Texas, My Texas

Although I love Nashville, there are things I miss about Texas. In the film, No Country for Old Men, Tommy Lee Jones has an opening soliloquy that made me very homesick. The language and the rhythm of the speech was so Texas!

I found this poem in a collection by Naomi Shihab Nye called Is This Forever, or What, Poems and Paintings from Texas:

In Texas, every podunk town
has a Dairy Queen,
where old men in Stetsons
or John Deere caps
gather between naps, burgers fat as Bibles
dripping grease in their laps.

They stare at a landscape lit
like an overexposed photo.
Sunlight glints off windshields
till every eye turns inward
to the kinder light of memory.
Their lives tick like combines cooling;
their stories, old ropers
worn thin.

But it's comforting here
where the waitress has hair as big
as her heart, and flirts
as she refills their coffee.
Finally, the black cups cool
and the old men hoist their bellies up
from the booths, crank their frames
out to the parking lot.

And one hand waving
and one foot in the car,
They pause to watch a strange wind brew
as a dust devil scampers up from the field,
grabs their hats and runs.

Beverly Caldwell, a Texas poet from Fort Worth

After my mom died, my dad spent a lot of time at the Dairy Queen, sitting in his Stetson hat drinking coffee and eating burgers. And when we visited, we went there and ate beef fingers with gravy--yum. Nobody makes better gravy than Dairy Queen. I miss it.