Fromness, noun

Pronunciation: [fruhm-nis]

1. A concept of one’s identity as defined by place, not necessarily being the place of one’s origin or current abode.

2. The conceptual answer to the question, “Where are you from?” not to be confused with “Where are you in from?” “Where do you hale from?” “Where are your people from?” “Where do you live?” or “Where do you stay at?” and is usually an answer derived from a combination of the answers to all of these questions, with extreme deference given to exclusions and embellishments based on either negative or positive experiential memories.

3. A self construct influenced by time, place, landscape, heat, cold, nurturing, nature, love, hate, taste, scent, feeling, family, marriage, child-rearing, attitude, and the desired impression to be made on the questioner. 

Caution in use: The answer to the question “Where are you from?” is often complete self-delusion, though usually with a grounding in geography. Fromness is a concept with very squirrelly edges, has roots in both experience and memory, which are rarely perfectly aligned with regard to accuracy. Care should be taken in analyzing the answer to this question, with pre-acknowledgment that it is often a question which may require the subject of the question a half hour to fully explain, and is rarely a simple matter of geography. Therapy may be indicated for the subject of the question, but one should utterly refrain from any such suggestion. Nodding and smiling are safe should you find yourself across from a subject in a Fromness fugue. One merely making small talk is cautioned to use a more specific question such as “Where were you born?” or “Where do you live now?” to receive a brief answer. “Fromness” is a concept that can evoke joy or pain, and is to not be inquired about lightly, and it is also the source occasionally of creative storytelling with no basis in fact whatsoever. Particular care should be taken in analyzing an answer to an inquiry into Fromness made of politicians, who are serial abusers of the Theory of Fromness and will capitalize on warm and tender feelings evoked in a questioner or listener from a truly well crafted Fromness narrative.

“Where am I from? Good Lord, how much time do you have?”

My answer to the question “Where are you from?” is a doozie. Much like “How are you?” in nature, “Where are you from?” is usually a question that someone asks wanting a one location answer so they can move on without getting too involved. It’s essentially rhetorical. For me, From is with a capital F. It’s a big deal. It is an opening of a floodgate. I want to know you when I ask that question. I want to place you in a framework of Fromness. To me, asking someone “Where are you From” is akin to saying “Tell me your life story.” 

Where you were born is not necessarily where you’re From. My brother was born in Hawaii and raised in Texas. He lived in Hawaii for one year as an infant. He’s now a six foot three petroleum geologist who lives in Oklahoma City, smokes an occasional cigar and can sometimes be found playing haunting chords on an old guitar. When someone asks him “Where are you from?” he does not say Hawaii. Yet, being born in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on an island is damn sure part of his Fromness and might explain a little about why his friends in high school referred to him as Cool Breeze. There’s something there. Hawaii is in his Fromness. Being From a place is akin to being of a place, a concept of belonging even if you never really fit in or got to stay. Places touch you, leave a mark, change you forever, for good and bad, too. Texas surely left a mark on that boy and he is as apt to say he is a Texan who lives in Oklahoma, and it’s coming on a quarter of a century.

Oh my gosh thank you, I love it when people ask me where I’m from. I’m from Wichita Falls. No, not the Kansas one. The real one. Well, yes I do live in Dallas now. How long? Good grief, well I guess we’re coming on twenty-five years. No, I didn’t live in Wichita Falls that long actually, but it’s where I’m from. No, I wasn’t born there. It’s complicated. No, this isn’t my speaking accent. I’ve learned better. But it is the voice I dream in. It’s my part of who I was and always will be. It’s part of my Fromness. My daughter says my accent gets stronger the closer we get to Wichita Falls. My friend Bubba said I’m one of the only people who came to Dallas from Wichita Falls who brought all of my Wichita with me, instead of leaving it at the city limit like an embarrassing habit. But that mostly has to do with my use of profanity.

Factors of Fromness include, but are not limited to: Do you currently live there? If not, how long did you live there? Do you still have family in the area? If so, how many generations of your family lived there? If you are questioned out of state, you’re probably going to answer what state are you From. If you are in your state, you usually answer what city are you From. If you are in your town, what neighborhood are you From? What school did you attend? Do you still have friends there? Did your family’s race dictate where you lived? Did you have extended family in the home or nearby? Did your grandma ever live with you or next door to you? Did somebody teach you how to cook? What did you eat? How did you celebrate? Where do you consider the emotional home of your extended family to be? If your family is non-functioning, or you have been whittled down to the last man standing by deaths, where do you feel the most grounded on this earth? Where do your memories live? Fromness. 

