as we could in our good jeans from Sears, our pointy-toed $20 Acme boots and cheap straw cowboy hats, but we considered spurs a little "too-too," an affectation.

Times change.

When I first was dating Pardner, he let me ride his best horse, Big Boy. (Ain't love grand? And blind?) Big Boy and I got along okay, but he just seemed to be hitting on about seven out of eight cylinders. Pardner watched us

bumble around for a while.

"Pick him up. He's asleep out there. Get after him," he hollered. "Hey, wait a minute. Where are your spurs?"

"Spurs? What spurs? Why?" I wondered.

Well, I've learned a little bit about spurs in the last few years. I've learned that while it is hardly ever necessary to touch the spurs to a horse that has always been ridden with spurs, the jingle tells the horse, "Okay, time to get serious and go to work."

I watch the animals respond to the ring of the jinglebob on Pardner's Chihuahuas. Just as the music of the spurs is a factory whistle to the horses, it is a recess bell for dogs: "Oh boy, gonna go play — I mean work!"

I've learned that even though a person once upon a time learned to ride without spurs, that person still unconsciously cues her horse with her heels. When that person then starts riding with small-roweled, straight-shanked, dainty spurs, her heels telegraph their message to her horse about two inches sooner — and harder — than is expected. That person then learns that grabbing saddle leather is highly preferable to getting dumped in the prickly pear.

I've had trouble learning how to wear spurs. I know that spurs have a right and a left, a top and a bottom, but I have to stop and think about it every time I put them on. Otherwise, I'll look like an escapee from a slick Western lifestyle magazine. You know, the ones photographed in the Wild West Side of Manhattan, where "just plain folks" wear their spurs upside down and backward while they pose leaning on a girthless saddle.

At least I don't have trouble walking with spurs on my boots. A friend claims that too many years of dance lessons put her feet naturally in ballet's first position — heels-together-toes-out — while walking. Going into a store, her spurs locked her heels together and she fell flat on her

face in the parking lot. Her husband pretended they weren't together and walked on alone — his face flaming with embarrassment — into the store.

Furious at her abandonment, she untangled herself and chased after him, pointing and yelling, "I'm with him! I'm with him!"