The Best Palomino in the World

The Best Palomino in the World

Looking back now, I realize that the greatest adventures of my childhood weren't given to us—they were built by us. Brick by brick, board by board, and yes, sometimes broomstick by broomstick.

This was the mid-1960s, when imagination wasn't just a pastime; it was the very currency of childhood. Your world was only as small as your lack of creativity, and my brother Donnie and I had imaginations that could stretch from our shotgun-style house in Tennessee to the dusty streets of Dodge City or the beaches of Normandy, depending on the hour.

We were children of the television era, but television was just kindling for the fires we built ourselves. Westerns blazed across our black-and-white screen every Saturday morning—Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Rifleman—and we absorbed every frame like scripture. At night, the late shows gave us war movies, the heroes of World War II still fresh in the national memory, their exploits dramatized in grainy glory. Donnie and I would sneak into the living room, crouched behind the couch like commandos, watching Combat with wide eyes, living every ambush and firefight from the safety of our own carpet.

But the living room was just the beginning. The real magic happened when we took what we'd seen and tried to make it ours.

Our house was a shotgun-style relic—long and narrow, room leading into room like a train of boxcars. At the bottom of the stairs sat a small room, then you'd step into a larger one that held the bathroom, and finally, at the far end, the room Donnie and I shared. Dad and Grandpa had put up a wall to make that last space, but before they did, it was just one big open area, full of possibility.

We didn't have a bunk bed yet in those early days. Just a standard-size iron bed with a tall headboard of vertical spokes and a shorter footboard made of the same wrought iron. That footboard became the best Palomino horse in the world—a golden stallion that could carry us across the prairie, through Indian territory, and back home again before supper. We'd grip those iron bars like reins, galloping through our imaginations, the bed frame squeaking in protest beneath us.

I don't remember whose idea it was—probably both of ours, the way good ideas happen when brothers are in sync. We had just finished a Saturday morning western, our toy guns already strapped to our hips, and we looked at each other in that way that meant trouble was brewing.

Mom was in the kitchen, as always, keeping our youngest brother Mark out of mischief. Mark was maybe two years old then, a toddling wrecking ball of sticky fingers and endless questions. Dad was in his recliner, half-watching television, half-dozing, his weekends a sacred space of rest from the shop.

Donnie and I slipped through the house like shadows, our mission clear but undefined. We needed something—we weren't sure what yet, but we'd know it when we saw it.

The old Stanley broom with its metal handle caught my eye first. Then Donnie grabbed the mop. We whispered excitedly, making plans, and slipped out to the garage where we found a rake and a long stick that seemed perfect for... something. We hadn't quite figured out the details.

The clothesline was our next acquisition. Mom would have objected if she'd seen us yanking it down, but she was busy with Mark, and we were too deep in our scheme to consider consequences. Then the blanket—the one from our bed, the one with the faded pattern that had been there since before I could remember.

We dragged everything to the backyard, our hearts pounding with the thrill of creation. The rake, the broom, the mop, the long stick—we arranged them in a tripod, tying the tops together with pieces of clothesline. But the legs kept slipping on the grass, so we improvised, jabbing smaller sticks into the ground to brace them.

Then came the blanket. We draped it around the tripod frame, making a cone that would be the envy of any Plains tribe. But it wouldn't stay. The blanket kept slipping, bunching up, refusing to cooperate.

"We need to tie it down," Donnie said, his voice carrying the authority of a general issuing orders.

I ran to the garage and grabbed a long nail. We poked holes in the blanket, Mom's good bedding, and tied it to the frame with more of that cut clothesline, leaving an opening at the bottom just big enough for two little cowboys to crawl through.

When we stepped back, the thing actually looked like a teepee. A crooked, lumpy, certainly-not-historical teepee made from household tools and a sacrificial blanket, but to us, it was a masterpiece. We had built a home on the frontier, a place to plan our campaigns and tell our stories.

I wish I could describe the feeling of that moment—the way our chests swelled with pride, the way our imaginations transformed broomsticks into lodge poles and cotton into buffalo hide. We had created something from nothing, and that is one of the most powerful feelings a child can know.

Our frontier town grew organically after that. We found old wooden crates in the garage, the kind that might have once held tomatoes or bananas from the farmer's market. We stacked them up, arranging them just right, and in our minds, we'd built a saloon as fine as Miss Kitty's on Gunsmoke. We had wooden soda cases too, ancient relics with the faded logos of long-gone brands, and we arranged them into a bar, a counter, a place for cowboys to drink their sarsaparilla.

Our toy guns were already holstered. We were ready.

Then the hurricane hit.

Not a real hurricane, of course. But the force that erupted from the back door that afternoon might as well have been one.

"WHAT IN THE—" Mom's voice cut through our play like a gunshot, and we froze, caught in the act of imagining ourselves into another world. "DONNIE! RICKEY! COME HERE. RIGHT. NOW."

She stood on the back steps, hands on her hips, her mouth opening and closing like a fish as she tried to process what she was seeing. The missing clothesline. The blanket. The broom. The mop. The nail holes.

