Everybody is from somehere
Traces how being from Texas shapes you forever, no matter where you go—from childhood jokes about “Texas and everywhere else” to a son’s conflicted pride in his hardworking father. Through memory and reflection, it ties identity to place, work, and the inherited drive to keep learning and making.
The thing about being from somewhere is that you can never not be from there. You an leave, you can put on new clothes and a new accent, but that place will always be a part of you. Like it or not. And me? I’m from Texas. And its the goddamnest place you’ll ever visit.
There’s a joke I learned as a kid, well there are a couple, but the one I always think of is: There’s only two places; Texas and everywhere else. And everyone knows this joke, only in Texas even though we say it with levity, we kind of believe it. Hell, I’ve been other places, amazing places, and as awe-inspiring as they are, there’s always something missing.
It might be the kindness of strangers, or the way people wave in small towns, say howdy or just was we know as mexican food. Sometimes it’s the heat. I’ve stood in the Pantheon in Rome marveling at the largest unsupported occulous in the world and thought, ‘I sure miss the warmth of Texas in November’!
So, being from someplace is in you, it is you. It was part of what Eliza Doolittle struggled with in the film adaptation of Pygmillion, My Fair Lady. Many films, plays and books have been written where the main character lived a lie, trying to be ‘better’ than where they were from, to fit in, please society and impress others. In the end though, they always find the value in who they were born as and why it matters.
I’m no different. For decades, I ran away from who I was. I hated country and western music, eschewed cowboy boots and hats and despised the idea of bucolic paintings of cows and chickens and red barns. Now, all those things exist other places. LOTS of places, but when you’re 10 and your daddy comes home in his boots and hat, all dirtied up from working in the oilfield, or wrangling cattle, well, you either fall in love with, or you decide that’ll never be you.
That sounds cruel; seeing your father and thinking you want to be anything but that. I don’t necessarily mean it that way. There were may qualities my Dad had that I desired: creativity, intelligence, the ability to draw and make things with his hands and imagination. Now, all those qualities, I’ve worked hard to make him proud. But by his own admission, he wanted me to have ‘an office job’ and ‘not come home tired and dirty every day’. That is a sentiment no doubt most parents want. Coupled with a good work ethic and a sense of honesty, I would say it makes for a very respectable man or woman.
One of my first memories of my father is my mother and I taking him lunch when he was working second shift as a tank-manufacturing plant. Now, for the city-types, or anyone not smack in the middle of oil-fields, a tank-manufacturing plant doesn’t make tanks for war, they make varying sizes of vessels to contain oil. Some small, some larger than houses. Massive structures that are nothing but plate steel forged into massive arching shapes and welded seam by seam in to one continuous surface, usually with a manhole or two and whatever ports the buyer requests to get their chemical into and out of the vessel.
And that was my father’s job: welding all of those seams.
On this particular evening, I’m maybe 6 and we drive out to the east side of town, the outskirts back then, and park off the side of an asphalt road that is framed on either side with 6’ wide bar ditches. They handle the rainwater run-off and when it’s not raining, breed mosquitoes.
My mother has prepared something, I don’t know what, and placed into a black steel lunchbox with a thermos. While I poke at the ditches looking for frogs, my dad opens his lunch on the hood of the car and he and my mother chat about something while he eats his sandwich and occasionally asks me a question about what I am doing. Eventually, we end up throwing a tiny-child sized football back and forth.
This event has always puzzled me. My father has never cared for sports. he does not talk about them, watch them, nor have I ever seen him play sports. He says they are waste of time. And I believe him. For the 50 years I’ve known him, it’s only in the last 2 that I’ve seen him ever do anything but go to work, or work at home on various projects. He is a production machine. Make make make. And it’s the process that seems to inspire him. He isn’t interested in drilling down and finding a thing that he can then just rinse and repeat into oblivion. He loves learning how to do new things.
I doubt this is a particularly Texas thing. But it is sure a my-dad thing. And I’m the same way.
It’s why I’ve never liked the idea of being a specialist, master of one thing. I much prefer learning a new process, getting moderately adept at it and then just adding the tool to my box. That comes with a lot of frustration. Constantly relearning fundamental things that masters have long become so accomplished at that they don’t even think of the process.
2025-05-05 23:56:52