Texas, My Texas

Texas is a state of mind, a culture, a never-never land with all the hopeful romance of The Crystal Chandelier, the grungy despair of a South Dallas flophouse, and the slightly acerbic wit of the Debonair Danceland.

Texas begins with a river and ends with a gulf, starts with a cool green pine forest and stops with a blast furnace. In winter, you'd swear there's nothing 'tween us and Canada 'cept a bob wire fence, and half of it's down.

This State is a mystery, even to experienced insiders, the native-born Texan. It is a rigorous mathematical puzzle created by TI and simultaneously the most emotional and irrational of states.

Cowboys come and go (but not to the Super Bowl), Native Americans come and then hurry to Oklahoma, Yankees come and sometimes stay, native-borns move away. But Texas endures.

Texas is a series of renamed streets and reconstructed highways so enormous, so contrived, so frustrating that no one has uncovered the secret of how to get from work to home in under thirty minutes.

Texas is fueled, not by oil, but by greed; and oiled by cupidity. The slightly-less-than-sonic boom of Spindletop has hushed to a whisper, as quiet as the shuttle hangars in Houston.

There are many fine buildings along I-35. Some house prestigious firms whose probity cannot be questioned. And then there are the concrete barns with stalls for cash cows and others for spavined beasts not worth the feed to keep them alive, although they continue to exist until fatally stricken by Chapter Eleven.

The people of Texas have come up with a few sayings to explain the economy.

1.  If it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true.
2.  Never panic - - but if you do, make sure you're the first to panic.
3.  Happiness can't buy money.
4.  I've been rich and I've been poor; rich is way better.

So just what is all this leading up to? A friend of mine suggested I should write down some of the colloquial gems I've heard since I moved to Texas fourteen years ago. Especially from the seniors who have seen more than they care to remember - most of them can remember twenty years ago much better than they remember yesterday. (I'm fast getting that way myself.)

As we moseyed along the corridor of her residence, when asked about her wedding ring, which was all scarred up, and almost worn through on the under side, my darling little white-haired friend said, "Yeah, this one's been through the ricks." I asked her to explain, because this saying, like most, was foreign to my Alabama-born-and-bred vocabulary. She described hay baling in Marshall, her home town, and the way the rick wound up with little bits and pieces of everything along with the hay. I guess her marriage was like that, too. (But then, truth be told, aren't most of them?) She stopped her amble for a little while, smiled to herself, and then slowly walked on up the hall, aided by a cane in one hand, and a conveniently-placed wall rail in the other.

I despair of ever having hair as beautiful as my friend's. But one day, God willing, my wedding ring will look like hers. And I hope I'm still here, in my Texas, when it does.

old soldiers

And so the absolutely awesome TXDAR Patriotic Prayer Breakfast is now a part of my history. Talking to Kathleen and Sheila yesterday, sharing stories about my part in the Vietnam Airlift, I realized that the reason Old Soldiers don’t talk about their experiences is not so much that we’re not willing to share, it’s that in our hearts we feel the person asking might not really want to know, that it’s just so much lip service.

My father-in-law was a ball turret gunner in WWII. He shares a few stories eagerly, but for the most part not so much, usually nothing that requires more than a three-word answer; and especially not with a civilian; but, given the opportunity, and the time, his hesitancy at the beginning disappears and before you know it hours have passed. His recent experience at the new Museum in Florida is a perfect example. Things he had never shared with his wife or sons came to light with no reticence because he was engaged in conversation with others actually working on the planes, guys who not only cared enough to ask, and actually wanted to hear his response, but also were delighted to listen to what he had to say. There’s a vast difference between hearing and listening.

Talking with BFF Ginger about her time in the sand box, it’s much the same. She shares, but only if there’s time to get into the subject fully. For how can you explain to someone who has not lived it the hours and days of tedium interspersed with seconds of fear and minutes of lightning-reflex response to a clear and present danger?

It’s like trying to explain to the visually impaired the peachy light of a Back Bay afternoon, or the many hues of green in an East Texas spring, or the sparkling facets of the ocean at dawn on Newport Beach.

It’s not that we don’t want to talk. We do. Some of us are really quite desperate to get it out. But we’re afraid you might be offended at the depth of our emotions. Of late it seems we, as a people, don’t handle emotions very well, not our own, way less those of another. When you are kind enough to ask, and we begin to answer, we see your eyes glaze over after a couple of minutes. We know it’s not that you don’t want to know, and we understand it’s not that you don’t care, it’s simply that we are cognizant of the fact that the uninitiated have no frame of reference.

The gentleman standing next to me yesterday morning during the photo op made a comment about what he had done in his war, and then he asked me how I had served. Just a few words out of my mouth and I saw the light in his eyes grow brighter. No, we had no actual experience in common. He’s a man and I’m a woman, we were in different parts of the word, and at different times, with the United States Navy. But there was and always will be a common bond between us – the eagles on our arms and the flag in our hearts.

