On moving to Houston from parts more northerly, a fellow is liable to observe first that palm trees here are a commonplace, and it does seem that most anything photosynthetic will take and thrive under this sun and in this soil and with this moisture. I can't imagine that there's a more treed, flowered, and shrubbed jurisdiction on God's earth. And Houston's roaches are so very big, I almost think I ought to apply for a hunting license before squashing one.
Houstonians don't tan so much as roast. The sun can be a violent, angry thing at this latitude. I'm given to understand that Houston is hot or warm for something like ten months of the twelve, and I almost wonder if it only turns winterish at all in respectful observance of Christmas: 90-some-odd degrees on December the 25th would after all be an affront to Christmasness.
They claim Houston is the fourth most populous city in the Union anymore, and having been fairly terrorized by the big-city traffic and rents here, I'm disinclined to dispute them. It's no laggard for square mileage, come to that: I've been on the road for 25 minutes and imagined that we must've crossed city and county lines, then appealed to the map and discovered that we hadn't got out of our corner of Houston. There are entire states in New England and the Mid-Atlantic not so awfully bigger than Houston.
Anyone accustomed to the tic-tac-toe board that is the map of Tulsa, OK will observe that the streets of Houston were not plotted on a grid at right angles by some civil engineer, but run at all angles, and curve and swerve, and follow their own courses and logics and histories. Houston was after all founded in the 1830s, when a street still was something that just sort of happened, as people and goods moved from one point to another through features natural and manmade.
A Tulsan will observe also the unidirectionality of Houston's streets, and the great, mounded, gardened islands segregating their two sides, with their requisite U-turning. The grander of Houston's overpasses writhe and rise into the clouds like Jack's Beanstalk, and are formidable structures unto themselves, constituting miniature metropolises of columnar towers.
Work in Houston is done when it needs doing, even if that be on weekends or in the black of night, and road crews or paint contractors may be found on the job at all hours.
Church in Houston is a going concern, not a vanishing ancient rite practiced by scatterings of semi-fossilized stragglers.
I'm no foreigner to the American institution of the Walmart Supercenter, but until I came to Houston I never conceived of one with a wine aisle and a McDonald's in the parking lot, another at the entrance, and still another at the alternate entrance, for a grand total of three McDonald'ses within a matter of yards. Not to say I'm complaining.
Houston is so very rich, I'm reliably informed that a Third Worlder resident here declined a job offer of collecting litter and posting notices for $11.50 an hour, on account of it paid too poorly. Shiny late-model vehicles jam the streets and cram the parking lots, a towering metal-and-glass cupola which may or may not be a stylized representation of a pineapple embellishes a skyscraping new hospital, refrigerator ice-makers come standard-issue, and even the busted-up, dumpstered detritus are nice. I've never felt so poor.
I'm a fellow who's written lines like "Texas accounts for half the 'net new jobs' in all America for the year," and I've been preaching about economic systems and the fruit they bear since I was too young to be preaching about anything, and yet I have no capacity to process prosperity on this sort of scale. Houston and Texas are final proof that American decline is a policy, or the consequence of policy: if certain parts of this country were more Texan, there'd be no notion of American decline, and Churchill's "broad, sunlit uplands" would stretch before America today as in the three-and-a-half centuries 'til sometime in the late 1960s.
I may yet wind up singing "Take Me Back to Tulsa", but I'm privileged to be Gone to Texas.
Houstonians don't tan so much as roast. The sun can be a violent, angry thing at this latitude. I'm given to understand that Houston is hot or warm for something like ten months of the twelve, and I almost wonder if it only turns winterish at all in respectful observance of Christmas: 90-some-odd degrees on December the 25th would after all be an affront to Christmasness.
They claim Houston is the fourth most populous city in the Union anymore, and having been fairly terrorized by the big-city traffic and rents here, I'm disinclined to dispute them. It's no laggard for square mileage, come to that: I've been on the road for 25 minutes and imagined that we must've crossed city and county lines, then appealed to the map and discovered that we hadn't got out of our corner of Houston. There are entire states in New England and the Mid-Atlantic not so awfully bigger than Houston.
Anyone accustomed to the tic-tac-toe board that is the map of Tulsa, OK will observe that the streets of Houston were not plotted on a grid at right angles by some civil engineer, but run at all angles, and curve and swerve, and follow their own courses and logics and histories. Houston was after all founded in the 1830s, when a street still was something that just sort of happened, as people and goods moved from one point to another through features natural and manmade.
A Tulsan will observe also the unidirectionality of Houston's streets, and the great, mounded, gardened islands segregating their two sides, with their requisite U-turning. The grander of Houston's overpasses writhe and rise into the clouds like Jack's Beanstalk, and are formidable structures unto themselves, constituting miniature metropolises of columnar towers.
Work in Houston is done when it needs doing, even if that be on weekends or in the black of night, and road crews or paint contractors may be found on the job at all hours.
Church in Houston is a going concern, not a vanishing ancient rite practiced by scatterings of semi-fossilized stragglers.
I'm no foreigner to the American institution of the Walmart Supercenter, but until I came to Houston I never conceived of one with a wine aisle and a McDonald's in the parking lot, another at the entrance, and still another at the alternate entrance, for a grand total of three McDonald'ses within a matter of yards. Not to say I'm complaining.
Houston is so very rich, I'm reliably informed that a Third Worlder resident here declined a job offer of collecting litter and posting notices for $11.50 an hour, on account of it paid too poorly. Shiny late-model vehicles jam the streets and cram the parking lots, a towering metal-and-glass cupola which may or may not be a stylized representation of a pineapple embellishes a skyscraping new hospital, refrigerator ice-makers come standard-issue, and even the busted-up, dumpstered detritus are nice. I've never felt so poor.
I'm a fellow who's written lines like "Texas accounts for half the 'net new jobs' in all America for the year," and I've been preaching about economic systems and the fruit they bear since I was too young to be preaching about anything, and yet I have no capacity to process prosperity on this sort of scale. Houston and Texas are final proof that American decline is a policy, or the consequence of policy: if certain parts of this country were more Texan, there'd be no notion of American decline, and Churchill's "broad, sunlit uplands" would stretch before America today as in the three-and-a-half centuries 'til sometime in the late 1960s.
I may yet wind up singing "Take Me Back to Tulsa", but I'm privileged to be Gone to Texas.
