100 Things I Want to Tell My Children and Grandchildren: #5

If you want to have friends, you have to be a friend.

(High school friends, Acey Mullins, Betty Word, and LaNelle Stokes)

This is something I didn’t learn until I was older. Maybe I didn’t have to learn it because I always had plenty of friends, or maybe I always had good friends because I was a friend.

When I was young, I wasn’t the smartest or prettiest girl, so I had to be a good friend. I couldn’t depend on my looks or grades to garner me the worship often heaped on kids for doing nothing more than being handsome or pretty or uncannily smart. I always related very personally to the old Avis motto, “We try harder because we're number 2". I always felt like I had to try harder. (More high school friends - slumber party at my house, L-R Eileen Stuart, Rhonda Badgett, Suzanne Heath, Claudia Walters, Sherry Chalfant, Suzie Smithson, Dee Dee Wright in front.)

In his new book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, Malcolm Gladwell, who also authored Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw, claims that people who aren’t naturally endowed with assets valued in our world are sometimes more successful. This is because they spend their whole life trying harder and being more creative about how to achieve the desired results in spite of their perceived lesser assets. In fact, as only Gladwell can, he demonstrates through real-life characters, like Richard Branson, Charles Schwab, and Brian Glazer, all of whom are dyslexic, how disadvantages are often advantages, and vice versa. His bottom line being, “use what you got.”

That’s the story of my life. I use what I got. I’m not naturally gregarious, but I can present a very convincing act that I am, and gain the advantages that come with being gregarious. People never believe me when I say that I am not a natural networker or social. “But you do it so well, SueAnn,” they say. Yes, I do, and I enjoy the benefits.

Same thing goes with being a friend. I’m not all that likable. I don’t have people lining up to be my friend. So I compensate for that by remembering birthdays, showing up, buying lunch, and making the call. The irony is this - although I have to make myself do those things, when I do, I feel really great.

So be a friend, so you can have friends, because whether you know it or not, you need friends, and they need you.

With Arianna Huffington and Texas Observer Board Member, Mary Nell Mathis at UT Alumni Center

100 Things I Want to Tell My Children and Grandchildren: #4

(Photo is of the staff in Bob Honts' Office, 1985, including yours truly on the left)

There is a special place in your heart where you keep your moments of greatness tucked away.

I had no idea what I was getting into in 1984 when I showed up at the Travis County Courthouse. The job interview was as assistant to then County Commissioner, Bob Honts, who honed his sagacity against the steel of Texas political icon, former Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock. Honts was, unbeknownst to me at the time, a “colorful” local legend characterized as a revolting show-off by his enemies and a slightly flawed genius by his friends.

When I walked into Honts’ office that day, he shook my hand, looked piercingly into my eyes and said, “I have to get back on the dais, so you have 20 seconds to tell me why I should hire you.”

I opened my mouth and words came tumbling out from some place I didn’t even know existed. “I have above average intelligence, more energy than I know what to do with and a low tolerance for boredom,” I rattled off breathlessly.

“Okay,” he quickly responded. “Will you take this?” He was pointing to a long list of numbers on a piece of paper he held in his fist, and which I later realized was salary levels, but at the time just looked like a bunch of impossibly small numbers.

As I leaned into the paper willing my brain to catch up to the moment and my eyes to focus, Honts, not one for pauses, pointed higher up on the salary level list and said, “How about this?” I just wanted to agree and get the hell out of his incredibly intimidating presence. “Okay,” I said in a quivering voice.

“We’ll process the paper,” he said, as he turned and walked out, back to that dais where issues I couldn’t have conceived of previously would become de rigueur for me over the next four years of my employment.

Within the week, I found myself sitting on the front row of Commissioner’s Court, pen and paper in hand, no idea what I was supposed to be doing. The first item on the agenda was the consideration of an oil lease on property Travis County owned. The prospective lessor, and his very handsome son (another story, another time), owners of an oil and gas exploration company in Ohio, had stated their proposal eloquently and the county attorney had recommended the contract.

Commissioner Honts waggled his fingers in my direction summoning me to the dais and whispered, “What do you think?” Good Gaud! He was asking me if I thought Travis County should sign the lease!

