Family Heirlooms

garlic drying in our garden shed in Louisiana

Years ago when we lived on 23+ acres of land in Georgia, I grew several heirloom tomatoes for the first time--Cherokee purple, green zebra, among others. The tomatoes were very colorful, and I managed to encourage my two kids into eating them as healthy snacks by slicing the tomatoes and arranging them in a colorful pattern on a white platter. I called the dish "tomato snacks," and the kids often asked for this dish as a midday, summer treat--another example of presentation being everything. 

The beautiful diversity of heirloom tomatoes is one reason to grow them, and I have been growing different heirlooms ever since. They are tastier than most hybrid tomatoes, and they are open-pollinated, so that you can save seed to plant the next year and have true-to-the original descendants of the parent plants. 

There are some possible drawbacks: some heirlooms seem to be more susceptible to various fungal or bacterial wilts or root rot. A couple of our plants this year have succumbed to such a disease. But even hybrids bred to be disease-resistant can have problems. The Better Boy tomatoes that we planted in our greenhouse here have tended to have blossom end rot, a dark, leathery spreading "sore" on the bottom of the tomatoes. The soil in the greenhouse includes chicken manure that accumulated in what was once a chicken house. Perhaps we didn't water the plants sufficiently at just the right time, or perhaps there was a calcium deficiency in the soil, or perhaps we planted those tomatoes too early. Not all the tomatoes from the Better Boy plants have developed blossom end rot, and other tomatoes in the greenhouse seem to be doing very well. But we are noting these problems for next year, as we rotate the tomatoes to other areas of the garden to reduce the chances of those diseases spreading further.

Heirloom vegetables are also interesting because the seeds have been passed down for generations and often have interesting origin stories attached to them. For example, the Mortgage Lifter tomato is said to have been bred by a guy who cross-pollinated five tomato varieties and saved the seed. He planted that seed and saved its progeny seed for several years until he had a stable descendant plant with the fruit qualities he desired in a tomato. He then sold the seed and made enough money at the time to pay off the mortage to his house. You can now buy Mortgage Lifter tomato seeds from seed catalogs. As this writer says, "Growing heirlooms is a direct link to our heritage, making a connection to generations of gardeners that came before us and extending the link to our children, grandchildren, and beyond." 

Tom standing among the heirloom tomatoes we grew in 2013, Louisiana

Over the years we have saved seed from season to season as well as planted the descendants of plants that our grandparents grew. I have lost count of such plants that we have left behind in our moves, still flourishing, I hope, in our absence. However, we have managed to bring along with us one vegetable that is the descendant of ones my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat and her mother before her grew: bunching onions. My dad has grown these onions for years, and we got our onion plants from him. 

Year after year, we grew these onions, eating what we wanted to eat and saving others for planting the following year. If we moved and were unable to salvage onion plants in the move, my dad always had plenty to give us for planting in our new garden. But then my dad and mom moved, and Dad thinks he may have lost his onions to too much rain and then drought in the garden he left behind. Fortunately, we managed to bring some of those family heirloom onions with us to Arizona, where they have flourished in our garden. So, this year, we may be giving back to my dad the heirlooms we first got from him and that he got from his mother and grandmother. 

Cassie watches as Tom transplants onions in our AZ garden, onions that are descendants of ones my dad, my grandmother and her mother planted in their gardens.

Our bunching onions were primed to grow in the winter in the South, and we didn't know how they would do at a much higher elevation and a much cooler climate. We kept some in pots in our sunroom over last winter, and only a few plants survived. However, the ones we planted in the garden last summer, right after we moved into this house, managed to survive winter temperatures in the single digits. Their growing clock reset, and they flourished this summer, as evidenced in the photos above and below, where only two or three bunches, pulled apart and transplanted singly, filled out two full rows.

Tom pulls apart bunching onions to transplant them.

When we pull the tomato plants out of the greenhouse, Tom plans to plant some onions there, as well, so that we can observe which ones do better, the ones exposed to the winter weather or the ones in a more sheltered space. (The greenhouse is not heated.)

Growing these heirloom onions that my grandmother grew connects me to a history of family gardening, not just vegetable gardening but flower gardening, as well. For years, I also grew purple globe amaranth flowers because they were among my grandmother's favorites. I always got seed from her...until her plants finally died out as she got too fragile to care for them, I moved once too often, and those seeds were lost forever. Now I have to order seeds from gardening catalogs, and they are not always easy to find.

