-Draw me a picture

-Ok what’s it to be, this picture, what’ll I draw?

-Draw me…a stagecoach, yeah a stagecoach. And a story, a story too. Yeah, yeah.

Listening. Watching. Remembering that nervous spidery line travelling across the page, across cheap lined notepaper from Woolworths: watching the outlines of Mesas, drawn from memory, completed in the tales he told. For him a familiar landscape; a place I could only inhabit in my imagination, in the weekly visits to the local cinemas to watch the westerns you loved.

-I never could draw that well, could I?

-Dunno. No, you never could. But maybe those spidery lines were sufficient, were all I needed.

- Always only starting points, eh? And the stories were good, weren’t they.

Standing under a boundless sky, thinking that maybe this is enough, all I’ll ever need.

Days ago, sitting in the lobby of the El Rancho Hotel in Gallup, New Mexico.
Stained, fading photographs crowd the walls of the lobby, the balcony. Old movie stars, long gone. Faces that would have been all too familiar to you, fragments of childhood memory for me.

18th September
Barstow
California