Having dealt with a fair share of oil and gas lease issues when I was married and living on a ranch in the middle of oil country in west Texas, the one thing I knew for sure was that everyone “lawyered up” big time.

“I think you should have an oil and gas attorney look at the lease,” I whispered back. Honts requested a delay and the county eventually made a lot more money off the lease than was originally proposed.

That was my first day, followed by many more filled with similar issues of intrigue. But my favorite, and the focus of this #4 of the one hundred things I want to tell my kids and grandkids, was STARflight.

(The first STARflight is pictured right. The inscription says, "To SueAnn - A STARflight all by herself - Bob Honts.)

It all started one day about a year into my “Honts experience,” as I was sifting through the two-foot pile of mail that came across my desk on a daily basis. On a magazine cover I saw a photo of a man standing in front of a helicopter, obviously a doctor as he was wearing the requisite white coat over blue scrubs and had a stethoscope draped around his neck. The caption on the cover said something like, “Dr. Red Duke and Lifeflight,” which I found out was a helicopter ambulance service associated with Herman Hospital in Houston.

Big Brother: A Novel by Lionel Shriver

A good friend, Charlena Vargas Prada, recently sent me an email asking for a quote for the back cover of her new book, Mrs. VP luvs Shakspeer. At the end of her email she said, “By the way, I’ve heard that Big Brother is good.” I had been sniffing around that book for a while myself, and Charlena’s book recommendations are reliable, so I ordered it up post haste!

Big Brother: A Novel by another one of those female writers with a male name, Lionel Shriver (pictured), is a story within a story, within a story and they’re all good. 

First, you have the story of Pandora and her husband and his two kids, a teen boy and a pre-teen girl from a previous marriage, and their strained family dynamics. This story, along with Shriver’s exceptional way with words would have been enough to lure me page-to-page.

Pandora has achieved some fame for inventing “Baby Monotonous,” custom-made dolls that look like, and when you pull the string in their back, talk like, whoever the purchaser specifies, repeating the phrases that characterize the person the doll portrays.

I found this piece of the book singularly titillating, making me wonder what phrases I would include if I did a doll, let’s say, of my husband. Maybe his doll would say, “It’s not in here,” because he can never find anything, or “Shit, that’s hot!” because he can’t seem to remember that pots on the stove are hot. It also made me wonder what my doll would say. 

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink

Two things I learned from this book:

When nature turns on us, no amount of preparedness is enough.

When you lose air conditioning in a warm climate, civility goes out the window.

Five Days at Memorial is exactly that. It is about five days at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans, prior to, during and after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. This is a very sad story and a wake-up call for anyone who thinks they’d be okay in a storm of that magnitude. The answer is, no, you probably won’t. Why? Because as I said above, no matter how much hospitals practice emergency procedures, no matter how well-prepared the National Guard is, no matter how many times the Red Cross has served at natural disasters, each disaster presents a unique scenario for which there is no procedure.

At first it seems that Memorial Hospital is the place to be in a hurricane. Nurses and doctors bring in their families and pets and picnic baskets to “wait it out” in safety. They’d done it before. No big deal. But Katrina had other plans. 

The water soon got so high that the generators, illogically installed in the hospital basement, went out, and the hospital was without light, without air conditioning (imagine New Orleans in August without AC), without ventilators pumping oxygen into critically ill patients, without elevators in an eight-story building, without flushing commodes, and without drinking water.

(Photo is of Memorial Hospital during the flood)

When people started dying, they were moved into the chapel, and the heat spread the smell of decaying bodies throughout the hospital. When rescue helicopters tried to land on the top floor of the adjacent parking garage to rescue people from the hospital, there wasn’t a reasonable way to get the patients from the hospital to the helicopters. 

No one was in charge, and no one was communicating effectively from the outside to coordinate rescues. Every rescue effort was horribly overwhelmed and evacuations were needed all over the city. Families had no idea of the fate of their loved ones because there simply was no communication. People were asked to bring their boats to rescue people, but then they had to stop because of snipers and looters.

