BEING TEXAN: AND BEING OTHER THINGS, TOO

 

At lunch, I went to The local greasy spoon to eat. I had in-hand the new book Texas: An American History at my table. The waitress on-duty at the time I believe is a Marlborough native, and she was talking to some townies there in the familiar way that folk who've lived in one place their whole lives do. When folks do, I try to imagine what it's like to live in one place for all your life, or even most of it. (I really have no clue!)

When I tell people I'm a Texan, I feel a little weird about it, because we only lived there for eight years. I'm not a native. I was born in Missouri. But I identify strongly to the state, and I feel my time living there has shaped me indelibly. Hell, I pretty much spent my whole childhood there. But I still feel weird making the claim.

However, I did do a little math at lunch. What percentage of my life did I spend in each place? I turn sixty in two weeks, so I took that as my benchmark. Here's what I came up with, from high to low:

Wisconsin 23%
Indiana 23%
Massachusetts 18%
New York 17%
Texas 13%
Mississippi 7%
Illinois 3%
Missouri 1%

Wisconsin: Check. I can see that in how it shaped my view on the world. We lived there throughout my adolescence and early adulthood.
Indiana: Hmmm. Don't identify as a Hoosier at all, and don't see it shaping me at all. Went to Valparaiso University for two years and started my library career at the St. Joseph County Public Library. But no. (And yes, I do know Pete Buttigieg, albeit in passing). Probably retire there -- hopefully in either Bloomington or Indy.
Texas: Double-Check. Everything weird or idiosyncratic about me seems to come from my being Texan. My dialect, which is faint but detectable by those with trained ears for Southern accents. We lived in both Sweetwater and Seguin, Texas.
Massachusetts: I'd like to think so. But really, it's pretty late in life for me to be much influenced by it, though. My second and third library gigs are here.
New York: Definitely. Where I learned to shed my Midwestern and Southern reticence and learned to be assertive. Also my rate of speech sped up by 25-50% faster.
Mississippi: Not a chance. Just too young to retain anything about it. Only some really faint childhood memories that have nothing to do with it anyway.
Illinois: Naw. Just passing through for graduate school at Northern Illinois University.
Missouri: Not a chance. Born there, baptized in Mississippi. No memory of it.

An interesting exercise. The percentages may not add up exactly mathematically, between there being some overlap and the effect of rounding things up. But I now have more confidence in the answer I give when people ask me: Texas Wisconsin New York. And doubling down on Texas when folks insist I choose one. Not so much numerically, but in absolute terms. But up there and in terms of my character formation and personal habits, being there at the easily the most important time in my life.

Postscript. Another interesting mathematical fact about my moving around. I have lived in 16% of the US states. Nearly 17% of the Continental US.