Feet in the Soil

On my recent road trip to the wilds of Oklahoma and Texas, I reunited with a high school friend I hadn’t seen in three and ahalf decades. In 1967-68 when I was a freshman and Richard a senior at Guymon High School, we were in band together. Band rehearsals, marching drills, and football games gave me the opportunity to develop an unrequited crush on him and for him to torment me with the glee of an older brother. Surprisingly, he invited me to his senior prom, to which I couldn’t go because of the rules of the whacko Nazarene Church I attended and the parents that made me attend. We did go to the ersatz alternative event the church put on. He moved to Amarillo right after his graduation, and I only saw him once more shortly before my own graduation.

Despite the intervening years, from the first hello we didn’t miss a beat, and the conversation flowed easily. Like me, Richard has lived all over the country since those times, with his residence now in New Mexico. We discovered commonalities that we had never known during our high school acquaintance, such as the fact that he and I had spent our earlier formative years in Stinnett and Borger, respectively, small towns in the Texas Panhandle that were only 12 miles apart. And that after high school and college, we had both lived in Amarillo at different times.

We made our Amarillo history tangible by driving around to the different places we’d each lived. There was the house for which Richard's parents had paid $7200 while he was still in high school in Guymon, and where they lived until his mother died. His father continued to live there until he could no longer care for himself. Not far from there was the first house Richard had purchased himself, for the tidy sum of $12,850.

Next on this slightly off-beat Tour of Homes was the shack on Arthur street where I had lived for $95/month, and even that was more than I could afford in 1975. It looked like it was about to fall down, but was nevertheless in better shape than when I had lived there. I felt a little melancholy as I related how hard those times were. I had just graduated from college so full of hope and sure a great job and enormous success were waiting for me. It didn’t work out quite that way, at least not for a long time. Not then, and not in Amarillo.

We drove by various duplexes Richard had occupied when he was in college. We talked about our friends, families, hopes, dreams, and a few of the disappointments back then. As we drove down Amarillo Boulevard, I was reminiscing about eating at Ding How’s Chinese Restaurant from the time I was a small child when my family would come to “The Big City” to shop. That was back in the day when eating at a Chinese restaurant was exotic stuff. At that moment we drove by Ding How’s. It was faded, ramshackle, and closed with weeds growing in the parking lot.

Maybe it sounds depressing, but that tour of our past lives in Amarillo was wonderful. Just being able to share that history is a big deal. How can you explain Guymon, Oklahoma or Amarillo, Borger, and Stinnett Texas to someone who doesn't have that red earth running through their veins? Let alone feel that someone with a vastly different background can understand the lives and pains and victories experienced there without the visceral knowledge of those areas? Even as I drove back to Wisconsin, my adopted homeland that I love like no other, I felt enveloped by that sharing of times and events that meant as much and went as deep as the roots of the Texas mesquite trees we grew up with.