Don’t ever let anybody off the hook with a one place response, unless you also are engaging in formalities and trying to move on. I am From Texas. I am from Dallas. I am from Clay County. Even better still, I am from Wichita Falls.

Well, you see, I was an Army brat. On the one hand that makes me related on a level to every other kid in America whose little butts got hauled hither and yon to this post or another. We all knew how to make friends because nobody got to keep anybody for more than a few years. And this is probably why I will always consider my big brother to be my best friend in that heart-of-a-kid way. But I was born at Brooke Army in San Antonio. We lived on Greystone Street next to James and Melba. Melba cooked chicken and dumplings. They made Will and me a gum tree for Christmas one year. They took a tiny Christmas tree and tied pieces of Juicy Fruit to it with red ribbons. Their daughter was our babysitter and had long blonde hair. She had a Trans-am with the big gold eagle on the hood. Debbie was the best. 

I had long beautiful red hair. My mom offered me two chocolate Hostess cupcakes with the white swirls on top if I would let her trim my hair, and I eagerly agreed because the cupcakes were in those little brown molded plastic trays and usually they were just on white cardboard so these were special. And she put me in the sink and I greedily devoured both cupcakes and when I was all done I had a chili bowl haircut. Did you know that in San Antonio you can go on big boats up the river and have breakfast and if you are looking from the side you can see that each seat on the boat already has a perfectly cut half grapefruit with a cherry in the middle just waiting for the lucky passenger? Did you also know that the Circle K at the end of my street had a SlushPuppie machine and the place smelled gloriously of freon or whatever stuff is used in those machines and sometimes Debbie would walk us up there for a SlushPuppie. I always got red. Will always got grape. That beat the river walk boat by miles. I assume it did. I never rode in one of those boats. And, I’ve never liked grapefruit anyway.

Maps lie. In a manner of speaking, maps set somewhat arbitrary dividers down on a rectangular piece of paper depicting a round and messy world. They tell us you are of this place, and I am of that place, even if it is only divided by a mile. Case in point, The Red River Rivalry, wherein the entire state of Texas and the entire state of Oklahoma pretend to hate each other for three hours once a year even though half the kids in Texas seem to go to OU these days. Burnt Orange. Sooners. Beer. Bar fights. Its all good fun til someone ends up in jail but your Dallas aunt is just as likely to go get your Oklahoma butt out of Lew Sterrett jail as are any of your drunk friends from Norman who are, I hate to even tell you this, already north of Gainesville. 

But we are creatures of category. We like boxes and columns and pigeon holes. Republican or Democrat. Wait, that’s boring and doesn’t emphasize enough extremity, let’s be Conservative VERSUS Progressive. Urban versus Rural. Our penchant for split tribalism and othering and fighting has gotten so ingrained that I live with a knot in my heart. I prefer the fantasy of Texas as a refuge, a rugged refuge for a collective of kind but sturdy individualist. Maybe it has always been this way. But we can’t help but create teams, it seems. And not in the good way. I find myself wanting only to spend time with my cows because they don’t do that. Then again, they will become lunch. Maybe a little fight is in order. 

Texas has a distinct shape, distinct borders, distinct and varied cultures, and is something of a cult. My cult. A cult I love. This is the place where I like to think of us as one family with an incredible array of glowing differences. We are a shape and a style and a swagger and a statement…of something. And you might find it to be bullshit and we do fight amongst ourselves like all good siblings do…but being Texan is a thing. It has its very own Fromness. Maybe one of the biggest positively asserted Fromnesses one can have in the world. It is actually fun to say, “I’m from Texas.” It is a distinct identity. Some people want nothing to do with this Fromness and that’s alright too. Too much swagger. Too much bravado. But even they define their Texas identity in disassociating from the other Fromness. Some people live here for three weeks and claim the Fromness and that’s alright too as long as they don’t act like idiotic bouncers when they settle in and start deceiving people about the fact that their Fromness is more aspirational than deep. 

Then we moved to Fort Hood and that’s where I went to Kindergarten. And I had a pink gingham metal lunchbox with a Thermos and my mom would tape a dime into the inside of my lunchbox with Scotch tape so I could get a fudge-sickle from the lunch lady on treat day. One time I had to pee so bad after the school bus dropped us off at home that I had to go in the corner of our yard. Thank God we had a tall wooden fence. I was so embarrassed. Later in life I found that this was one of the main advantages to being a man, a right and skill exercised with such joyful abandon. But I digress. Did you know that Fort Hood and Killeen had about eight billion horny toads back then? They were everywhere. Once a big kid on the school bus put my little American Flag on a stick on the dirty school bus floor and told me I was going to go to hell. I bet that kid is in prison now. He also held the corner of my stapled homework down on the padded seat with his thumb so hard that if I pulled it away it would rip and, according to him, I would fail and get kicked out of school. If he’s not in prison, I bet he’s a preacher in a mega church. I bet. I loved Fort Hood.

