She's Not From Texas

One from the archives I hope you'll enjoy....

I brought my Yankee fiancée home to Texas to meet the family.

Austin’s airport had relocated since I moved to Rhode Island. No more Robert Mueller Airport. I can’t show her where my family and I waited for my dad to step off the airplane from Vietnam, all six of us kids fighting over who gets to hold the cardboard sign we made in case he didn’t recognize us. I wished I could have shown her, because that was part of what made me… well… me.

My dad passed away a few years ago, so my fiancée will never get to know the incredibly patient and hardworking man who provided for six kids and watched over us as we matured into reasonably well-adjusted adults. Instead she got to see his achievements -- my brothers and sisters.

Over the years, the family had dispersed. Three of us had gone into the military, all of us had created our own families, creating nephews and nieces and step-sons and all possible combinations of cousins. On the day we arrived, it seemed as though every single one had come to the potluck social at my mother’s church, just to welcome me home and to meet the woman who had captured my heart.

My fiancée sampled real Texas home cooking. Biscuits and cornbread and beans and brisket and tamales and three bean salad and sliced ripe tomatoes. She drank iced tea made with water fortified with a healthy dose of dissolved Hill Country limestone. And she met my brothers and sisters.

Home cooking and family. That’s part of me.

Afterward, we strolled through the field behind the church and collected a nosegay of tiny Texas field flowers. Bluebonnet season had long passed, the heat of the summer had already set in, so the yellow flowers dominated, with the white flowers providing harmony. I used to be able to name them all, thanks to the wildflower identification charts that the Texas Highways Department, but those memories seemed to have faded like the Indian paintbrushes and fire wheels at the beginning of summer.

A week was too short to see all of Texas and to share with her all of the things that went into shaping me. But I made sure that we went to Copperas Cove, a tiny town outside of Fort Hood. If I had a hometown growing up, Copperas Cove would have to be it. I was born in a military hospital in another state, but my first memories of childhood come from here. We found the house where I had planted a now-absent sycamore tree and where I had lived when my little sister was born. I found two out of three houses I lived in during a year when every landlord seemed to be selling houses and breaking leases faster than we could unpack. Some houses we couldn’t find at all -- it was as though the streets had been moved and didn’t connect quite where memory demanded that they be.

The old Boy Scout house was gone – a lot of me came from being a Scout. But, I guess I did show her something – when I was twelve, the town was huge, filling my entire world. I never realized just how tiny Copperas Cove was – I guess I really am a small town boy after all.

In Austin we saw the colony of Mexican free-tailed bats under the Congress Avenue Bridge. We swam in the chilly waters of Barton Springs in Zilker Park. We ate great food at Threadgill’s restaurant, on the site of the old Armadillo World Headquarters.

We visited Southwest Texas State University, now named Texas State University. Some dorms had vanished, to be replaced by a hulking library. The old San Marcos Academy boarding school had been absorbed.

The university had also purchased the old Aquarina Springs tourist trap, converting it into a nature center. The swimming pig and submarine theater are now long gone, but they kept the glass-bottom boats. I showed my fiancée the icy springs bubbling up from the Edwards Aquifer, fish brave enough to swim under the boat, and the place where Johnny Weismeuller once swam to the bottom of the lake to have a sip of water from a gushing artesian spring. I showed her where I acted as an extra in the movie, Piranha, skipping class to be eaten by imaginary toothy fish.

Then we headed to San Antonio. I had spent many wonderful days in San Antonio when I was in college. Long lost friends probably still live there. “The tall guy with a beard who enjoyed war games” “the gal who invited me to dinner and her mom tried to get us married the same day” “the guy who couldn’t remember where he parked his car.” I can’t remember their names anymore.

Instead of socializing, we visited the San Antonio Riverwalk. The old WPA project was much the same as I remembered; it was still a place of tourists and a cool retreat from the simmering Texas sun. More restaurants lined the waterway, there were new names here and there, and we didn’t see a single floating restaurant barge. We had Mexican food, though they didn’t have chile con queso or tamales the way I remembered, choosing I guess to concentrate on the more ubiquitous and tourist-acceptable fajitas and chimichangas.

And we went to the Alamo -- had to do it, it’s part of the Texan psyche. Texans are idealists who fight for what they believe in, and the Alamo stands as tribute to their belief in freedom. We walked grounds that were once soaked in blood and sat under a tree so old that it must have witnessed the fateful battle. We talked for hours about dedication to a cause, the willingness to sacrifice for others, and whether or not I shared traits with Crockett and Bowie and Travis.

On our last day in San Antonio, we went to the Veteran’s Cemetery at Fort Sam Houston. We strolled through row after row after row of white marble headstones marking the graves of men and women who, like the heroes of the Alamo, sacrificed for what they believed in. We stopped for a while at my dad’s grave before calling our trip complete.

So now she knew me. She knows the source of the reverence I hold for the military, why I love homegrown tomatoes, and why I consider a drive from Rhode Island to Boston no big deal. She saw where I grew up, where I went to school, and where I hung out when I was in college.

She went to Texas to meet my family, but more important, she met the real me.