Just like any family heirloom, heirloom vegetables connect us to the past and enrich the present.

In the Garden of My Memory

Years ago I created an art car on which I was inspired to paint and illustrate an original phrase that came to mind when I was thinking of my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat and all the women who have to re-create their worlds when war, natural disasters, bad relationships, stunted aspirations, or a myriad of disappointments change their lives: "Because she remembered her grandmother's garden, she planted her own. Flower by flower she remade the world." This is now a phrase I live by. Actually,  that idea directed my life--often literally--before I was aware of it, for in all the moves we've made to improve our circumstances, the one thing that has remained constant is the energy we put into creating a garden immediately when we've settled.

As I noted in this post of January 17, I set for myself several art, craft, gardening and writing goals for the year to see me through the presidential election and beyond. The stupidity of the election cycle can be so astounding that any thinking person keeping up with the news has to find a way to balance illusion and fantasy with reality, venality with generosity, amoralism with ethics. Work helps, but I am unemployed since I left my last job a year ago to move to the state where my husband had begun some months previous to my moving a more monetarily-rewarding job than I could acquire. So sustained gardening,  craft, and writing do that balancing act for me now.

One of my projects is the altered art journal that I described briefly in that January 17th post. I keep all the materials on an antique table in my study and work on the journal as I find the time from other projects and as inspiration strikes. It's the work of an amateur, but it gives me joy. The journal has become not just a record of 2012--rendered in paint, collage, poems, even sewing, embroidery, and crochet--but a memoir. The journal entry of this week focused on gardening, and I created two tiny, hand-stitched booklets to place in seed-packet pockets that I glued to the pages. In each booklet I wrote an essay about the flowers of my childhood and my gardening memories.

This is one of those essays, with minor editorial changes:

My earliest memories of gardening have almost disappeared into some inaccessible compartment of my brain, but I remember hoeing weeds in our garden in Old River, Texas. Mostly, however, I remember my father working in the garden. When I was very young, he had a couple of plow animals that he used to cultivate his garden, donkeys he called Jenny and Jack. I remember standing barefoot on our front porch, watching Daddy hitch up the plow and head the donkey on a straight run through the garden to create a row for planting. Sometimes the donkey didn't comply, and Daddy would begin to curse. This is where I first learned curse words though I didn't use them myself until I was much older.

I also remember gathering okra and eating the fresh, raw pods as I delivered a batch to the kitchen for cooking. Our household was a traditional one, and we girls did most of the housework while my brother, six years younger than I, did many of the outdoor chores when he was old enough to take them on. I would have much preferred hoeing in the garden, I think, to washing and folding clothes. One summer when I was a teen, I decided that the grass growing around the cement blocks under our house was unsightly. We didn't have a weed-eater, and there were places a lawn mower couldn't reach. I spent several days in the hot Texas sun hoeing that grass away from the house. It was work I initiated and thus work that I liked.

One of the funniest and yet not-so-funny experiences from my teenage years occurred one day when I was picking field peas with my grandmother Ruby Scott Benton. Grandma Benton was a short, fat woman; she was in her sixties at the time and suffering from ailments associated with her weight. She could not lift her feet very high off the ground, and when she tried to step over a row of peas, she fell flat on her back in the sandy soil. I was horrified, but Grandma started laughing, and then I did, too. She looked like a June bug waving its limbs around, trying to roll over to right itself. Grandma Benton was a very even-tempered woman, easily moved to laughter, and it was easy to be happy in her presence.

The first garden of my own was one my husband and I planted when we were students at Texas A&M University at College Station. We were living in married student housing, and the university owned some undeveloped land behind the apartments which the administration designated as a gardening area for married students living in university housing. In the spring, someone would disk the property and divide the land into small garden lots. Married students could choose a plot to garden. 

Tom and I worked very hard in that first garden. Tom would load up our Ford Ranger with free chicken manure from the Ag Center, and we added that manure to our garden to amend the soil. We also weeded assiduously. I remember getting down on my hands and knees to weed, trying to make that garden as weed-free as possible. We were rewarded with such beautiful plants and bountiful vegetables that our gardening neighbors began to comment on the lushness of our garden. Some of them assumed--and told us--that we had "lucked out" in getting the best gardening spot. So one year someone beat us in choosing that patch which we had amended with manure, and we got one of the least desirable plots on the edge of the disked land. I have a photo of myself in that garden that Tom took. I am standing near a row of corn as high as my head, smiling triumphantly. We had proven, if only to ourselves, that our dedication and hard work could turn a plot of land that no one else wanted into a productive garden. 