Texas. You bet I’m from Texas. It’s more complicated than that. But I am a Texan. I am both long and tall, too. I’ll not trifle too much with stereotype, but hear me out. Texas is so vast that you can drive in any direction and comment upon five or six distinct changes in geology, in the flora and fauna, the types of trees, the types of rocks. You know where the red dirt cedes to the black dirt in one direction. You know where the red dirt, fruitful if irrigated, happily gives up to the pull of the arid. I see that I am centering myself in the red dirt part. The dusty part. It’s true. But a Texan knows that even within Texas there is a region where she recognizes the voices better, where the food looks right, where the soil under foot just feels right. Color, texture and weight. Your Texas might even be a sandy beach with waves breaking over your toes where the horizon decorated with offshore rigs and a moon setting over the Gulf. I can’t breathe down there after about three days. I’m a creature of the dry heat and the extreme cold. But that beach is also where I’m from, Texas, a place that has coast and mountains and rivers and lakes and cold and hot and dry and wet and tornadoes and hurricanes and dust devils. Did I mention that Dallas is as far from Memphis as it is from El Paso? This bird has a mighty wingspan. There are many of us. We are all different, but somehow related. Was this ever not so? My sense is that even from the times when there were only natives here, or times when it was empty, but for animals, long ago in the pre-human days, the land under the place where we drew lines was still special. Each in its own part, yes, but particularly when considered as a whole of lovely parts. 

But, there’s so much blood underfoot. That must be acknowledged. Conquering, defending, fighting, pioneering, stealing, standing. So much blood. We have walloped and winnowed one another. We migrated, enslaved, begged, borrowed, stole, gambled and murdered. All of this blood wasn’t shed because Texas is a bad place. On the contrary. And here we all are, the inheritors of a space that we fought relentlessly to keep or take, and a place that we tried to tame. In the end, while Texas has managed to domesticate very few of us well, it is Texas that owns us and not the other way around. I’m not sure Texas was ever going to be of one people. I think she always knew she would and could hold us all. And I think she knew we were all fighters, and individualists, and outlaws, of both the good and bad imagining. She leaves a mark.

We moved to Denver for a year. Well, I say Denver because not everyone knows where Aurora is. I thought it was heaven. Predictable snow of the sort that allowed you to roll up balls for snowmen like you were rolling up carpet off the floor. Texas has snow on occasion, but never good snow. There it packed so nicely. Carrot noses. The whole thing. I went to Park Lane Elementary School, on the bus again. But I was so much older now, second grade. I was the Old House Mouse in the school play. My mother sewed my costume from this lovely soft gray ribbed corduroy. I felt so bad for the kids who had round pieces of construction paper stapled to a headband as the only evidence that they were mice. My mom could sew up a storm. Now she has a collection of advanced degrees. She taught me that learning how to do things, learning about things, should be a life long hungry pursuit. She never sits still. We saw Willie at Red Rocks. I smelled pot for the first time there, at that concert. We went fishing or skiing almost every weekend.

We give each other a hard time, we Texans. We are mountain lion cubs with outsized baby paws batting at each other playfully. Houston is old school. Dallas is neuvo. Austin is cooler than all of us put together….and has a notion that they win the weird contest. They only win in the self-styled, carefully curated weird-as-cool way…because I’m here to tell you Texas has enough weird in the bad way to go around. And our bad weird is toxic. All of us are barbaric to some extent or another but our un-ending collective battle between the forces of good and evil is a Greek tragedy viewed from the outside, with the leaders of the “good” being to a disturbing degree multiple divorcees, “redeemed” philanderers, bankrupts (morally and fiscally), and those that can’t get through the eye of a needle when a whole damn camel can. Are these the evil or the good? Mind you, I’m a fan of sinners. I just have no time for sinners who con otherwise decent people into thinking they are shiny pennies instead of the shit birds that they are. And, in the other corner, we have progressives. Are they the good or the evil? They, even though I admire them in spirit, also cannot seem to acknowledge that in families we are all conflicted as hell, and sometimes undeservedly loyal. And we’ve all got to make a living. 

Well, there you go, the pure on the two poles at a whopping population of about 10% of the state on the edges yelling at all of us in the middle who are mostly like a version of me…a conflicted political tossed salad. And we stew in our divisions while a political class strategically wedges us apart and robs us all blind as we yell at each other and blame each other for all the world’s woes. You might check your back pocket again for your wallet. There’s another Special Session on the way.

