texas – no power in the 'verse

things i ate in texas that i loved

January 14, 2013 By salempearce Leave a Comment

migas from Goode Company Taqueria; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

When I go back to Texas, which I am usually able to do about three times a year, I have two priorities: seeing my family (parents; brother, sister-in-law, and nephew; cousin and her husband; aunt and uncle; and grandmother) and eating Tex-Mex — which is often just called “Mexican food” by locals. Inspired by Mexican food, Tex-Mex is actually not Mexican food proper but its own type of cuisine.

I haven’t lived in Texas in more than 10 years, and there is no good Tex-Mex anywhere on the East Coast — and anyone who says differently is (a) wrong or (b) selling something. Even the restaurants that look promising aren’t: When my husband and I first arrived in Boston, we found a Tex-Mex joint run by a man from Houston: It was awful.

butter crunch blue bell ice cream; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

So when I’m in Texas, I make my family eat Tex-Mex at just about every meal. During my most successful trip, I managed to eat at Pappasito’s, Chuy’s, Ninfa’s, Lupe’s, Berryhill, and Goode Company Taqueria (my favorites). My New Jersey-native husband usually cries uncle after about two days, and of course my own family doesn’t normally eat that much. (They often refrain for a few weeks before I arrive to prepare themselves.) I’m like a Tex-Mex chipmunk: I have to store it all away until my next visit.

frozen margarita with salt from Pappasito’s; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

My favorite breakfast is migas (without chorizo) from Goode Company Taqueria (above), which come with refried beans, rice, and flour tortillas. I ate them three times last week. The breakfast menu is extensive, and I’m told other items on the menu are also great. On our last day my husband got huevos con napolitos (eggs with cactus), a favorite of my brother’s. This trip my mom did manage to convince me one morning to try breakfast tacos from Maria’s Tacos near their house in the Heights: They were indeed excellent.

shipley’s chocolate iced nut and cinnamon sugar do-nuts; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

For dinners, we did Chuy’s and Ninfa’s on Navigation, at the latter of which we saw a family whose daughters went to school with me and my brother. The oldest daughter also lives in Boston with her husband and two daughters and during her visit was also doing the Tex-Mex tour of Houston. (See, I’m not the only one!) And I had Pappasito’s at Hobby airport on the way out of town.

This trip I also managed to work in a few non-Tex-Mex local Texas food. One afternoon we got stuck in some traffic on what should have been a quick detour to get a doughnut at Shipley; my husband griped that it had better be worth it — and he later confirmed that it was. I ate Blue Bell (new-to-me flavor Butter Crunch) in Brenham, Texas, the home of the Texas-made ice cream. My parents and brother and sister-in-law and I drove there one day to meet my aunt, uncle, and grandmother, since the town is about halfway between Houston and Austin, where the latter live. We ate lunch at the Brenham institution Must Be Heaven, known for its homemade pies (I had a slice of the peach praline).

Now we’re back in Boston, and my husband has declared that he needs to fast for the next five days to make up for the excess of Texas. I, on the other hand, could eat more Tex-Mex.

Filed Under: travel Tagged With: doughnuts, food, ice cream, margaritas, migas, tex mex, texas

let the people in

January 12, 2013 By salempearce 2 Comments

When asked what she would have done differently if she’d known she was to be only a one-term governor, Ann Richards grinned and said, “I would probably have raised more hell.”

While I was at the ashram, I read Jan Reid’s Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards. I laughed with delight at the introductory chapter, and I cried with despair at the ending — at both endings. There was the end of her rather short political career in 1994, and then there was her death in 2006 from cancer.

My introduction to this bawdy, loud, wonderful lady was during her second and failed race for governor. As I wrote for my introduction when I was asked to speak during the feminist fishbowl, “Salem has identified as a feminist since 1994, when as an impressionable 16-year-old she watched Ann Richards lose her re-election bid for governor of Texas to one George W. Bush.” I remember feeling like the world was going to end that fall — and then being sure of it six years later in the fall of 2000. But here we all are.

And thank goodness for that, because the world that I live in is one that Ann Richards helped to create. As Reid notes,

Her greatest accomplishment was to bring to positions of responsibility and power in Texas the women, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, gay men, lesbians, and disabled persons who had been so long denied. Because of that, state government centered in Austin will never be the same. Whatever party wins the elections and controls the appointed boards that keep the bureaucratic agencies and institutions of higher education running, democracy in Texas is better because she won.

