My Journey of States-3 Texas

A WRITER'S WIT
As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in office.
Molly Ivins
Born August 30, 1944.
​Died January 31, 2007

M. Ivins

​MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the third post of fifty.

3 Texas

​My parents related to me that we traveled around Dallas in 1950 using Loop 12, which was subsumed by Dallas city limits long ago. I clearly don’t remember it. My first memorable trip to Texas came in 1968, when my college choir sang at the national meeting which joined the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church, making it the United Methodist Church. The trip was in April, and, while those back in Kansas were still experiencing cool temps, we sunned by the pool at the motel where we stayed [photos below]. I remember roses blooming profusely in several locations. Even then I was impressed with Texas’s wealth and opulence, particularly in its churches. 

I returned to Dallas in 1970 to attend graduate school at Southern Methodist University. Even then, I often got the feeling I couldn’t begin to enjoy the city without earning a six-figure income. To heighten the disparity even more, SMU was nestled in the heart of the wealthiest part of Dallas. Highland Park United Methodist Church was located across the parking lot from the married student housing in which I lived for two years, yet the one time my wife and I attended services there, no one spoke to us or even extended us a hand. After two years I was only too glad to leave Dallas and serve an internship in the western part of the state. Yes, I moved to Lubbock, and I have lived there since 1972. At that time Lubbock was just what I needed, what my shrink called a quiet corner of the world. I didn’t intend to stay, but I wasn’t sure where to go. I hadn’t liked Dallas, but neither did I wish to return to Kansas. I sensed that living there I would still be subject to my parents’ scrutiny; I wouldn’t grow. Then at twenty-seven I divorced my wife, found a job and a boyfriend, in pretty short order, and Lubbock seemed like the place to be, where we could reside, and so we have. ¶ Ken’s and my retirement from teaching has been predicated on staying in Lubbock, where our home and cars are paid for, and the cost of living is much less than it is in any of the so-called retirement meccas found in the Southwest or in Florida. With the money we save each year, we can travel to almost anywhere in the country or the world for that matter. There is so much more I could have shared about Texas, having lived here forty-seven years, but I'll save it for another time.¶ Texas is the twenty-eighth state. Its centennial was celebrated in 1936 (on the basis of its being a republic, not its 1845 statehood), its sesquicentennial in 1986. It is curious to me that Texas’s and Oklahoma’s statehoods are over seventy years apart, and yet they lie next to one another like siblings.

Trunk Decals and Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link:
1-Kansas
2- Oklahoma
3-Texas

NEXT TIME: My Book World