Would you believe me if I told you that we were supposed to be stationed next in San Francisco but my dad chose instead to retire back to Wichita Falls. Yes, the one in Texas. Stop asking that. That’s where we went. Wichita Falls is where I’m from.

I like to view Fromness through the lens of a military kid, because I was one. But it was different when I was a kid because it was that period after Vietnam and before all the Gulf wars. Being a military kid in my time carried little risk of loss. That’s not the case now. But, Army kids get particular permission to choose where they are From. Wichita Falls is the first place we stopped. It’s where my whole family lived prior to my birth. We finally stopped and stayed. Wichita Falls, specifically, is where I choose to be From.

But, nobody gets to choose where they are born. We get dragged about, Army or no Army, as kids. We don’t have a lot of say in the matter. So taking some sort of credit for being a Texan by birth, which is one of my favorite things to do, admittedly, is kind of silly. The “Got here as fast as I could” part is really quite admirable. Choosing to be Texan is lovely. Choosing to be an ass and calling it Texan, however, is not. 

My people. My glorious people. My cousins, my aunts, my uncles, my grandparents almost to the person lived in Wichita Falls, Texas when we left Colorado to come “home” to a place I’d only gotten to visit at holidays. Four months prior, though, I sat on the floor of our quarters in Aurora on April 10, 1979 and watched the news on a huge console television. Yes, the ones where the nearest child is the remote control. “Go turn that to channel seven!” I sat on the floor in front of the television, all of eleven years old, and watched as much of Wichita Falls got sucked up into the sky in a dark cloud. Newscasters telling us the worst. The tornado. Not a tornado. The tornado. I remember that one of my parents had a phone receiver in hand, trying to make calls in. There were no lines to be had. We just had to hope. 

Trials of strength and human spirit affect a place and add to its character. A storm of magnitude becomes part of the cells of a city, part of its heartbeat. I’m thankful we missed The April 10^th tornado. All the town rallied. Dead were buried. Houses were demolished and new ones built. Wichitans carried on. In the most human of human behaviors, Wichita Falls like so many other communities who have been through trauma, now almost definitional of Houston and the Gulf…Wichita Falls got up, dusted itself off, and carried on. No use in crying because you still have things to do. Like your parents always said, get your butt up and get moving. Learn to play hurt. Help the people around you. But get up. 

By the time we arrived only a few months later, had I not known, I never would have known. But many people I went to school with over the years stop every year and tell their tornado story. Strong and resilient folk who you might swear had never seen a rough day, had their homes ripped off from overhead, while huddled in bathtubs and closets. In all respects, it didn’t kill Wichita Falls and it made it stronger and forged an identity that was almost worthy of trademark. Still though, I hear the weatherman. A particular voice. A radio voice. “FordHardemanWilbargerWichitaTakeCoverImmediatelyClayMontagueBeAdvised…” I did not learn my North Texas counties from a map or a geography class, but the cadence of a weatherman telling us to run for the cellars and bathtubs. 

My best friend was Joey. My girl cousin roughly the same age. Twins in every respect other than anything physical whatsoever. Anyway. We had just moved to Wichita. Joey lived on the second floor of an apartment with her mother, my Aunt Joyce. We had a ballet event the next day and I was spending the night. We had to go the next day to the beauty parlor and get buns in our hair so tight I’d have a headache for a week, because Mrs. Doran’s ballet school was putting on a recital. I was a pig in a tutu, a dirt borne terrestrial child with body that didn’t fly anywhere unless ejected from a trampoline. Joey could dance and I wanted to do whatever she did. 

We are sleeping. Bunkbeds. Joyce comes in and yells for us to get up and get in the tub. I get up, take off all my clothes, birthday suit style, and sit on my bare butt in a cold porcelain tub that has nary a drop of water in it. And I sit there half asleep, hunched over with my eyes half closed, waiting for something to happen that involved water and maybe some bubble bath potion. Joey and Joyce come into the bathroom. I swear I think Joyce was dragging an armload of couch cushions and blankets in and they stop, mid-emergency, mid-horror, mid-good-lord-last-year-the-whole-town-went-up, and laughed until they almost peed because I didn’t understand it was a tornado warning and I was supposed to take cover in the tub, with my clothes ON.

