Pat Bean's blog

  I grew up being properly indoctrinated to the belief, according to my beloved grandmother, that if you weren’t born in Texas, you didn’t deserve to be. That way of thinking was not challenged for the first 30 years of my life – not until I moved out of the state and was perceived to be that obnoxious, loudmouth girl from Texas who didn’t know how to speak properly –right on all accounts.

I dropped the y’all,s and fixing tos, and sure things, until I no longer sound Texan, although, every once in a while, a person with an educated ear picks up on it. Or I become a bragging blabbermouth, just one more Lone Star trait I inherited. 

But it’s hard to dig up one’s roots when they grow deep, as mine do. There’s a part of me that is proud of being a Texan, just as I’m proud of being an American, though politics and history’s lies have tarnished my Pollyannish image of both in my later years.

I recently spent three weeks in Texas, where much of my family lives, and came away with a few observations that let me know I could have been nowhere else. For one, I rarely got out of sight of huge, side-by-side red, white and blue flags, one representing America, and the other Texas.

Pickup trucks, boots, cowboy hats, cattle and country western music abounded. Pumping oil rigs and summer wildflowers (courtesy of Lady Bird Johnson’s encouragement to dump flower seeds along highways) were common sights as I drove around.

Among the people I visited on my rounds were my third-oldest grandchild David and his wife Sheila, who are the parents of my two great-granddaughters seven-year-old Savannah and five-year-old Charlotte. They had recently returned from a trip to Disney World, where David said they attended a show in which the emcee asked how many in the audience were from a different country.

“Savannah raised her hand and shouted out, ‘Texas,’” David told me.

And she never even got to know my grandmother.

Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.