When I came back to Texas in 1978, I wasn’t surprised to find that most of the inhabitants were natives. Born here. Never lived anywhere else. Didn’t want to, either.
Things had changed a lot since my very youthful sojourn in Dallas and they have continued to, but, really, not fundamentally. Unless you look through Erica Grieder’s historical lens:
“Think about Texas’s historical baseline compared to that of the United States; project a mental image of the Jazz Age in New York and then contemplate the fact that around that time LBJ was riding to school on a donkey. And things are improving in Texas, more or less across the board.”
The population certainly has ballooned since LBJ’s donkey days in the Hill Country town of Johnson City (named for his ranching grandfather) and, for that matter, since 1978. The traffic in most Texas cities (including onetime [1978] buccolic Austin) is horrendous. And what used to be the pretty rural stretch of highway between Austin and Waco is now pretty much wall-to-wall commerce, including some unsightly junkyards.
Howsomever, Texas still is a nice place to live, work and play. And, as Greider, who formerly covered Gov. Rick Perry for The Economist and now writes for Texas Monthly, shows in her new book the Texas haters could learn a thing or two from us. Not that we can expect them to, of course. Some things are just too much to hope for. But no big whoop. It’s their loss.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 