I loved Wichita Falls. I love it still. I love North Texas. I love everything from Decatur to Henrietta to Wichita to Vernon to Childress. I even had a baby doll that I named Childress because I thought there was no more beautiful name. Seymour and Archer City and Jacksboro. I have such love for these little towns. We lived on murky brown Lake Wichita in a brown house with a beautiful green lawn that stretched all the way down to a retaining wall where blazing hot metal steps led down to the water. Depending on the year, the water was up to the wall or out past the reaches of the nearby pier. Feast or famine, rain or drought. Wichita Falls has its own seasons. I baptized myself over and over again in that water, in the glory of growing up in Texas, surrounded by a tough set of cousins. 

My grandfather Virgil, a tall sturdy inventor and tinkerer, the super at Mead’s Fine Bread in the day, drilled a hole through his bar of soap and put a string and a bobber through it so his soap would float and he could take a bath in the lake when it suited him. I love this. Let me repeat that. I love this. And this, this is part of my Fromness. Brown water, red dirt, clay and silt, largemouth bass and cattails. The Monarch butterflies came through one year and covered our house. Pelicans came through yearly. Canadian Geese. The lake was filled with giant mussels and we would dig them up with our toes out of the soft muddy bottom and pretend they were oysters bearing pearls, and the moss by the dock was a feast for any mermaid. Silky green threads, waving in the water.  The men in the family lived for duck season and constructed extremely well planned, floating, duck blinds which could be hauled out to the other end of the lake by boat. They had little doors for the labs to jump out to fetch ducks and pop up windows for the shooters. I remember a particularly fun afternoon when Virgil and the uncles, having saved up (or more likely drank on the spot) dozens of beer cans, Budweiser and Coors, carefully cut the aluminum cans in half and filled each with cement and then inserted a metal wire loop to create weights for the duck decoys. 

The men. Hunting prep-days were no less of a quilting bee than quilting bees are quilting bees. The men. God the men. Texan men. The cologne of a workshop. The tools lined up just so on the walls. Bullshit and crazy plans. I wanted to be them, live like them, be one of them. I never didn’t want to be a woman but I wanted the rules of womanhood to be the same as the rules of men. It is its very own gender identity disorder to grow up a woman wanting to have access to the culture, rules or lack thereof, and presumed equality that men do. I could feel it. I basked in their glow. And you are encouraged to be like them until you aren’t. You are one of them until you aren’t. Refer above to urinating outdoors. Fromness is time and place cooked up together. How you were raised. How you were treated. The rules you followed. I suppose I made my own rules in the end. I’ve never liked rules. I’m a mixture of traditional and something all together different. Drank too much at a time. Still cuss like it’s my birthright, but I am a little sorry about it. Just can’t help it. I’m mostly a rule follower of rules that could get me thrown in prison, but I’m not a fan of your rules or anyone else’s.

My mother was an athlete. Marathons. Triathlons. She has a slow, hard-to-kill, quality that makes her an endurance athlete as opposed to a sprinter, and a terrific student in a Ph.D program. Anyway, at some point a Triathlon was established in Wichita Falls and it took off in my back yard. Repeat, a triathlon of some magnitude started in my backyard. This is not a joke. It was real and big. We lived on Lands End, a bit of land that used to be called Bugg’s Point because it jutted out into the lake. We had a huge lot and a decent waterfront beach to which my parents hauled in sand. It was great. Have a donut and coffee on the lawn, stretch, and then jump into muddy Lake Wichita and swim all the way across to the park on the other side. This also involved men bringing out their bass boats and being there to haul in anyone who had overestimated their abilities, or who had too many donuts on the lawn. My dad was always one of the boatmen in maybe the only Boston Whaler ever owned in the county. One year a man started having trouble half way across the lake and began to struggle, arms flailing, gasping for breath, waving to be saved by anyone. So my dad yells at the poor bastard, “Stand up!!” It was Lake Wichita. Needed dredging something awful. The man stood up and his head was squarely above water. I believe he waved off the rescue squad and got back to paddling with a renewed sense of vigor. 

The lessons are part of the Fromness. Men and women both. Stand up. You aren’t going to die. Well you might, but that shouldn’t keep you from gettin up. Get up. You can handle this. I don’t care if you have fallen off your bike or your horse or been tackled or punched in the face or drilled a dry hole or been fired or assaulted or otherwise gambled and lost. The implied fantasy, which is really a threat, is that at the end of the day, you are on your own. Sadly. But, Texas has a sense of Stand Up. Get Up. You can do this. 

