Small Town Texas Roots
Earlier this week I described my recent travels in Texas, reflecting on planned re-connections with old friends and the surfacing of other connections with people in my past. If I’d thought about it, I might have incorporated Whitehead’s suggestion that what we tend to think of as an essential person going through life collecting all sorts of experiences is really an abstraction. The more concrete reality, he suggests, is a series of selves, each the concrescence of experiences that come together to make that self, and each dying and then passing its identity on as a central element in the coming to be of the next manifestation of self. As he put it, “the many become one, and then there is one more.” As I thought about that this morning, I returned to something that I often wonder about: who would I be today if my father had not made the mid-career decision to enter the army when I was 12 years old?
This decision led our family away from small town Texas, first to El Paso, which is so different from the rest of Texas that I lost my Texas accent during our almost five years there, and then to Germany, where I graduated from high school. There’s no question in my mind that my these moves broadened my view of the world.
Several examples come to mind. I remember classmates in El Paso being expelled from school because they were caught speaking Spanish in the school hallway. I wondered then what was so threatening about students speaking a language other than English. In Heidelberg, I remember pushing my parents to subscribe to the International Herald Tribune in addition to the Stars and Stripes. I read both newspapers daily, and was struck by how the perspective of each paper shaped its presentation of news about various world events, in particular the war in Viet Nam. My awareness of world events was both broader and deeper than what I knew and didn’t know about the world while living in those small Texas towns.
Obviously, I can’t go back and live a different life, staying in those Texas towns, so that I can compare the person that I would have been to the person that I am.
Yesterday I read a fascinating interview of Craig Mod, the photographer and writer now touring to discuss his new book Things Become Other Things. I had seen the book in a couple of bookstores. It looked interesting, but I resisted purchasing it. After reading that interview, I’m afraid, resistance was futile. I returned to the bookstore and purchased one of the two remaining copies they had in stock. (It’s even a signed copy — number 0063 — the number, I suppose, communicates the fact that Mod is an artist, and not just any author.) Despite the fact that it doesn’t fit all that neatly into my current reading plan, I couldn’t stop reading it. I’ve read only a third of the book, but I’m struck by Mod’s comparison of his life in Japan to his childhood and adolescent life in a so far unnamed (but rust belt?) U.S. town decimated by the loss of industry and the Opioid crisis. The book is addressed to a childhood friend whom he’s not seen in 27 years. He describes his move to Japan to attend university as a life-changing and world-expanding move, and at least in retrospect he sees the move as an escape:
Somehow, early on, I decided the only way out of our quagmire was to leave. … I remember now, even at age eleven or twelve, making a promise to ourselves that we would get out. I would get myself out and pull you, too. I’d remove us from the hexed equation entirely — the equation of the town, the country (for how could a country that would let this happen to a town be trusted?).
I know that the 1960s world of those small Texas towns was not as desolate as the life he describes in his hometown, but the question still haunts me: who would I be if we hadn’t moved away from those towns when I was 12? More to the point, given the current political climate of our country, would I be as concerned about the well-being of others as I am now? I know from conversations with friends in conservative states that there are many who strongly disagree and are attempting to resist the oppressive actions of conservative state and federal governments, but I’m wondering about my own development here. Given how my experiences have shaped the person that I am, how would I be different if I hadn’t moved away?
The poet Billy Collins has something to say about this.
I Go Back To The House For A Book
I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor’s office,
and while I am inside, running the finger
of inquisition along a shelf,
another me that did not bother
to go back to the house for a book
heads out on his own,
rolls down the driveway,
and swings left toward town,
a ghost in his ghost car,
another knot in the string of time,
a good three minutes ahead of me—
a spacing that will now continue
for the rest of my life.
Sometimes I think I see him
a few people in front of me on a line
or getting up from a table
to leave the restaurant just before I do,
slipping into his coat on the way out the door.
But there is no catching him,
no way to slow him down
and put us back in synch,
unless one day he decides to go back
to the house for something,
but I cannot imagine
for the life of me what that might be.
He is out there always before me,
blazing my trail, invisible scout,
hound that pulls me along,
shade I am doomed to follow,
my perfect double,
only bumped an inch into the future,
and not nearly as well-versed as I
in the love poems of Ovid—
I who went back to the house
that fateful winter morning and got the book.