Ann Richards was born near Waco, Texas, at the end of 1933, and she was almost immediately ill suited to her time. She was a wife (to David Richards), mother (to Cecile, Daniel, Clark, and Ellen), and teacher because that’s what women did; she was honest even in her lifetime about how those roles made her just about go out of her mind with boredom. Even when she served as chief of staff for Sarah Weddington (before the latter went to D.C. to argue Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court), Richards had to negotiate a special arrangement with her boss to leave work early be able to cook dinner for her family. On the one hand, we should all be able to so organize our lives to spend more time with our families. On the other hand, of course Richards’ demanding job did not excuse her from her unpaid work, as it did her husband. Indeed, even as she began to field requests for appearances all over the country, Richards answered a phone call from Midge Costanza, the highest ranking woman in the Carter administration, with the breezy, “Hi, Midge, what do you want? I’m cooking David’s supper.”

ann richards at the 1988 democratic national convention

Richards rose through Texas politics as a campaign volunteer, political staffer, county commissioner, state treasurer, and then governor. (Her career is a good reminder that it wasn’t so long ago that Texas was not the monolithically Republican state that it’s now considered to be.) Her spunk brought her to the attention of the national scene even when she was just a local politician, but she became a star during the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, where she gave the keynote address. She “talked Texas” and delivered the now well-known zinger about the Republic presidential candidate: “Poor George, he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

In 1990, Richards’s first race for governor, against millionaire businessman and good ole boy Claytie Williams, is one of the most amusingly horrifying tales in Texas history — and is chronicled brilliantly in Molly Ivins’ book Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, a collection of the columnist’s political coverage, from which Reid draws liberally (no pun intended). Richards became the first female governor of Texas since 1924, when the wife of a former governor was elected. (They are still the only two women to have held that office.)

As Reid tells it, Richards tried to do too much: Her inauguration speech included 15 massive projects as top priorities. She made progressive headway in many, but ultimately, she would preside over the largest expansion of the criminal justice system in the country, doubling the number of incarcerated persons in Texas. In so doing, she did pioneer a revolutionary model of drug and alcohol treatment for non-violent offenders (she herself was a recovering alcoholic and drug user). And in her defense, she inherited a state prison crisis that had been broiling since the early 1970s, when an inmate brought a federal case against the state for violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Adding pressure to the impetus for change were several high profile killings, most notably the Luby’s massacre in Killeen in 1991 and the siege on the Branch Davidians in Waco in 1993. But the number of executions on her watch reached 48, and her only acts of clemency in four years were two 30-day stays. It is an indelible stain on her legacy that by the year 2000, Texas had the largest prison population of any Western democracy.

The book suffered slightly, not from its subject, but from its writing, which swung between not enough repetition and too much. The text was full of awkward segues that didn’t properly introduce new characters, and recurring characters were not given enough context to remind the reader of his or her significance. But as the author touched on a subject and later returned to it, entire passages (as for example, on the history of prison reform in Texas) would be repeated almost verbatim.

But Reid was a friend of Richards (and his wife was in her employ for more than a decade). The reader can’t help but feel his affection for her. Oddly enough, he refers to her as “Ann” throughout; it’s hard to tell whether this is simply familiarity, but it is certainly not customary in biography.

It is indeed easy to root for Ann Richards, who said on her inauguration: “Today we have a vision of a Texas where opportunity knows no race, no gender, no color — a glimpse of what can happen in government if we simply open the doors and let the people in.”

Filed Under: books Tagged With: ann richards, drug war, feminism, politics, texas

fall . . . winter?

November 10, 2012 By salempearce Leave a Comment

fall leaves in jamaica plain; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

I began this post a mere two weeks ago, and it’s already somewhat obsolete. Superstorm Sandy and an early snowfall knocked leaves off of most trees, essentially putting an end to the visual signs of fall. It’s already to gotten warmer again this weekend, so it’s still not quite winter yet. But I wasn’t sure about that on Wednesday evening.

But first! My original post included the observation that life is different in New England. And it’s not just the crazy sports fans and crazier accents. The passing of time is more clearly reflected in nature. There are distinct seasons — although I’m speculating about two, having experienced only two so far. It felt like summer when we moved to Boston, and it’s felt like fall for the past few months. But it’s not just a feeling: it’s looked like the seasons, too: a lush green summer with clear blue skies gave way to a bright, warm palette in the trees.

This is different from my experience growing up in Texas, where the seasons were “hot” and “less hot.” Green slowly turned into brown, which later became green again. But I spent my childhood and early adulthood thinking that we were in some ways faking it. Halloween and Thanksgiving could generally only qualify as “bearable,” and I remember spending a fair number of Christmas afternoons reading on the porch of my grandparents’ house. Chain stores stocked fall and winter clothing as a matter of course, but how many wool sweaters does one need when the temperature never really dips below 45 degrees (and that only in the middle of the night)? With the exception of the appearance of bluebonnets in April on the side of the road between Houston and Austin, the passing of time is in the mind.

first snow at hebrew college; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

On Wednesday I woke up to a grey day with a forecast of heavy rain, but early in the afternoon it started snowing. By the time I left school at 9:00 p.m. (after working at the front desk), there were a couple of inches on the ground, and it was still coming down. First, after years in D.C. — which panics at even the prospect of flakes — I’ve never been surprised by snow before. More to the point, I’d never driven in snow before (since I grew up in Texas and only walked and took public transportation in D.C.). I made my way home slowly, feeling for the sidewalk from the parking lot to our townhouse under the blanket of powder. I kept thinking, “It’s the beginning of November.”

