I have so many wonderful Christmas memories.   But one really stand  out in my mind.   It   was   the year Bo and I got our first bikes. Ogelsby, Texas,1957.  We lived across the street from Aunt Opal and her family. Clay and I were in the second grade and Bo was in the first. Bo and I got baby blue bikes for Christmas. They were beautiful.  

It took me weeks to learn how to stop and get off! I could ride after the first day. But I just could not get the hang of stopping! Daddy worked and worked with me on it. I would just fly up in the yard and jump off. Not good on the bike or me either! Before long I had both knees bleeding and both elbows scraped.

Daddy finally told me I would get a spanking if I kept jumping off and letting my new bike crash into whatever. So I took off around the block for a ride, determined to get off right when I got back to my house. When I got down to the end of our street someone had tied his old milk cow to the fence post to graze on the roadside. The road was barely one lane wide and that old Bossy was out in the road. To a scaredy cat seven year old that cow looked HUGE! To make it worse, there were so many  potholes in the   road I   had to go with in inches of that old cow to keep from wiping out . (If   you never lived in a small Texas town in the fifties , such as Oglesby, you may not have ever had this problem.)

I was NOT going to go by this cow more than once. Now our "limits" only extended around our block. But a block in Ogelsby was not like a city block. It was quite a long ways around . I was glad to see my house coming up. I got   ready to jump, ( remember I had not learned to get off my Bike yet!) when daddy walked out on the porch. I keep going. I had never had a real spanking from daddy and I was not ready to start. On down the dirt road I went. Sure enough that old cow was watching me come. I figured she wanted to have me for dinner! ( Ok, I was only seven!)

I gritted my teeth, prayed real hard and wheeled past her. That silly

thing  mooed hello to me as I passed. I almost lost control. Back aroundto  home. Dad was still on the porch! I was crying. I went passed the house  and headed out to face the cow again. It was her or daddy. By the time  I got back around to our house I was howling my head off. Dad heard me coming and had figured out something was wrong. ( So had the whole neighborhood.)  He was waiting and stepped out and caught me. He held me while I blubbered out my horror story about the cow, the spanking, and not being able to get off my bike. He tried real hard not to laugh at me. He was a good daddy.

He spent the rest of the day teaching me how to dismount my   Bike. He even  took me down the street and introduced me to that old bossy cow. I was still a little leery of her, but daddy said she only ate grass. He had never  lied to me, so I trusted that!