Our fearless leaders tend to use this as a false machismo to say that nobody should need any help but we all know that help for the power brokers comes in terms of tax deductions and bankruptcy, freely granted. We tend to give the working people a hearty “up yours” when they need a hand. Stand up, we say. You should be able to handle this, we say. So I want to acknowledge that there is a serious downside to the bravado. And it isn’t fair to purposefully pile cannonballs in a person’s already full arms and tell them to stand up. Legislators and some of our most TV polished preachers in Texas like to make names for themselves by making life harder for people who barely have time for a snack break, let alone to go vote. 

Yet still, I truly believe that this notion of independence, autonomy and grit is one of the best parts of Texan Fromness. And the companion virtue Help Your Neighbor has to be calibrated to go with those other virtues, or you are just another jerk. While independence and autonomy should never be reasons to deny anyone needed help, they are darned good traits when you are up to your ankles in water in your living room, or you are caring for three kids on income made waiting tables. You have to stand up and get up and keep going and push harder. No politician gets to tell us this. But I get to tell it to myself. And all of us have a little of that in us here, I like to think. 

But let’s not fool ourselves, I’ve been well cared for since day one. I’ve been lucky. We must know our own bullshit stinks a little sometimes, as Texans, too. It’s easy to act brave and brash when you have giants standing behind you.

Next I went to Dallas. For college. I didn’t even know there were colleges outside of Wichita Falls until I was a junior in high school. A Coyote in a long and distinguished line of Coyotes. I assumed I’d be an MSU Indian (now Mustangs) like my parents and aunts and uncles. But, I loved SMU and I loved being in college. Dallas was vast. I followed my brother there and mooched off his connections and flirted with his good looking friends. I was almost assaulted by one odious character when I (remember again that I thought for a long time that I got to play by the rules of men) I had the dumbass idea to have him back to my place for a beer. Little did I know that that was dude-code for sex. Do all you guys have sex with each other when you invite each other over for a beer? Who knew? Anyway, I pushed him off, suffering only pushy and infuriating unwanted contact and kicked his ass out and then the son of a bitch had the nerve to come right back and knock on my door and say he didn’t actually know where he was and that I needed to drive him back to campus. And you know what I said? Do you? I said nothing. I got my keys and silently drove this asshole back and dropped him off and went back to my apartment alone. And I called a few guys who I thought would stand up for me. One in particular told me it was no big deal and that I needed to drop it. Everyone was already long past passed out. And I cried a little and I went to bed. And the next morning I acted like it had never occurred. I was never ashamed for inviting a man over for a beer. I’ve known too many great men to paint with that broad a brush. I was never ashamed at myself at his gross attempts. That was not my shame to bear. I was ashamed that I drove him back to campus. I was ashamed that I didn’t take a baseball bat to his skull, not to stop him but to punish him after the fact in broad daylight when he didn’t see it coming. I was ashamed that I was all by myself that night for a long time, with no hero. But you know what? I got lucky. And, I am my own hero. Why? Because I stand up. And I keep going. I handled it. Even by pushing it away and powering on, I handled it. I carry shame for not holding certain people accountable for certain things over the years. Women are not rewarded for holding men accountable, though. Sometimes getting through has to be the victory for us. I thought I’d never go back to Dallas. Four years was plenty, or so I thought.

Austin is, in fact, weird. I downplayed it early on. But it is weird, in the very best way. It was and will always be. It has a strange Switzerland appeal, neutral in theory, as though it gets to be whatever the hell it wants to be at any given moment. Perhaps being the seat of Texas government makes it the land of all of us. Somehow. Perhaps having that many students, with all the beer and sex appurtenant thereto makes it looser and freer in a way that transcends politics. Perhaps the fact that the lobbyists and the pols and the aggrieved and the rednecks and the pearl-clutchers all get drunk together at the same bars after the gavel drops and listen to the same tunes on the jukebox made it a different animal. 

I went to Austin in 1993 to attend UT Law and I liked to think that was the end of an era, but I believe all the folks lucky enough to stop in for a few years do that. “When I was in Austin, it was….” How droll. I’ll never say it again, I swear. But it does have an enduring impact on me, with the timing of a close country waltz and a blanket of queso to keep me warm. Gary P. Nunn at the Broken Spoke. Chris Wall. Alvin Crow. And all the rock you could handle. Walking Sixth Street was like being the embodiment of the radio knob in a good old truck. Walk past the music stations instead of turning the knob. Every bar bellowed a different style. We all welled up together there, half drunk and mostly joy filled, listening to music, looking at all of our own versions of weird. How does the song go? “Where the bikers stared at cowboys who were laughing at the hippies who were praying they’ll get out of here alive.” Except nobody in Austin wanted to kill any hippies and you were just as welcome in your goth gear as your cute dress as your blue jeans as your scruffy beard as your suit and tie as your big hair as your frat boy uniform. Austin had an all-are-welcome scene. It did. It was democratic with a small d, and Texan with a capital T, and yes…gorgeously weird. Austin is a little bit of all of our Fromness, whether we got to stay or not, and whether you’ve ever been there or not, as a Texan, just like the Gulf is part of our collective self, too.