That might have been the year that someone stole all our vegetables, leaving behind the knife with which he had done the deed.

When Tom and I went to Nova Scotia last September to visit the land where my ancestor Abraham Dugas (Dugast) had lived in the 1600s, we learned how the Acadians had turned marshy land into productive farm land by building dykes to drain the land. They also farmed all up and down the Annapolis Valley and the shore along the Bay of Fundy. Google search "best farmland in Nova Scotia" today, and web pages will pop up describing Kings County, Nova Scotia, as having the best agricultural land in the province.

But perhaps the Acadians were too successful in their farming and gardening. They, too, lost their produce to a neighbor--the British government, which confiscated all their property and exported them to other British colonies. Stripped of their farmland wealth, the impoverished Acadians had to start over in foreign lands. Some made their way to Louisiana, carrying with them a love and skill of gardening. 

Perhaps my Acadian/Cajun genes explain in part my own love of gardening. And a natural disposition to be wary of those in power and those envious of the success--however slight--of others.

Sick of Politics

In mid-September, my husband and I left for a two-week vacation, with Nova Scotia as our end destination. It was a great trip, in which we saw fossils of ancient trees in the cliffs near Joggins and the Bay of Fundy, watched humpback whales and porpoises up close, drove foggy roads along the Bay of Fundy, hiked in the rain, and viewed the land that my original Acadian ancestor farmed. What would my life be like now, I wondered, if the British hadn't ethnically cleansed the Annapolis Valley and the shores of the Bay of Fundy of French Acadians? What if Abraham Dugas' grandsons had remained instead of finding refuge in the swamps of Louisiana and then, later, the marshes of Anahuac and the Old and Lost Rivers of southeast Texas (where "Dugas" became "Dugat")? What would it be like to be Canadian now instead of American?

During our trip, I tried to stay away from the internet and the nastiness of our political discourse, but then one morning, a Canadian asked us at breakfast a question about our politics, and soon other people at the bed and breakfast were voicing their opinions, especially an ex-patriate from West Texas who had married a Canadian. Our hosts, however, were visibly silent; they were trying to sell their bed and breakfast so that they could spend their winters in Florida and their summers in Nova Scotia, untroubled by testy customers who wanted better views.

I was sick of politics. I just wanted a better view, not from my window but from my heart, a better view of humanity. History was not the place to find it, however. Abraham Dugas had never been compensated for the land confiscated to build a fort at what was then known as Annapolis Royal; his grandchildren were deprived of their cattle, the farmland they had improved, and their homes were burned; his descendants were transported to British colonies where many had to beg and where their daughters were taken away to work in the big houses of Protestants, where their language and their Catholicism were scorned.

Just the politics of kings: the strong taking from the weak. But how is that different from today?

It was the greediness of Wall Street--of banks and CEOs of corporations and financiers and politicians-- that brought our economy and the economy of the world to the brink of disaster, yet corporations continue to profit while laying off workers, politicians continue to cut deals, the banks are bigger, the CEOs who led those bloated financial institutions are not in jail but making more money than ever. So that's not the smoke of burning homes in the distance or of people loaded into ships with only the belongings they can carry, but, really, how different is it?

Mitt Romney can run for the highest office in the land of a democratic republic and tell voters that foreclosures should just be allowed to run their course. So what that people lost their jobs because Wall Street sold toxic derivatives and over-leveraged. So what that those people now can't keep up with their mortgages while looking for other jobs. Let those with money buy up those homes at rock-bottom prices and rent them out.  In other words, let the rich make more money off the losses and grief of the working and middle class. That's Romney's message to the people.

Or how about making federal employees scape goats for the economy? Mitt Romney, whom it is estimated to be worth up to $250 million, shows up at a steel fabrication plant, dressed in jeans and a plaid work shirt,  and tells the workers that government employees are "making a lot more money than we are." I'm married to a government employee, and, with a Ph.d., he still makes less as a government employee than he did working for a private non-profit and less (counting inflation) than he did working for a corporation over ten years ago. I bet you he makes less than some of those working in the steel fabrication plant.

