Fun With Texans

When I was in the Air Force I got to know a guy from Texas. His name was Jimmy Lee Davis. And Jimmy Lee was caught up in the "everything is bigger and better in Texas" thing. They had faster horses, faster cars, bigger steaks, stronger men who could drink more, they had more beautifullerer womenses (Jimmy Lee talked kind of funny, sometimes), taller buildings, deeper oil wells and bigger ranches.

It was a compulsion with him. No matter what you were talking about - he had to do you one better, Texas style. But as annoying as this habit was, you couldn't help but like Jimmy Lee. He was about 6'2" (average height for a Texan - tall for the rest of the country), muscular, had sandy brown hair that was slightly mussed all of the time, blue eyes set in a nest of creases from sun squinting, a gentle kind of laugh and he was polite. So polite, in fact, that you could never grab hold of a good argument with him and give it a solid yank; if you know what I mean. He would just bow his head a little, give you that lopsided,"aw shucks" grin, and you couldn't stay mad at him. This didn't mean that he didn't still frustrate us. He did. Or that we were impotent against him. We weren't. We just had to pick our moments.

So one day we were sitting at the Enlisted Men's Club, having a few beers and shooting the breeze when we had the following conversation:

I was telling Jimmy Lee about a farm my step-grandfather owned. He would plant corn or some other cash crop and then there'd be a smaller garden that grandma would supply the table from and used the extra to "can" and "put up" for the winter. They had a few ponies and some goats and pigs, a couple of milk cows and a bunch of chickens. But the thing I remember best, and loved the most, was that the farm was nestled in a valley and that the hills and the woods on either side belonged to grandfather, too. It was paradise for a kid growing up.

At this point, Jimmy Lee leaned forward and said, "Well that's NOTHING! Back home in Texas, I could walk off my Daddy's front porch, get into my pick-up truck and I could drive for FOUR DAYS in a straight line and I'd STILL be on my Daddy's property!"

I sat back, examined my finger nails, looked up and said, "Don't worry about it, Jimmy Lee, I used to have a truck like that myself."