The protocol for evacuation was that the sickest went last, a policy that seemed both horribly right and wrong to me. Pets were euthanized because the rescue helicopters wouldn't transport animals. And then, one of the doctors makes the decision to euthanize eight patients she deems too ill to move, and one too overweight to move.

100 Things I Want to Tell My Children and Grandchildren: #3

Relationships go through phases, so just relax.

The issue of relationship phases came up last night as I was enjoying dinner and wine with my hubby of 23 years, Mr. Crouse-y-poo. We were discussing how glad we were that we’d weathered some tough times in our marriage to get to where we are, and it occurred to me that a little insight into  “relationship phases”  was something that might be of value to my kids and grandkids.

If over fifty years and multiple love relationships teach you anything, it teaches you that everything about relationships is temporary. Contrary to traditional wisdom, which tells us that relationships are all about permanence, temporary-ness is not a bad thing. You’ve heard of the five phases of grief, well, relationships have five phases too: sex, fear, anger, resolution and comfort.

In the early phases of most “love” relationships it is all about sex, and that rocks. But at some point, just like a new toy it may lose some of its luster and/or be taken for granted. If you are truly committed, you’ll be satisfied to explore the relationship and find new ways to keep it exciting and interesting. 

The thing about sex and relationships, and it took me years to learn this, is that they are almost entirely about how you feel about yourself. If you don’t feel good about yourself, you will feel insecure, which causes fear. This fear compounded by the stress of money, work and kids, will eventually, and pretty much unavoidably, lead to the third phase of relationships, anger. This is often where divorce or counseling happens.

There is an old adage, “If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.” Which, when you are in the middle of it, seems impossibly unbearable. It is here at this critical crossroad you find out how smart you are. If you can be still long enough to figure it out, you have reached the next phase, resolution. Some might call this stage compromise, but as I often tell my children, being right feels good for 15 minutes. If you’re still miserable after those 15 minutes, what have you really accomplished? A good bit of compromise/resolution in relationships is about accepting who you are and accepting who your partner is.

So here we are at a point past the sex, fear, anger and resolution – which may be 10-20 years into the marriage – and you’ve arrived at comfort, which is strangely similar to the sex phase, in that it is just fun. You may still have rows, but when you wake up the next morning, you let it go. 

Long story short, relationships go through phases, so just relax.

Cluster Critiques

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown

I cried at the end of this book. Not because it was sad, but rather because I didn’t want the book to end. I’d already purchased it, along with four others, but when my BFF described it as “endearing,” I put down what I was reading at the time and picked up The Boys In The Boat and I am glad  I did.

The Boys in the Boat is about nine young men at the University of Washington who overcame numerous odds to ruin Adolf Hitler’s day by winning the Gold metal in eight-oar rowing at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. These sons of loggers, shipyard workers and farmers took on and defeated the sons of bankers and senators rowing for elite eastern universities, and those of British aristocrats rowing for Oxford and Cambridge, to stun the Aryan sons of the Nazi state.

“Against the grim backdrop of the Great Depression, they reminded Americans of what can be done when everyone quite literally pulls together. And they provided hope that the ruthless might of the Nazis would not prevail over American grit, determination, and optimism.” - Daniel James Brown (pictured)

Described as “Chariots of Fire, with oars”, and compared to Unbroken and Seabiscuit, I predict that The Boys in the Boat will end 2013 as one of the top five books of the year. 

Not only is the story endearing, I also I found the athleticism of rowing surprising and fascinating. Physiologists calculate that rowing a two-thousand meter race takes the same toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back, in about six minutes. At top speed, the crew are rowing up to 46 stokes per minute – nearly one stroke per second. “It’s not a question of whether you will hurt, or of how much you will hurt; it’s a question of what you will do, and how well you will do it, while pain has her wanton way with you.” - Daniel James Brown 

One of the stories within the story that made me want more was that of George Yeoman Pocock, the British builder of the boat of choice of all the top-rated rowing teams, and whose enchanting quotes began each chapter. For example: “Harmony, balance, rhythm.  There you have it.  That’s what life is all about.” - George Yeoman Pocock 

Read The Boys in the Boat. 

Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld

 

I don’t know if Sisterland author Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld goes by Curtis because she, like many female writers, felt she would be given more credit as a man, but in any case she is in good company with some other famous gals who adopted male pen names, including Joanne Rowling (J.K. Rowling – Harry Potter), Emily Brontë (Currer Bell - Jane Eyre), Alice Blixen (Isak Dinesen – Out of Africa), Louisa May Alcott (A.M. Barnard – Little Women), and Nelle Harper Lee (Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird).

In Sisterland, Sittenfeld (pictured) gives us identical twin sisters, Daisy and Violet Shramm who have almost nothing in common other than their on-again off-again psychic powers. Vi, the eccentric, milks her “gift” eventually nabbing a spot on the Today Show when it gets out that she has predicted a massive earthquake in the St. Louis area. Daisy, who has changed her name to Kate in an attempt to escape her “psychic” persona, just wants to be a good mother and wife. In fact, it seems they’ve dedicated their lives to being as unlike each other as possible.

In the end, the story of what happens really doesn’t matter because that is not what makes Sisterland worth the read. It is the emotional geography shared by Daisy/Kate and Violet - “sisterland” if you will. Sisters don’t have to be identical twins or psychics to read each other’s minds, and it is this territory in which Sittenfeld soars. The dialogue and dynamics between these sisters rings genuine, and that is what makes the meaningless story of Sisterland meaningful.

Is there an earthquake in St. Louse? Yes, of sorts. Read it if you want to find out, but go into it knowing it’s about sisterhood, not predicting disaster.

Political Potential by Dean Lofton

Dean Lofton’s (pictured) Aug. 25, 2013 post

Dean's List - Let's get smarter - A writer's rambling blog

The call for a Citizens’ Filibuster to testify against appalling legislation moved me out of a decade of political apathy. My work as a women’s political group founder and feminist journalist in South Carolina left me burned out on political action, and since arriving in Austin six years ago I’ve been hesitant to put down roots in another politically repressive state. I’m an independent voter and not a member of any of the organizations who did an amazing job mobilizing the masses to testify and protest.

I spent about 35 hours over three days observing the Texas legislature’s first special session. I was still there in the early morning hours when Cecile Richards stood in the packed-to-capacity capitol dome and read Senator Wendy Davis’ text relaying that SB5 had been defeated. And as I sang “The Eyes of Texas” for the first time in my life with over 1,000 of my new best friends, I knew I was a Texan and I was home.

I also knew the citizens made a difference just by showing up. While it seemed like a short-lived victory, the community building, organizing and inspiration will last far beyond this one issue or bill. It sounds cheesy, but it restored my faith in humanity to see people show up, speak up and rise up. I loved the visible expressions of resolve and commitment on citizen’s faces as they settled into their seats in the galleries with books, knitting, laptops and phones and filled the hallways waiting in line. The group dynamics were a mix of rage at having to address this issue again, and joy at seeing the increasing numbers of protesters grow throughout each day.

There was an intense sense of immediate emotional connection with the massive crowd of mostly strangers – each with their own stories and reasons this moment was their call to action. I’ve tried to describe the silent acknowledgment as our eyes met in the galleries and hallways, but words don’t seem big enough to hold it. The photos, videos and press coverage come close to conveying it, but there’s something more. There was a sense of awe and hope for the future and wondering – if we can do this… imagine what else we can do. The hours of silence in the galleries and the roaring voices of the people were full of the potential for real change.

Write Your Life as a Woman - Sunday, September 22 – 1-5 pm

The Writing Barn

10202 Wommack Road

Class fee: $100

Class size limited to 15

Register here

Share the Facebook event invitation

Join a gathering of women for a grounding and inspiring afternoon writing retreat. Experience the radical self-care of putting away all electronics, turning off your phone and turning on your creativity.

In the style of journal writing workshops, participants write by hand – pen on paper –  in response to writing prompts and class content. With a focus on the process and experience of writing, there is no critiquing – only gentle encouragement in anon-academic, creative environment. No writing experience is necessary.