Compounding the already pronounced effects of the onset of winter was daylight savings time just a few days earlier. It’s now dark when I get home after class most days (which also means that I think it’s time to go to bed at 8:00 p.m.).

So it’s not quite winter yet, but it doesn’t look like fall anymore. But at least it’s not still 80 degrees, as it was in Houston today!

Filed Under: Boston Tagged With: snow, texas, weather

return

September 25, 2012 By salempearce 2 Comments

empty road sign; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

I opened the front passenger-side door and sat down, glancing at the three other people waiting for me in the car as I shut the door. He smiled at me: “You miss home. Not just your family. You must if you’re taking pictures of a sign by the side of an empty road.”

I felt the tears begin to form. “I do miss home. Sometimes so much I can’t allow myself to think about it.”

I’ve never been to this particular place before, but I instinctively feel it as familiar.

I’m at a rest stop in Ellinger, Texas, on Highway 71 between Austin and Houston. I stand at the edge of the small parking lot, on a curb that gives way to a shallow ditch that runs alongside that empty road that passes by green fields and that seems to end at the horizon a couple hundred feet away. Even in mid-September, the heat rises from the road in shimmery waves, the exhaust from cars on the highway and in the parking lot adding to the 90-degree air temperature.

The empty road dead ends into the highway, and across the intersection the arrows of two black-and-white signs, both with “71” inside an outline of the shape of Texas, point in opposite directions: north and south. A few abandoned tin-walled structures sit behind the wooden fence that separates highway from field.

Back on my side of the highway, three signs give the distances to the local Baptist, Lutheran, and Catholic churches, down the empty road that must become fuller past the horizon. Another sign advertises pecans for sale beyond the furthest church.

Peh-CANHS, I think. That’s how we say it here. Not PEE-cans, as they do elsewhere.

Walking across the empty road to take my photograph, I see an enormous white canvas that the church signs have obscured. “Romney-Ryan 2012” is backwards, since the logo faces the highway. I wonder whether it sits on public land at the same time that I know that few will care. This stretch of highway and this empty road is red.

Small white clouds only intermittently dot the expansive blue sky, which I always think seems bigger in Texas. Or was I just taught to think it so? Would I really recognize this landscape as Texas if the outline of the state were removed from the road sign?

I am a Texan, but I haven’t lived in Texas in 12 years. And there’s a chance that I might not again. When my nephew was born, the hospital gave his parents a discharge sheet congratulating them on “the birth of your new little Texan.” Will my children be so-called? What does it mean that he is a “Texan”? What does it mean that I am?

I love my family and Tex-Mex and Shiner Bock and Longhorn football and Astros baseball and bluebonnets and mesquite trees and the hill country and the car ride from Houston to Austin on a hot day.

I don’t love the death penalty and retrograde politics and homegrown presidential candidates and heat and humidity and traffic and suburban sprawl. I’ve become an East Coast urban Jew, like my husband, and so much of my former home has become an anathema to me. And perhaps I have become an anathema to it.

Molly Ivins said, “I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults.” She knows the mixed feelings that come with loyalty to a state that is often easy to deride as buffoonish. How can I be homesick and horrified at the same time?

In his memoir of his life under the ayatollah’s fatwa, Salman Rushdie writes about his and others’ dilemma as Indian writers but expats in the United Kingdom:

Who were they, and to what and whom did they belong? Or was the idea of belonging itself a trap, a cage from which they had been lucky enough to escape? He had concluded that the questions needed to be rephrased. The questions he knew how to answer were not about place or roots, but about love. Who do you love? What can you leave behind, and what do you need to hold on to? Where does your heart feel full?

He is surprised when a writer still living in India explains that his writing, that of a native son, is “highly problematic” in the country.

I claim Texas, but would Texas claim me?

As I fly back to Boston, it doesn’t feel like home. I like it, and I may one day grow to love it, as I did D.C. I think that home is Texas, and I always leave a part of me there. It’s a part that wouldn’t know what to do in Boston.

Rushdie calls this migrant consciousness. I moved because I couldn’t do what I want to do there. So I’m here now, and I am grateful and blessed. But the move required the construct of a new identity. You can’t ever go home again.

My parents have lived in Texas for more than 40 years. My grandparents were born and went to school in Texas – and moved back in retirement; my aunt and uncle did the same. My cousin moved to Madison after college for graduate school and then work and moved back several years later. My brother never left.

Re-entry into my “real life” has been very hard this time around. Enrollment in rabbinical school has amplified the differences between who I was and who I am. Will I ever feel whole in either place?

Filed Under: memories, travel Tagged With: conversion, family, texas