The Charlie Daniels Band did a song early in their famous-ness about Carolina (North?) that I haven't heard in a long time. Stuff about biscuits as big as a train conductors watch and such. What I remember mostly about it was that it made me wish they were from Texas and had written such a great song about my home state. That's high compliment on my chart, so take your hats off and nod solemnly if you've ever liked anything in that way. I also like "Georgia on my mind" (even Willie's version). I don't have any musical talent, but love my home state and can relate to folks who get misty about their own favorite patch of realty. I wrote the following after talking with a fellow I used to meet for business purposes a couple of times a year in Niagara Falls. He had a son in the service at San Antonio, and commented seriously that they intended to come see him and wanted to take the remainder of the week of their visit and see Texas while they were at it. I was reminded of a guy from California who went to work for the State. He and his daughter drove across Arizona and New Mexico. Upon coming to El Paso in the dark, he told her it shouldn't be much farther now until they reached their desitination (Austin). They finally stopped and spent what was left of the night in Big Spring, still in West Texas and hundreds of miles from the capitol.

None of us can sum up our feelings about our home states easily (those of us who have feelings about them). Depending on his heart and where he's put down or who he encounters, one may learn all about a place in half an hour. I'm not that perceptive, and it takes me longer. This item chronicles a two day trip and exhausted my abilities to describe her for awhile. You may date it from the double nickel speed limit days and that ugly economic period after our banks failed and the oil and real estate markets cratered along with them.

So you Wanna See Some Texas

So you wanna see some Texas-saddle up and get out there and ride/Ride in the rain from Houston if you can clear the traffic/Out to Austin in the dead of night and the mist and damp/Look at the Capitol all lit up and the river ashimmer under waterstained arches then spend the night/Get up early and bear on northwest in the overcast February/Notice the stock-paints are in this year/Go slow through towns where a fugitive feed sack blows across the street before you

Deer stands tin and wood-across the field next to the brush/Yonder sticking up on legs overlooking the pipeline right-of-way/Angular above the gray-leafed oaks and greenblack cedars

Fields occasional with pieces of twisted corrugated galvanized something/Lying here then there and there's another one-out in the open/Deposits of the last cold front or the one before that/Mean blue-eyed dark-haired old widowers and their bunch of destructive overgrown adolescents/Bad tempered because nobody even knows their names/Jet-setting cousins get the names and the press-blowing up from the Caribbean/Running through the Bahamas leering at Mexico-ripping the party clothes from well-dressed resorts/Then heaving their massive bodies across the South and crying themselves out/Bulked up but grown old and wearied by the distance/These others quick and vicious-killing and slashing-making short work and local news/Plucking ripe fruit from trailer houses for small town graveyards/They have only numbers like other criminals and are known by those/The bad one of eighty-three-that one in seventy-nine that took Charlie's fiance

Wet highway-and dry

Long grass-fallow repossession of a banker himself gone bust/Now ruled by northern paper money from afar-by branch banks and Savings & Loans/Propped up by bailout money after the customers had already been thrown out without parachutes

Short grass-overgrazed by the hangars-on/Hoping for winters so cold they drive up the price of natural gas and wool/But not so cold they kill the stock and bust the flow lines

Rural Texas-backbone of the state that's backbone to the country/Cutting edge of frontier spirit on the wane-dominated by the urban voter/Robbed of youth by the State University and bold city girls/Dependent upon the alien tide for companionship once reserved for the native son

Drive fast now as distances between become boring with the sameness/Like a growing thing so slowly it changes that TV attuned sensibilities soon numb/Distance becomes an enemy pecked then dug frantically until you are moving/As great a chunk as you can lift each shovelful and panting with the strain of desire/To be at the end missing Texas in the passing

Being passed by Texans with electronic protection-burglar alarms for the pocketbook/Arming themselves as their elected officials waffle and cave in to Eastern sarcasm/National energy policy and safety justifications that know nothing/Of regular 500-mile drives to grandmother's on the flat West Texas monotony

Dead deer repulsive road kills attest to the magnitude and resilience/Of rural critter populations-including that of the buzzards/That had to be protected from extermination a few years ago by bans on their destruction/To which most who were inclined to kill them in the first place paid little heed