Who does Mitt Romney think he's fooling? This is a man who made his fortune buying sinking corporations, laying off the workers, and re-selling what remained. And he's likely to be the Republican nominee for President of the United States.

What a joke. On us. The middle-class, the working class.

 Our houses are burning, our wealth confiscated, our voices silenced in a sea of political bullshit.

Reflecting on Links to the Past

I have been going through the hundreds of letters that my husband's family kept over the years, letters that go back to the 1850s. The work is tedious because each letter must be opened carefully, quickly read, and then filed. As I read, I store ideas for posts on my Left for Texas blog, which I am using to create a narrative of the family, to establish connections in the family genealogy, and to help organize the overwhelming material that we have. I also perform online research and have made interesting discoveries about the history of the South before and after the Civil War as well as discoveries about distant relatives of my husband's, all descended from the same great-great-great grandparents. (I plan more extended research--in university libraries and on locale--after I have organized this material.) I have also made other discoveries: that human nature hasn't changed, that people can paradoxically hold progressive and abhorrent ideas, and that much of the daily experiences of our ancestors weren't much different than our experiences today. We may have better technology, access to faster transportation, better nutrition (perhaps), and multiple conveniences, but much remains the same.

One idea that many people have about the past is that people remained in one place for generations. This might be true in old civilizations, but it's less true in America, where folks seem to be in continual flux. News articles make a great deal of spouses living in separate cities or states, but these family letters reveal that spousal mobility and separation is not all that new. My husband's great-grandfather, Baker White Armstrong, moved to Texas from Virginia, where he was first employed with a drugstore/pharmacy in Bryan, Texas. Then it seems he began representing a large drugstore retail business based in New Orleans, and he traveled all over Texas from town to town promoting products for that company. His traveling meant that he was often separated from his wife and young family in the last decade of the 19th century. His wife, Mary Ophelia Nugent Armstrong, would also take the family back to visit relatives in Virginia, staying for weeks. The couple communicated by writing two or more letters a week to one another. As the family grew and Baker became more prosperous (by speculating in oil in Houston), Mary followed her young brood to boarding schools, staying nearby for weeks, and to sanitariums, where the couple sought medical help for their daughter Helen, who was epileptic. Also, the family bought a second home in Boulder, Colorado. Mary and the family would precede Baker in moving to the home in the summer. Of course, Baker and Mary were among those better-off individuals, but Baker was not only supporting his immediate family; he was sending money back to Virginia to his un-married sisters as well as to his wife's un-married sisters (two of Mary's sisters lived with the Armstrongs in Houston for a time in the early twentieth century), and the occasional handout to various other relatives, including Baker's youngest brother, who never seemed to succeed in anything he undertook.

Reading these letters provides some comfort to me, as in this current economic climate, our family has its own separations with which to cope: one spouse working in one state, the other spouse working in another and remaining there until the youngest child can be successfully situated, and a second young adult child in yet another state. Our concerns for our young adult children are really no different than the concerns that Baker White Armstrong's parents reveal in their letters. The worries may be slightly different--yellow fever, the lure of strong drink, the "wildness" of Texas in the 1800s--but the underlying parental concern is much the same.

The letters also provide cautionary tales. In 1879, Perry Nugent's family was doing well. The girls were being educated at female academies, and the boys were soon to be sent away to well-respected institutions of higher education. They had recently moved from New Orleans to a fine old home, called Longwood, in Salem, Virginia. Perry still had his business concerns in New Orleans, and he was able to wonderfully furnish the family's new abode. Two of the oldest girls, Lizzie and Helen, were enjoying the waters, body rubs, and meals at Clifton Spa, probably located near Clifton Springs, New York. Helen writes a very diverting letter to her younger sister Mary, describing the clientele. She bemoans the changes in dress and style of the current clientele, and she makes mild fun of a woman from New Orleans with a heavy drawl who knocks on Helen's and Lizzie's door to inquire whether or not the girls might be acquainted with her own friends in New Orleans. As I read the not-very-flattering description of the young woman that Helen Nugent provides for her sister Mary, I couldn't help thinking of Helen's own future as well as the future of Perry Nugent's family. In December of 1888, less than ten years after Helen and Lizzie were enjoying the good life at Clifton Spa, Longwood and most of its lovely furnishings were to go up in smoke. Shortly after the fire, Perry Nugent was to experience a number of financial set-backs (the house was inadequately insured), and the family was to be scattered. Helen was to end up in a boarding house, carefully counting every penny, and becoming more and more obsessive and manic. Eventually, she was to find some safe haven in the Armstrong house (with her sister Mary and family) in Houston, Texas, but the intervening years were to take a terrible toll on her.

