I wasn’t made from the rib of a man
I was fashioned from a potent mixture
Of Gun Powder
And the Seeds of Bluebonnets
Bound together with the Sap of Mesquite Trees
I didn’t crack forth from the skull of a god
I was born in an Oyster Shell in Galveston Bay
And adorned with Pearls on my Birthday
I’m the Feral Daughter of the
First Twilight Star and the Bobcat.
The Child of a Blue Norther
That picked up the Red Dirt and carried
It to the rich
Soil south
I rolled up in front of John’s house to pick him up for the funeral. I love a man in starched cowboy duds, I do. I hope everyone comes to my funeral in starched jeans because it shows a certain awareness of the importance of the occasion. He looked great. Dad would have been so pleased. Or maybe Dad would have called him a damn quitter. John gave up drinking a few months ago and really seems to have his shit together this time. It’s nice to see. He was not a pretty drunk and he wore it like a mean vagrant now and again.
Mom owed us a debt of gratitude for even going to her service at all though. She disliked both of us to the core. It gave me chills to even think of her. The condescending glare. Always looking so damned disappointed. Kind of like Stacy, John’s perennial girlfriend, who was standing behind him.
Stacy didn’t even bother to dress up like a two dollar whore. She had on flip flops for the love of all things good and holy. It matters not a tiny speck of dust that there were rhinestones on the straps. And on the thighs of her jeans, on her bag, and you can call that a tunic all damn day long but we all know it’s just a long ass t-shirt. I rolled down the window.
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The old house has fallen.
I don’t know what part gave in
Or gave up
First.
Or if every last beam and joist
Just saw it coming
And gave up the ghost
All at once.
You know by a child’s cry whether the offense or injury is dire, and I swear you know by a dog’s bark when there is something horribly the matter. I was fifty yards down the hill towards the pond at our ranch in Clay County, Texas, when Birdie, my then young English Setter, started to barking at a new pitch that told me something was gravely wrong. So I headed back up. When I crested the hill she stood alertly looking at me at like she wanted to show me something and like she didn’t really recognize me at the same time. Then she decided it was time to play again, and ran to us, past us and off down the hill I had been headed down with Sally. She ran feverishly, thrilled, to the water’s edge. I followed, thinking I must have misinterpreted her bark, or heard her wrong. I shook my head at the antics of this goofy dog, our first English Setter in a line of Golden Retrievers. To my eye, she was utterly her usual joyful and muscular self, propelling her body through every moment, spring loaded at all times. This was about three years ago.
*****
My life is still mostly in Dallas. One can become aloof about the existence of death by nature there, surrounded by dark parking garages and speeding buses and people, so many people whom we do not know, and whom we have no interest in really getting to know. We begin to think death comes only from bad people and dreaded slow diseases. But barring a freak accident involving a busy tree trimmer swinging through the canopy who doesn’t see me below and drops a branch on my head while I walk through my neighborhood, my chances of being killed by nature, or association with it, are remarkably slim. Stress might get me. My lifestyle might get me. A thoughtless moment piloting a very large vehicle may get me and others around me. But nature is mostly held at bay, pushed out, manicured down to its least threatening forms. The occasional tornadoes notwithstanding, nature is mostly neutered or paved here. I can be outside all I want without really ever being outdoors, with the flood of life and wild that outdoors should entail.
*****
Read More(This is a piece I wrote for a class a few years ago. It is probably the moment I started thinking about the idea of Fromness, which I explored in some length in A Texan Theory of Fromness.)
I am of the red dirt.
The basketball post set with a bag of concrete into a flat spot of grass and gravel. Rusted. There must have been a net at some point.
The fillin’ station on the right that hasn’t been anything but a hollow shell for fifty years, when they used big chunks of green glass right along with the hewn stones.
I’m from the evangelical church where no one shows up anymore.
I’m of the railroad tracks.
I’m from where the bluebonnets start and the hawks swoop and the buzzards sit in the road, hard working janitors.
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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.
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