What happens in class…

• Escape all things digital – write by hand with pen or pencil on paper. Old school. No laptops, iPads or phones allowed. Phones are turned completely off and stored securely in another room.
• Write and read out loud in class. However, you can always “pass” and no one will mind a bit. (Bullies do not take this class. Only really nice people take this class.)
• Even if you don’t like to write, don’t worry… words will be spilling out of you right away… it’s magical.
• Guaranteed good for the head and heart. 

Head West

100 Things I Want to Tell My Children and Grandchildren: #2

Fun is not a thing. It is a place in your mind. 

(Yes, that's me in my feral youth - about 6 years old.)

When I was very young I only cared about the next fun thing I was going to do, until those unwelcome moments when my body trumped my mind, forcing me to eat or collapse into a bottomless sleep. But around the time I entered the age of double digits, I began to wonder what life was like for mom and dad when they were kids.  So, to my children and grandchildren, here is a story of what my life was like when I was a kid.

If you asked me what my life was like before the age of five, my response would be more supposition than fact, speckled here and there with truths captured more accurately on photograph paper than on my mind.  By the time I popped uninvited into the family, mom was 40 and dad was 60 and they had four other kids. I asked my mom how she could have become pregnant at that age and she replied that “back then” birth control was more of an art than a science and “those things happened.”

Even as a 10-year-old I found it remotely peculiar that my elder sister Gloria had kids older than me. Nowhere in Dick and Jane or the Bible, my two major sources of information at that time since TV hadn’t arrived in our neck of the woods yet, did I see a family that looked quite like ours. Family photos from that era look like scenes from a daycare – lots of babies, toddlers and young kids, and a scattering of young adults. Gloria’s five kids, middle sister Dot’s two, and youngest sister Honey’s four. My brother J. S., dad’s namesake and my only male sibling, was 12 when I was born, so he understandably appears in my childhood photos as a surly teen.

We were living in Iraan, TX, where I believe Mom and Dad and the balance of the family had lived for the previous 20 years or so. Dad, feeding off the growing West Texas oil boom spurred by World War II, had a seemingly lucrative construction business, building roads, bridges, well sites, etc. Our property, a quarter of a city block a couple of blocks off the center of town, consisted of a three-bedroom flat board house with a screened-in front porch and an unfenced front and back yard, a large service garage, a small office, a grease rack, and a large equipment yard filled with bulldozers, maintainers and dump trucks. There was no end to the intriguing and dangerous things I could get into without ever even leaving our property.

I can’t imagine that Mom and Dad didn’t tell me not to go out into the equipment yard because I could get run over, and not to play in the service garage because it was full of dangerous things. But I don't recall that they did and those places, accompanied by my very vivid imagination, were my playground. Being the fifth of five kids to parents anesthetized by time and experience had its advantages. Most days along with a varying assortment of neighborhood kids (in a town of 1,200 people, every kid is a neighborhood kid) I would play “war” or hide and seek, or act out life dramas around the construction yard. 

Cluster Critiques

Joyland by Stephen King

Every now and again Stephen King writes a really good book. Joyland, his most recent, isn’t one of those.

The setting is ripe, a carnival and all of the attendant carny creepiness. And, of course, King occasionally drops in a showstopper sentence, like:

“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction,”

and 

“When you're twenty-one, life is a road map. It's only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect that you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you entirely sure. By the time you're sixty, take it from me, you're fucking lost.” 

Set in North Carolina in 1972, Joyland is a murder come ghost come coming of age story, none the telling of which stir the heart, or give goose bumps, which is disappointing because Lord knows King can. But the problem with Joyland, and the reason that I recommend you skip this barely passable paperback, is the characters are characterless. Even the villain isn’t villainous.

It will be interesting to see what King does with his next book, the sequel to The Shining, Dr. Sleep. Redrum Redrum!

Wool by Hugh Howey

We (the public) seem to never tire of post-apocalyptic sci-fi, as if we keep reading about it, it won’t actually happen. When I bought Wool I didn’t buy it because it was sci-fi, I bought it because it came so highly recommended. Of course what I've learned, as the result of many disappointing sci-fi reading experiences, is that sci-fi aficionados read through a different lens than us amateurs.