Dad had followed her out, drawn by the commotion, and for a moment, he just stared. Then his face did something remarkable—it cracked into laughter, deep and rumbling, the kind that comes from somewhere genuine.

Mom looked at Dad, and despite everything, she started laughing too.

But then she saw the holes in the blanket. Her good blanket. The one from our bed.

"Oh, you boys," she said, shaking her head, the laughter fading into something more complicated. "You boys..."

The frontier town of our imagination lasted exactly as long as it took Mom to find the blanket damage. After that, our creation had to come down. Every piece of it. The broom went back to the kitchen, the mop to the closet, the rake and the stick to the garage. Mom took the blanket inside and spent the evening stitching up the holes we'd punched in it, her needle moving in and out of the fabric like a patient surgeon repairing battle wounds.

And then came the real punishment—the walk to Cooks market, our newspaper money clutched in our fists, to buy Mom a new clothesline and install it ourselves. We threaded the line through the pole hooks, one hand on each end, stretching it tight and trying not to think about the adventure we'd just ended.

Other than the yelling, and the laughing, and the punishment, it was worth it. Every minute of it.

I don't think any Indian teepee ever used a blanket the color of ours, or broomsticks for poles, or clothesline for binding. I'm fairly certain the Plains tribes weren't salvaging their supplies from suburban garages. But to us, that broom was a pine sapling cut from the forest, that mop was a stripped birch, that clothesline was rawhide leather scraped from the hide of a buffalo we'd hunted ourselves.

That's the trick of imagination, isn't it? It transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. A bed becomes a horse. A backyard becomes the frontier. A boy becomes a cowboy, an explorer, a soldier, a hero.

Half the day we spent having fun. The other half we spent cleaning up the mess from our fun.

And I wouldn't trade a single moment of it.

I think about that day sometimes, now that I'm older, and I think about what childhood has become. I don't mean to sound like one of those old men shaking his fist at clouds—I know the world changes, and I know kids today have their own adventures. But there's something about imagination that feels different now. It's been bottled up and digitized, packaged and sold back to children in the form of screens and controllers and prefabricated worlds.

Don't get me wrong—I love technology. I love what it can do. But watching someone else's imagination on a screen is not the same as building your own. Reading requires you to paint the images yourself, to construct the scenery from words, to see it all as if you were really there. That kind of imagination—active, physical, participatory—doesn't fade.

That's one of the reasons I love reading, and why I encouraged my own children to read. That's why I understand why Jesus spoke in parables, why the Old Testament is rich with stories that demand your mind engage, your imagination work.

Because when you read those stories, when you let your imagination build the world around them, you're not just hearing a lesson—you're living it. You're there in the boat with the disciples, you're there in the lion's den with Daniel, you're there in the desert with Moses. You're building your own teepee in the backyard of your soul.

Donnie and I had an awful lot of adventures. They were all different, but they all had that one thing in common: imagination. Imagination made us ask the question, "How can we do this? How can we bring this story alive?"

And we always found an answer. Broomsticks and mops and old blankets. Crates and soda cases and nail-punched holes. A bed frame that became a horse, a backyard that became a frontier, a childhood that became a foundation.

I give God thanks for that childhood. For the parents who took our chaos in stride, who yelled and laughed and punished and loved in equal measure, who understood that kids are going to make mistakes and bad choices and that learning is a messy process.

That's what I think God does with us, too. As we learn and grow, as we begin to develop, He understands we're going to make mistakes. He takes it in stride, as long as He knows we're learning.

And we learn best, I think, when we're using our imagination. When we're building, creating, dreaming. When we're turning broomsticks into lodge poles and blankets into buffalo hides and ordinary lives into extraordinary adventures.

Because that's what faith is, in a way—a kind of imagination. A seeing of what isn't yet there, a building of something from nothing, a trust that the world is bigger and more beautiful than what we can see with our eyes alone.

Those days in the 1960s, with Donnie and our makeshift teepee and our frontier town—those days taught me that. Not in any lesson or lecture, but in the doing. In the playing. In the imagining.

I'm sorry that kids today don't always get that kind of life experience. I don't mean they need to do exactly what we did—they can find their own ways to imagine, their own ways to build. But I hope they do. I hope they find their own backyard frontiers, their own broomstick horses, their own moments of creation that become memories that last a lifetime.

Because the best adventures aren't the ones you watch.

They're the ones you build.

So I'm thankful for Donnie, for the sound of his voice planning our next move, for the way we worked together like two halves of a whole. I'm thankful for that blanket and those broomsticks and that clothesline Mom eventually forgave us for cutting. I'm thankful for the laughter and the yelling and even the punishment.

I'm thankful for imagination—the kind that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, the kind that builds worlds from nothing, the kind that makes you ask, "How can we do this?"

The answer, it turns out, is almost always: "Together. With what we have. And with a little bit of faith."

That, I think, is the best Palomino in the world.