At each of our DAR meetings we recite the American’s Creed. In part, it says, “I therefore believe it is my duty to my Country to love it, to support its constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies.” I silently add the words “foreign and domestic” because that’s the oath I swore when I became a member of the United States Armed Forces, and renewed that very same pledge each time I re-enlisted.

We old soldiers – we’re all cut from the same cloth, wearing garments made at different times. And to a man – or woman – there’s not a one of us who, if requested, would not gladly do it all, and MORE, again. If you don’t believe it, just ask us. We’ll tell you. But only if you have time for our answer.

full belly

Today is Mardi Gras. I am reminded that not everyone in the United States, much less the world, will go to bed tonight with a full belly. For that matter, not everyone in the world has a bed to go to, much less a roof over it.

Some years back I met a homeless man standing on the street in front of the Dallas shelter. He asked me why I was there, and when I told him we were bringing brown bag lunches for him and other temporary residents, he responded, "I help people, too. I use the experiences I had in a field hospital in Da Nang to help my brothers on the street every day."

"Until you've been without a home, you can't know how the homeless feel. If you've never been down in the trenches, you don't know what it's like to have bombs going off over your head. And until you've been hungry, I mean really hungry, not just the normal little twinge and tummy rumble at noon, it's impossible to know the true meaning of not being able to meet the most basic human needs."

Strong words? Yes, and some of the most heartfelt I'd heard in recent memory. He continued, "If you never had to rummage through garbage cans for a meal, or if you never felt the warmth of a newspaper blanket on a bitter cold night, you just don't know. It doesn't matter how many movies you see or how many books you read, until you've been-there-done-that-threw-away-the-tee-shirt, you don't have a clue."

Wondering where this diatribe might lead, and knowing that discretion is not only the better part of valor, it's also the best way to keep my nose from being broken, I backed away slightly from the bearded gentleman in his second-hand boots.

"Now you take Moses, for instance. He wasn't all that great a negotiator, because he couldn't persuade Pharaoh to let the people go. Well, at least he didn't get anywhere until Yahweh brought out the big guns. And even though Moses was willing to try, before he could try, or even understand the need to try, he had to have a change in his living circumstances. Only after he lived as one of the common people did he understand why they needed to be free. Only after he'd had his own back lashed did he say 'enough is enough, I'm done talking, bring on the frogs.'

 "You see," he warmed to his subject, "it all happened just the way it was supposed to. I figure the Children of Israel never would have listened to him if he'd still been the spoiled brat riding around on his chariot all day. And he never would have felt their pain if he'd only seen them from a position eight feet above their bent heads. But God let Moses kill the overseer so he could understand what it felt like to be hunted, on the run, and homeless. And then, to top it off, God put Moses into a desert so he'd know what it was like to be hungry. Before he could be any good for his people, Moses had to learn that it's one thing to sympathize, but another to live the nightmare."

"That's why you people try but you just don't really get it. All you know is what you read in school and what you hear in Church. You've never lived it, and all you do is give lip service to the world's problems. If you guys were more like Moses, and less afraid to dirty your hands, you might be surprised what you could accomplish."

His words came back to mind in the next few days. Do we do our good deeds armed with a want-to attitude but no real-world understanding to use for ammunition? But must we become homeless ourselves to understand their plight? Do we have to be hungry to understand the depth of emotion in the voice of the jobless woman sitting in front of us, toddlers scooting around her feet, a baby clutched firmly in her lap, as she describes her needs? Must we live through the death of a loved one to know what it's like for the new widow who finds herself standing in the middle of the floor trying to remember why she went into the room in the first place?

Was the man in the ragged camo correct in his assumption? Do we have to live in the same circumstance, as one of the cold, tired, poor, hungry, or spiritually defeated huddled masses, in order to be able to give more than lip service to their plight? Is experience really the best teacher? I was convinced the answers were, in order, no, and not necessarily. But for days afterward, I felt I was missing something, some little thing that niggled at the back of my eyelids as I drove my car to work, dressed in down coat and gloves, replete with freshly-brewed coffee and granola bar.

I turned to yet another source for inspiration. Listening to my then-teen-aged granddaughter tell the story in her own words brought a different spin to the age-old tale. "Gramma," she said, "the most important thing to remember was that at first Moses kept on saying he couldn't do it. He said he was afraid of public speaking, he said he had nobody to help him do the job, he said he had no family to look after his needs while he went out every day to be at God's business. But for every I can't that he brought up, God handed him an I can." She said more, but those were the words that still stick in my mind.

Unlike Moses, it is not a matter of what I can do, but what we together can do. In his own way, the gentleman in the tattered field jacket is as much a social worker as Moses. While Moses relieved his people from physical bondage, that Vet relieves homeless brothers from the bondage of their spirit.

And shouldn't we do the same, one hour, one person, one can of soup for the Boy Scouts, one bag of new for donation to the VA underwear, at a time?