My father always loved the Old West. Our house walls, downstairs, held what seemed like dozens of paintings of cowboys and soldiers and Indians, and I was brought up to revere the names of Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, and George Catlin. I would stare from the vantage points of the game or enemy being shot at, or perhaps just the eternal third-party, invisible vantage point. I looked at them so long throughout the years that I can see them now, hanging in the places that they always hung. They had titles, but it’s the pictures themselves that I remember.

The one whose title that I remember, Remington’s “Signaling the Main Command,” hung to the left of the bar. Its memory is thus necessarily combined with the clink of ice in glasses, and the smell of bourbon being poured. I wondered throughout the years of my growing up just what it was that the soldier with the very long flagpole was signaling, and to whom. I even asked my father once, but he didn’t know either. Remington had been dead for several decades, and there was no one else to ask.

Over the years, several of my friends (as I thought the paintings to be) were traded in for others, always, to me, of much lesser qualities, and I didn’t find it particularly necessary to use their names. I don’t even remember what they looked like.