These letters remind me to count the blessings I have today, as small and insignificant as they may seem, and to judge carefully the actions and appearances of others, trying not to let diverting vindictiveness rule my judgments.

The past is not so different from the present.

Image above: Perry Nugent Family in better days at Longwood, near Salem, Virginia--Click on the image for a larger version of the photo.

"Do No Injustice"

Over the past couple of months, I have been going through the papers of my husband's family: letters, photographs, recipe clippings, greeting cards, cancelled checks, and all the ephemera of everyday life left behind by folks who disposed of very little. Their paper detritus suggests their unwillingness to leave this world. Hundreds of letters are stacked in boxes and an old steamer trunk, whispering in the darkness, trying to tell their tales. And I am now trying to make some sense out of the chaos and to channel those voices. I have learned a lot about writers of the family letters; the people are just as ambiguous and conflicted as any today. But in those letters are revealed values that at times seem to shout and echo in the moral hollowness of today's business world--whether it's political business on Capitol Hill or financial business on Wall Street or the daily business of a national non-profit.

I just turned to a letter dated January 12, 1886, a letter written from a father, Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., to his young adult son, Baker White Armstrong (later Sr.; my husband's great-grandfather). The son has left the family home in Virginia to find better prospects in Texas. Baker had evidently received an offer of business from one man to take on a partnership. The father offers his son this advice:

I want you to be very careful that in advancing your own interests that you do no injustice to others.

What a world it would be if people took that advice to heart.

What We Cannot Deny: The Tangled Web of Ancestry

I’m not sure what, exactly, excites people about exploring their roots. Perhaps it’s an inherent urge to identify tribal connections. Perhaps it reflects an underlying need to establish one’s “worth” and to validate one’s existence. For some people, I’m sure, the excitement is in exploring rather than in identifying the branches of the genealogical tree, the “sussing out” of secrets and hitherto unknown connections. Others, such as I, just love a story; we’re caught up in the drama of individual lives almost submerged by the sands of time. Every person’s genealogical search is different, and nowhere is that difference so stark as the difference between the search conducted by a white person in the United States and that of an African-American. And nowhere is that search so fraught with tension as a search in one’s Southern background. If you’re African-American, you run up against slavery and the unpalatable truth that at one point, you’re going to be searching not through birth and death certificates but through bills of sale and property records. If you’re white, you’re likely to discover that no matter how humble your roots might be, there’s probably a slave-owning ancestor somewhere in your family history. (And if you have a conscience, that discovery is going to make you queasy rather than pleased.)

A recent New York Times article discusses the roots of our First Lady, Michelle Obama, whose family history so tellingly reveals the tangled history of the South. Michelle’s great-great-great-grandparents were a slave girl, Melvinia, and an unknown white man. Melvinia took the surname of her slave owners, Shields. After the death of her original owner in South Carolina, Melvinia found herself in Georgia, one of three slaves owned by her former owner’s daughter and son-in law, Christianne and Henry Shields. This couple had four sons, still at home and ranging in age from 19-24, at about the time Melvinia became pregnant with her first of four children. Whether or not one of those young men or some other young white man visiting the 200-acre farm is the father is unknown. After the Civil War, Melvinia worked as a farm laborer on a farm next to that of one of the sons, Charles Shields, until she eventually moved further west near the Alabama state line.

Melvinia’s child, Dolphus Shields, from whom Michelle Obama is descended, was light-skinned enough almost to pass as white. What some white folks encounter when they search their family roots is a similar ancestor who decided to pass as white and thus was integrated into the white community in the South, the family’s losing in time the knowledge of their slave past.