Actually the story wasn’t bad, and the concept was quite intriguing. A thousand or so people have lived in an abandoned missile silo for so long that no one remembers when they didn’t live there. Earth’s environment is toxic and all that visibly remains are the ruins of skyscrapers in the distant horizon. This miniature of earth struggles with the same issues as always, power, class distinction, law, etc., which eventually result in “ranging against the machine.” The major difference being that it all happens with a 15-story silo. I thought the following description of the story from Emily Ding on the Litro website was good:

This is the story of mankind clawing for survival, of mankind on the edge. The world outside has grown unkind, the view of it limited, talk of it forbidden. But there are always those who hope, who dream. These are the dangerous people, the residents who infect others with their optimism. Their punishment is simple. They are given the very thing they profess to want: They are allowed outside.

To tell you much more would be a spoiler so I’ll just say that Wool isn’t perfect, but it is a better than average sci-fi thriller.

Me Before You by JoJo Moyes

I didn’t want to like this book, and I was almost successful. Me Before You started out feeling like a mystery, swerved dangerously towards feeling like a romance novel, and then pulled up just in time to provide a very satisfying ending, a feature that is inexplicably rare in best sellers.

Louisa Clark, a nobody very satisfied to live a nothing life in the suburbs of London for the rest of her life, stumbles over chance and ends up the caregiver to a James Bond-type used-to-be, now paraplegic and really pissed about it, Will Taylor. Over time these two halves make a whole and we enjoy the ride. 

Moyes’ writing is simple, subtle and flows easily over you. The well-paced story keeps you headed in a direction you’re not sure of but sure you want to follow. Read Me Before You before you read anything else.

Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss

OK, OK. I confess. I like true crime, which is a bit of a misnomer because when a true crime book is really good, you’re never entirely sure what is true and what isn’t. Fatal Vision is the nearly endless (945 pages) and relentlessly compelling (I finished it) story of Dr. Jeffery McDonald. He is a Princeton-educated, Green Beret, too nice and too good-looking guy, who over the period of nine years was suspected of, and eventually convicted of, killing his wife and five and two year-old daughters in an extremely macabre and bloody manner. The aspect of the book that made it most interesting to me is that much of it is verbatim-recordings made by the author, McGinniss.

Being the narcissist that he is, McDonald actually hired McGinness to live with him and record everything so that the two of them could publish a book about the murders, investigation and trial following McDonald’s vindication and release.

Well, it didn’t turn out that way, as McDonald was finally convicted and eventually sent to prison for life. McDonald, a very charming and popular guy, to this day has thousands of people claiming his innocence, him being one of them. He still says a bunch of drug-crazed hippies did it.

There are two really scary things about this book, other than the brutal murders of course:

If you think he is guilty, and I do, it is scary how close he came to getting away with it, and it is scary to know that he is being held in a “minimum security” prison in Bastrop, Texas, just 45 minutes from my house.

If you think he is innocent, it is scary because he will spend the rest of his life in prison because he couldn’t prove his innocence.

If you like true crime, you will love this book, and you might just like it even if you don’t.

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

At first, the title of this book turned me away. Just as after September 11, 2001, the word “tower” had new meaning, so too does the word “wave” mean something quite different after December 26, 2004.  That was the day that the world as Sonali Deraniyagala knew it ended.  In a matter of seconds she lost her mother, father, husband and two young sons, swept away by the tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people, and nearly took her life as well. That kind of tragedy is too hard to face. I turn away not wanting to know that it could happen to anyone, to me, to you.

But I took a chance on Sonali Deraniyagala, and I am glad I did. With heartbreaking dignity and spare narrative, Deraniyagala made me feel, not sorrow nor pity, but rather extreme gratefulness. Not just grateful it didn’t happen to me, but also grateful for the way the author expresses her astonishment, loss, guilt, sorrow, hate, debasement, love, memories and so much more.

For example, when she grieves less for her parent than for her husband and children she thinks, “How hideous, that there should be a pecking order in my grief.”

Here’s another example. “I can only recover myself when I keep them near. If I distance myself from them, and their absence, I am fractured. I am left feeling I’ve blundered into a stranger’s life.” I recommend that you read Wave because it is a beautiful love story.