Austin was amazing. But, I left right after. I barely got out of law school. I passed the bar exam somehow on my first go. But, by this time I was completely smitten with a man in Dallas whom I had met in the parking lot of the Astrodome at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo Barbecue Cook-off. We try not to say it in front of the kids but had it not worked out so gloriously it would have gone down in the books as debauchery to be only thought of in the darkest hours with a shit eating grin. Does everyone say that, “shit eating grin” as a good thing, like a sly guilty but happy look? God, I hope so. I only learned yesterday that “Boy, that’s a dilly of a pickle” wasn’t a universal pronouncement. Anyway, I got out of Austin with a skip in my step and a sense of vast relief. Some people never shut up about their law school ranking and some of us just try not to talk about it much and I’m in the latter group. I got out. Full stop. Thank you Professor Stanley Johansen for all mercy shown to a desperate woman. He liked the chicken fried steak at the Jolly Truck Stop, he told me once. I’m still convinced that is the only reason I passed Trusts. I have deep respect for anyone who ever stopped and ate at the Jolly Truck Stop. Johansen was held in high regard for many heady legal things…but for me it was mercy and his affinity for the Jolly Truck Stop that sealed my life-long admiration. God, I had a good time in Austin, though. The dancing, the music, the food. They never should have put a law school in Austin, but I’m so glad they did. 

Austin is a big chunk of Texan Fromness for me to be sure. The lessons were many. The impressions took years to fully form. I learned a great deal in law school but learning that I wasn’t as smart as I thought ranks amongst the most valuable lessons. I have a theory that everyone should stay in school or climb in a profession until they meet the rank where they have to admit that they are out-gunned, out-manned and out-brained. It is good for you, a little humility. Texans are either one or the other. We are either the most down to earth, decent, helpful and kind person you have ever met, or we are the biggest bloviating jackass you have ever met. It’s really one or the other. The best cure for the latter is a little humility. And I’ve been served humble pie over and over again but not how you think, probably. I am served humble pie every time I meet a person who has devoted their life to a cause like homelessness. I am served humble pie when I see a veteran with burns to his entire face. I am served humble pie every time I am served a literal slice of pie by someone who still makes about eight bucks an hour and has been on her feet for that many too, but still smiles with the force of the sun and actually gives a damn about how my day is going. I am served it when I hear the ideas of a young person who has both the energy and the will to take an idea and bust their butt every day until they succeed or fall over dead. And oh my God, Texas is just teeming with these people. Nobody makes the news for being humble or working day in and day out at a thankless job, and when’s the last time you called your mother? Texas is what we tell you. It is, in fact, the best place in the world. We aren’t joking. 

I have learned to see through the lens of food. It is what I study. It is what I photograph. It is what I write about often. Show me a Texas food and I’ll tell you a story about grit, perseverance, bravery, kindness, ingenuity and hospitality. And what make us special isn’t the bravado or that we have these gifts in greater proportions than any other state but that there are more of us and from more diverse backgrounds and more glorious collisions of culture to use as a palette from which to paint the story of a people. 

Yes, I am a sensory creature. Food is my gateway to all deep thoughts. I can admit that. The most famous dish in Wichita Falls has to be the Famous Enchiladas from Pioneer. There are only a few of the Pioneer restaurants left and I could go on about them but suffice to say that the dish is three cheese enchiladas topped with hearty beef chili, topped with diced raw onion and pickled jalapeños. My mouth is watering. Right now as I type. On the side…wait for it…wait for it. No, not rice and beans. French fries and cole slaw. I’m not kidding. As it has always been and so shall it always be if my prayers are worthy, french fries and cole slaw. You take the squirt bottle of ketchup and make a big puddle by the fries. The sweet mayonnaise from the slaw cools your mouth from the hot gooey cheese. The Mexican meets the Tex-mex meets the Chili Queens meets the chuckwagon meets the fryer meets the ranch all on a steel plate and served hot by a hard working lady with tall hair who is fast with the tea refills and will call you honey and make you feel like family every time. 

