P i n k • F e m i n i s t

I vaguely remember visiting my grandparents' ranch in Granbury, Texas. This early memory is mixed in with another one of watching a tornado slither across the horizon on a stormy black-as-night afternoon sky in the Panhandle of Texas. I stood in the orange dirt yard, only 2 years old while my mother hurriedly pulled flapping wet laundry off the clothesline and threw it into a woven plastic hamper. That was what she did. When big things were happening, she usually worried about the small details, like laundry, meals and germs. It is my first and only memory of living in Lubbock a a child.

My grandparents lived just west and slightly south of Fort Worth off the big highway that runs from Fort Worth to Amarillo. May-Ma and Papa raised cattle and goats and chickens; it wasn't a large spread, but the land was pretty, rolling and green. He also had a cotton gin at one time that he repaired and got running, but that may have been earlier in his life, when he lived in Oklahoma.

About ten years after Papa sold the ranch, drillers found natural gas on the property. Since he was conservative and frugal by nature, at least as far as his own needs were concerned, he had kept the mineral rights. So he got a little extra income from the natural gas company. I think perhaps some of that was used as seed money which was invested by my father to put all nine of his grandchildren, including me, through college.

When my dad returned from WWII, he married my mom and finished school at Texas A&M. They moved to Houston and then again to Lubbock where he and his only brother Gene opened a lumber yard together. That lasted about two years, at which point my dad dissolved the partnership. My dad, a practical engineer, was not happy when he discovered that my uncle had taken their meager profits and invested in a racehorse without consulting him.

So we all moved to Dallas, where my mom had her fourth child in 6 years. My dad got a job working as an engineer at a company that built large skyscrapers and office complexes and we lived in a small house in a new air-conditioned subdivision that butted up to dairy farm.

We drove to Granbury for holidays until my grandparents sold the ranch and moved to Dallas. My grandfather was one of the founders of the Cotton Exchange and opened an office in the Exchange where he ginned a little coton. He didn't drink or play cards and he was known as a strict Baptist, and an honest businessman.

But this is a sory about my brother, who was a year and a half older than I was. I guess all families have their traits that range from pathology to quirkiness; my big family seemed to have an abundance.

My parents used to take us out to the ranch and let us play with the baby goats. Now baby goats like to play by butting heads to determine dominance and they were also nibblers who tried to eat your clothes. So my brother was put in the pen with the goats and pretty soon they were butting heads while the adults sat back and laughed. This was in the very early days of television, and I have since wondered if there as not much enertainment in thier lives, because I could not imagine doing this to my children. Maybe this was a rite of passage for my brother, a young boy's introduction into the world of men, where he learned that it was not going to be an easy world for the meek.

I remember my mother laughing lightly as she recalled the sight of him in his tiny corduroy overalls, making fingerstick horns on his head like a baby goat. Butting heads with baby goats seemed normal to me until I became old enough to realize that it was just weird.