![]() ![]() In my heart I knew that I lived in Anywhere, USA, that I watched Crusader Rabbit after school just like the kids in Winnemucca, and that my image of my own environment came from the same sources that everyone else’s did: from Giant, from Davy Crockett, from a thousand stray pieces of folklore and merchandising.īut even this stitched-together notion of Texas had its power. “Well, they sure do grow ’em tall down there in Texas,” my relatives in Oklahoma would say when we went to visit, and I began to imagine they were right and to cultivate a little my Texan identity. Though I did not know what an oilman was exactly, I enjoyed visiting my new father’s office, looking at the charts and drilling logs and playing with the lead dinosaurs on his desk. I liked the excitement of being rousted from sleep on summer evenings and taken to a neighbor’s storm cellar to wait out a tornado warning. Nearby there was a dispiriting lake where drab water lapped at a caliche shoreline, and on the southern horizon were low hills-looking on a map now, I see they are called the Callahan Divide-that I longed to think of as mountains.īut I surprised myself by being happy there. On feast days the nuns would show us western movies and serve us corn dogs. My brother and I attended a Catholic school that, in this West Texas stronghold of stark and bilious religions, was like a foreign mission. Our house there had a dry, nappy lawn and a cinder-block fence. Abilene, Texas, had been named for Abilene, Kansas, and that fact was a convincing enough argument that it would be a dull and derivative place. I filed them away, and with a child’s tenacity I resisted letting Texas invade my essence. I had no real idea who Shakespeare was, only that he was one of those exalted characters like Will Rogers, and so it seemed perfectly appropriate to me that he would be buried in Oklahoma.īut all such reverberations stopped at the Red River. ![]() It was a place to ponder and reflect on the immortal bard, but its hushed and reverent aspect made me mistake it for a tomb. In the same park was a little garden with a semicircular rock wall dominated by a bust of Shakespeare and brass plaques containing quotations from his plays. ![]() This boulder, whose markings seemed to me to have some ancient significance, like the markings on a rune stone, was one of my power centers, one of the things that persuaded me that I had not been placed arbitrarily on the earth but was meant to exist here, at this particular spot. In the park behind our house was a sandstone boulder where several generations of children had scratched their initials. I don’t recall having any particular image of the state when, on the occasion of my widowed mother’s marriage to an Abilene oilman, I was told we were going to move there.īut I did not much care to leave Oklahoma City, where my baby footprints were embedded in cement and where the world of permanence and order was centered. The hard truth was that I was getting tired of Texas and was now able to imagine myself living in all sorts of places: on one of those minor Florida keys where a little strip of land containing a shopping center and a few houses counted as barely a riffle in a great sheet of translucent ocean in an adobe house, even a fake adobe house, in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos or perhaps in a city like Los Angeles, which with its corrupted natural beauty seemed so much more likely a center for the development of urban chaos than Houston.īecause I was born in Oklahoma and lived there until I was five, I missed being imprinted with native fealty for Texas. I would keep my cross-country skis propped by the front door, a bowl of apples on the kitchen table, a steady fire by which I would read during the dim winter nights.īut it was not just Massachusetts. Perhaps it was simply the act of waking up, looking out the window at the syrup buckets hanging from the maple trunks, at the banked snow glistening in the sharp air, and realizing that Texas would never be that. I’m not sure what brought this crisis on. Lying in a feather bed, in the guest room of a friend’s two-hundred-year-old house in western Massachusetts, I suffered a lapse of faith in Texas. Some of the language in this archival story regarding matters such as race and gender may not meet contemporary standards. We have left it as it was originally published, without updating, to maintain a clear historical record. This story is from Texas Monthly ’s archives.
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