One of my well-meaning "peeps" stood to correct me today after reading yesterday's post about the Grammy's. She said, "But you're not FROM Texas either". In my mind, she wins on a technicality!
It IS true...unlike Sbbridges (see yesterday's post comments), I was NOT born in Texas. I was actually born in a very small farm village in Nebraska in the 1960's. I spent the majority of my youth attending a tiny rural school, working in the fields in the summer time, and dreaming of another place I could eventually call "home".
Life on the isolated plains in the Midwest was no cake walk...winters were bitterly cold and summers were unbearably hot. There were no allowances paid for work done around the house...my family was PWT (poor white trash), and anything other than our room and board had to be earned outside the home. I started working every summer by the age of nine, either painting houses with my father (E.P.), and/or working in the fields cutting shatter cane, weeding 1/2 mile rows of beans, or detassling mile long rows of corn...these days started at 5:00AM and ended when dusk slowly arrived.
I lived through tornadoes and floods, droughts and blizzards. As a child, I didn't know there even WAS another world out there other than what I would see on TV...the nearest town with any substantial population was 100 miles away. But I never stopped being curious and "wondering" what might lay hidden just beyond the cornfields.
I went to a small state college after high school, earning a scholastic scholarship and a basketball scholarship...my initial studies were in Language Arts/Drama and Sports Education. The college was located practically IN the Missouri river in Southeastern Nebraska...I spent two years there. Somewhere during my first year of college however, I got the "bright" idea to change my major and began a pre-nursing program...this was after never having had ANY chemistry, anatomy, or physics in high school! Whatever...never tell a young and aspiring youth they can't DO something!
After my second year in college, I transferred to a private nursing school in Lincoln, NE, and spent the next 3 years there full-time emptying bedpans and learning the "ropes". I worked two jobs to support myself...when not at the hospital as a student, I was there as a glorified nursing technician earning about $6.00/hour...that job, and cleaning a large church at midnight every Saturday night, was more than enough to keep me busy and out of trouble!
My final months of nursing school found me "itching" to get as far away from the Plains as possible...Texas seemed the furthest destination! I HAD visited Texas as a very young child and the allure of the urban cowboy myth kept tapping on my subconscious. One week after passing our nursing boards, two friends and I loaded up their cars and a UHaul and moved to the Lone Star State.
Houston, TX, was my first stop in a big city...and, I fell in love with it. The people were friendly, the winters were warm, and nearly EVERYONE had access to a pool in the summer time! What's not to like about that?!? I established my life and my profession in Houston and it remains the place I call "home".
In the mid 1990's, I once again packed up my belongings (most likely foolishly as I was following a "love" to my next destination!) and headed blindly to the Great Pacific Northwest/Seattle...I have remained here ever since. I like Seattle...I really do. But it's just not the same as good ol' Texas and Houston in particular. And, I've yet to refer to Seattle as my "home".
They say "home" is where the heart is...I can't really say if G.W. Bush has his heart in Texas...I'm not even all that certain he HAS a heart! LOL And where we are BORN is not necessarily where we find "home". What's most important is that we FIND a place we can call "home".
So, as I said yesterday...I kind of have to cut our 43rd President some slack. We ALL have to be from somewhere, we ALL need a place we call "home", but that doesn't mean we necessarily have to LIKE our neighbors! LOL...
2 comments:
Houston and Seattle have been lucky to have you. We in New England where Bush was raised are very happy to give him to Texas and know it is not their fault-Texans had no choice in the matter. NO,George has a New England accent, although his life here was not like most of ours. He comes here to fish occasionally with his dad and we just try to ignore it. The cowboy boots are a joke here-guess he feels he needs to wear them to be accepted as a Texan and they must be one of his manly statements ( those people who trashed the Dixie Chicks sure fell for that ruse! They thought Bush was one of them!--) All that is left of George here in Maine is his trashed, wrecked car in the junkyard.
Fellow readers of Braincheese--please accept my apology for my note last evening --Linda wrote such a lovely account of her life in Nebraska, but by the end of it my neurons started misfiring and i was confusing Bush's cowboy boots, the Dixie Chicks, his cold eyes and sarcastic smile, Iraq, Iran, no armour for our soldiers, cuts in Medicaid, crushing debt to China and i started blathering to you all making no sense in the end. You wouldn't have been interested in my Maine stories of Bush and the car he totalled. This blog is about our struggles with MS and i will honor that and try not to stray again--back to Linda and her new medication. I have learned that Bush is very, very bad for my MS and have started meditating again.
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