with a fistful of dollars robbed from the bank of a frontier town.
They could be anything they wanted to be for the two minutes the two quarters lasted. So can you while you write. You get to be you and them and all the others for free and for as long as you want. Or at least until the story bucks you off its back.
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