Chicken fried steaks along the way/Places where the locals eat and old men laugh at true stories that end/With and we still had six lambs and do not hint at sexual innuendo of any kind/Sheep ranchers now old whose granddaddy's would have been mortified if they'd known/Whose grandmothers however whould have made do in the poverty that ranching of any kind has always been/Double up on the gravy please-served by tall honest-faced waitresses/That city boys only dream about but never really believe to exist/Windmills and concrete tanks-old abandoned farmsteads/Well not so old when compared to a Northeast/That thrived when the white man was fair game in these parts

Texas to be seen-absorbed while the echoes of its independent spirit/May still be heard-it's fading/It quickly bloomed in blood and grew in Mexican spurs and Winchesters driving/Brush-bred cattle to the puffing railhead-grinning like a healthy roughneck/Through a grimy face-flexing its muscles in its prime

Now merely awesome in dignity and distance-assets diluted by foreign ownership/Bid farewell-there will be exceptions and pockets/Of survivalist tenacity but for the most part she's a goner boys/And the greatest gift of passing may be the unrecognized contibutions/A wild free and yet disciplined spirit of pioneer self-sufficiency/Near reckless disregard for propriety tempered with Bible Belt conviciton/To the social gene pool of a nation struggling for a worthy contemporary identity

A Texas of the heart to people of ingenuity and industry everywhere/Who determine to bring her characteristics intact into the next century/Some of them will have nasal twangs that Hollywood can never properly immitate/Savor them America-they are your rare treasures

Drive the State and soak it up-it'll stick to your ribs like squirrel and dumplings/Or a fish fry or pecan pie-but don't put the trip off long

Anybody else out there got a favorite homestate-related item? Can you submit em as separate "questions" so these things don't run so long? More later--J

-- j (jsnider@hal-pc.org), October 08, 2003

Answers

Bump

-- For those (th@never,check.new.questions), October 08, 2003.

Uh, might as well be a bump in the night to me.

Do you mean that you never check new questions and so picked this item up there? Since that doesn't track, maybe I'm supposed to throw stuff against a different wall than the "new questions" spot??

1)I readily admit to being dense, so that's no hurdle, 2)I'm a newby-- did I do something wrong? and 3) Hey, it's gotta beat that "no question" thing, no matter what!

Anybody care to interpret for me or does that just sit there like a bump on the log?

Thanks for any pointers.

-- j (jsnider@hal-pc.org), October 08, 2003.

Hi J. I check the new questions page as do others too, but things ain't like they were in the past with getting lots of quick answers. So to speed thigs up a bit, sometimes we'll 'bump' a new question so that it shows up on the recent answers page and everyone knows it there.

I'm glad you're dense, since now I have something in common with you. And you didn't do nuthin' wrong. If you did the ladies (uh, I mean Pricessess) would be yellin and stomping (they ain't shy).

-- (sonofdust@bump.bump), October 08, 2003.

J, that's a very vivid quick trip though Texas for us - thanks! (Just think of all the time you've saved me, now I don't actually have to do the real thing ;)

Some of the regular visitors here (me included) don't do regular checks of the new questions page because we have the new answers page book-marked. So for us'ns it can be nice to have an interesting thread "bumped". And if we're impatient to get some input from some of our fellow frlians, we bump our own new questions to get their attention.

If Lon hasn't shown you some of our archives - feel free to search on your own. You'll find lots of useful information buried in tons of funny stories, great poetry and gentle ribbing. You could start with this thread: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl? msg_id=002tBb

There's a list of the original FRL threads dating back to 1998 on the Timebomb 2000 bulletin board. Some of those threads got verrrrrry lonnnnnng before we "split" them, so if you have a slow loading computer be prepared for a long wait (or go to your local library and see if they have high speed internet connections). I'd advise reading with an empty bladder - the ROFLTIP can be quite literal on some of these. They're great on blue days - pinks them up amazingly :-)

-- Tricia the Canuck (jayles@telusplanet.ent), October 10, 2003.

Just read this ..........

Right after traveling from, back, through and over all of East Texas after his 25th reunion at A&M ....

Whooooooooooooppppp!

Nice poemtree.

-- Robert & Jean Cook (Cooks@home.ga), October 12, 2003.

AGGIE ALERT!!!

-- helen (know@any.good.aggie.jokes?), October 13, 2003.

Hi J. That's some picture. I'll have to get the map out and see how big that State of yours is. I'm afraid I'm terribly ignorant about the whole U.S., but now at least I have a feel for your home State. Maybe you'd better have a go at writing the lyrics for the song of Texas, it needs someone who has her in his heart.

-- Carol (c@oz.com), October 14, 2003.