Fromness is the food we eat and the people we love, even the difficult people we love. Maybe it is especially the difficult people we love. It is a love that won’t let you let go. The land rolls on and on and changes and changes us. Fromness is kinship both with people and places and scents. Ask anyone from the south end of Amarillo about the scents that make up a memory. Ask anyone who once lived off of Central in Dallas when there was a Mrs. Baird’s factory at Mockingbird instead of a tennis stadium. What scents define you as a Texan? Pines, salt water, bait shops, oil, clay river beds, lakes, the bayou…these are all scents that could make a perverse but beloved perfume counter. Warm bread. The hoppy smell of a big brewery. A feedlot. Fromness is sensory. It is history. It is the present. It is struggle and success. It is shared but it is absolutely, positively, unique for every person. It is sensory DNA. It is a partially written book.

I know this all sounds like ancient history. Yes, I’ve spent the last twenty years raising kids and being a wife and learning about writing and taking photos. Photos are how I see. I stop things for a blessed moment and appreciate them. Him? Yes, I still love him as much, more, far more, than that crazy night. We got engaged thirteen days later. Days. Yes. On a hill on a ranch in Burnett, Texas. Now we have our own place up in Clay County where I chase sunflowers and take photos of cows and the beautiful Red River. Yes, it’s beautiful and you don’t even know that, do you? Never make assumptions about Texas. She’ll shock you every time. Two kids, almost grown. Where has the time gone? 

Fromness. I’ve had fifty years to soak in the things that make me where I’m from. My path. My mistakes. My incredible good fortune. Spending a long chunk of time in the warm murky water of Lake Wichita, surrounded by family. Why my heart still lives in that water, by the pier welded and built one weekend like a barn raising by family members, in the glow of a deep red and pink sunset on Bugg’s Point, I can’t quite say. I think it was all the love. It set me on a path to learn, grow, and love others. Why do I answer Dallas when asked where I live, but Wichita Falls when people ask where I’m from? I can’t really tell. But I do know this. People on the outside love to draw pictures in their minds of cowboys and horses, and I love those things too. But a bold, angry, eighteen year old lesbian with blue hair and a righteous sense of fairness shaking her fist on that Capitol steps is every bit as much of all of our Texas Fromness as a man on a horse, or a boy on a football field. As is a twelve year old chunky redhead mermaid bobbing in the muddy water of Lake Wichita. I think it’s the fight. The try. The spirit. 

We all let go too easily these days and Lord knows I love a good boundary, but we’re all going to be dying alone if we don’t learn how to be decent to one another. I know it’s hard to hear. I’m Texas. I’m Texan. I love BBQ and Boudain and Birria tacos. I love Kolache and coffee on dark morning roads. I love the radio. I’m cool with solar but I’m steeped in the religion of oil. And I hate your damned windmills because they are ugly and mess up my horizon and I despise people who put them out “in the middle of nowhere” but wouldn’t have them in their own backyards. I think nuclear is worth a moment of your time. I like guns, gays, gifts, grits, gold, and grubby kids. I like fishing. I think women are amazing and undervalued, but God I love men. I especially love a Texas man. I do. I love them so much I married one and I also gave birth to one, a fact that keeps my raging anger at the powers that be in Austin barely in check. Stand up for me and I’ll stand up for you as best I can. I am Willie’s biggest fan and I can’t get enough Lizzo. She makes me Get Up. Stand Up. Keep going. She may not love me back. That’s OK though. Beyonce is the queen. I miss Ann Richards and I didn’t know what a jewel she was in our crown until far too late. I want to be Molly Ivins when I grow up and I can’t hold a candle to her. Kelly Willis should be the Poet Laureate. I like old trucks that will never pass an emissions test. I think George W. Bush is a good man, but probably mostly because he got really lucky in the marriage department and has two ass kicking daughters to give him perspective. And the Dalai Lama adores the man so who am I to say otherwise. And I love Wichita Falls. And San Antonio, and Austin, and Fort Hood, and our former TX landmass Colorado. Sorry, I really couldn’t help myself. Oh, and I love you, too.

I know that Texas is made out of some kind of love, and held together by barbed wire. It is complex and conflicted. And, it is wonderful. If you are From here, I hope you join me in trying to be a better version of us every day. All are welcome, but only if you see us in all of our Fromness. Only if you can find a way to try to love us. Trying to love counts. You don’t have to be like us, or like anyone in particular because no two of us are the same. But if you come here I hope you aspire to be bold and kind, strong and tolerant, good and a little bad when the time permits, and honest to the core, at least to yourself, about who you are. Otherwise, you may stay where you are and make your fun, or have your preconceived opinions. That’s fine. We know we are a work in perpetual progress. We also know we’re hard to beat.

God I love this place and I’ll never leave. I am Texas and Texas is me. I was born of it. I deserve it. I’ll never leave.