100 Things I Want to Tell My Children and Grandchildren: #1

If you work hard and excel you will reap rewards, the best of which are memories.

(Photo is of my kids and grandkids, taken 2011)

When I was growing up, and throughout my mom’s life, I asked her lots of questions about her and dad’s families, and about their early life together. I mostly asked Mom because my dad died when I was 12-years-old, about the time I became curious about my heritage.

Mom’s typical response to my inquisitions was, “Oh honey, that was so long ago. I don’t remember.” Occasionally, however, she would spontaneously lay a snippet of family history out like a jewel for me to ogle, like, “My grandmother owned the first car in the county.” Or “My Uncle Wells built a three-story house and claimed he could not die until he owned all the land he could see from the top floor. And he did.”

“They were French, you know,” she would add, as if that explained everything.

All my life I’ve clung to those rarefied and slim nuggets of my family’s history, like water in a wasteland of inconsequential days, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps I just want to know more about the genetic bolt of fabric from which I was cut. Perhaps knowing that information would tell me nothing. I do know the absence of my parents’ intimate history makes me feel like I’ve lost a piece of my own life’s puzzle. So whether my children and their children want to know my history, and the things I have learned in the process of making that history, or not, here it comes, via 100 Things I Want to Tell My Children and Grandchildren.

Wow! Where to start? Well, let’s just start with the first thing that comes to mind.

I had tea at the White House in 1990. The fact that this was the first thing that came to mind is probably a story within the story, but let’s not start there. Let’s start here. 

(photo is me in the Red Room at the White House)

When I was the executive director of Keep Texas Beautiful (KTB) we won a national prize that was awarded at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. I was seated on the front row next to a small riser and podium. When I sat down, dizzy with the sheer drama of being in the executive mansion, I noticed on the stage two small cards. One read “President Bush,” and the other said, “Mrs. Bush.” And I then realized for the first time that, one, they would be there, and, two, I would actually be sitting within five feet of them. I don’t care what your politics are, when you are in the presence of a president, you feel incredibly honored.

Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards by Jan Reid

Ann is what I call her, although I should properly address her as Governor Richards. But then everyone calls her Ann, as if she were a close friend, a sister, a neighbor, still alive. 

We all read books through the veil of our own experiences. As I read Jan Reid’s absorbing book Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards, there was a parallel story running through my head. Where I was when Ann did this. The words I said to Mark McKinnon when that happened in the book. My shouting match with Lena Guerrero behind closed doors on a certain day in the book.

Yes, my position as the President of the Texas Women’s Political Caucus during Ann’s successful run for Governor of Texas was fortuitous. But this is a book review, and my stories about my relationship with Ann, and some of the other characters in her life-drama are for another day.

Jan Reid (pictured), longtime writer for Texas Monthly, begins with Ann’s youth in Waco, Texas, and ends with her tombstone in the Texas State Cemetery. In between he provides an entertaining look at how Ann goes from the high school debate team, to marriage and motherhood, recovering alcoholic, county commissioner, governor and icon.

 Many of the details in Reid’s book are repeats to anyone who has read Ann’s two books, Straight from the Heart and I'm Not Slowing Down. But what I did find very satisfying about Let the People In were the details about Ann’s gubernatorial administration; what she accomplished, what she didn’t accomplish; and why. The players, the disasters, the almost constant drama behind closed doors kept me awake and reading even though I already knew they were coming and the outcomes, which is a tribute to Reid’s writing.

Of particular interest to me was Ann’s relationship with Bob Bullock, the bulldog Lieutenant Governor. One minute they were close as kittens, the next they were fighting like brother and sister. Anther relationship struggle I was unaware of was between Ann and humorist, Molly Ivins. In fact, according to Reid, Ann had the capacity to irritate, antagonize and occasionally tear people apart. Some of the comments he gleaned from Ann’s staff were cautious, but clearly not complementary. And I did pick up a few tidbits I probably should have known, but didn’t. Like the fact that Ann managed Sarah Weddington’s successful Legislative bid in 1972.