I was struck, as I read the article in the Times that Melvinia Shields, the eventually emancipated slave, is a sort of African-American opposite to my husband’s great-great-great-grandfather, Paul Cook: black, enslaved, illiterate and great-great-great-grandmother to Michelle Obama; white, wealthy, well-educated, and great-great-great-grandfather to my husband. Born in Rhode Island, Paul Cook was not an original child of the South, but as a participant in the sugar refining industry in Louisiana in the 1800s, he certainly profited from African-American labor. According to his obituary, he settled in New Orleans in 1846, and went into the western produce business until, in 1866, he got involved in the sugar refining business. The history of African-American labor in the cane fields from which that sugar came is not a pretty story. And yet, four generations later, the great-great-great-granddaughter of the slave is First Lady of the United States, and the great-great-great-grandson of the Southern merchant works for a non-profit organization.

As I delve more deeply in the background of the Armstrongs, Nugents, Cooks, Whites, Robbs, Greenes and all the ancillary branches of my husband’s family, as well as my own, I know I will run up against this Southern dilemma: how to discuss—or, rather, WHETHER to discuss the relations between the white ancestors and their black slaves and servants and whether to reveal what we would now identify as bigoted attitudes. If one is honest and true to history, one will confront what one finds and reveal that information in all its tangled glory and infamy.

Further Information: Searching for Slave Ancestors

• Tamie Dehler, “Searching for Slave Ancestors Requires a Strategy, Terre Haute Tribune-Star, 12 January, 2008.
  
• Tony Burroughs, “Commentary: Tracing Michelle Obama’s Roots—and Yours, special to CNN.

Back from Texas

We have the Bible of my husband's great-great grandmother, on the flyleaf of which that lady recorded the journeys of her children:

Robert left for B--Aug 30, 1882; Baker left for Roanoke, 20 Aug 1882; Baker came home sick Oct 5, 1882 & left for Baltimore Jan 2nd, 1883; Baker & Robert left Sept 18th, 1884; Baker left for Texas October 28th, 1884; Robert left for Roanoke Mar 13, 1885; Robert left for Texas Aug 31, 1886; Baker reached home from Texas July 7, 1886--left for Texas again July 26, 1886

I thought of these lovingly recorded events while wandering through the Texas History Museum in Austin this past week. "Gone to Texas" was the title of one of the exhibits on the movement of people from the east to the west, from the United States to the Mexican territory of Texas and later to the state of Texas. My ancestors have their own "gone to Texas" stories: the Dugats, Cajuns who moved into Southeast Texas from Louisiana around 1832, with a Spanish land grant; Simmonses and Coles who moved into East Texas in the mid-to-late-1800s from west Louisiana; German immigrants--the Schlobaums--who landed in Galveston, Texas, in the mid-1800s; the Bentons, who traveled west from Alabama, leaving behind a history that they never talked about in Texas.

On the Dugat side of my family, I am a sixth-generation Texan. (The Dugat patriarch who immigrated to the New World in the 1600s, to what is now Nova Scotia, was born in France, in 1616.) I am a daughter of Texas, proud of the toughness of my ancestors who left familiar landscapes for the unknown. But when I drove across the Texas state line, from Merryville, Louisiana, on a lone drive that took me from Georgia, to Louisiana, through Alabama and Mississippi, I had very mixed feelings. The marquee at the Texas line on Hwy 190 says "Welcome to Texas, Proud to be the Home of President George W. Bush." I could feel my heart sink into the pit of my stomach.

As an antidote to the Father of American Torture and the Quaintness of the Geneva Conventions, I was listening at the time to the music of another transplanted Texan, Eliza Gilkyson. Heading toward Jasper, I sang along with Gilkyson's song "Man of God," which really is much too positive, I think. The narrator of Gilkyson's song is looking forward to the day when the whole world is going to rise up and say "that ain't the teachings of a man of god," when everyone is going to know what a bill of goods George W. Bush sold this country.

Based on my few days in Texas, that hope may be mightily misplaced. George W. Bush would still be welcomed as a man of god by many people.

Torture? "I don't have any pity for terrorists," said one person I know. He hadn't heard the story of Dilawar, the Afghan detainee tortured to death at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. But, no matter: "Those things always happen in war," he replied, excusing our government's official use of torture.

Everything comes down to the fact that too many people just want to be safe. "There have been no terrorist attacks since 9/11," I've heard some people say, conveniently forgetting the anthrax attacks which, as far as the public knows, have never been solved. And, of course, the attacks in Spain and London don't count--because those attacks aren't on American soil.

Just as George Bush looks into the eyes of leaders and decides that he can "see into the soul" of them and base his judgment on that alone, so do people I know. Their gut feelings, as far as I can tell, are fed mainly by a steady diet of Fox News and no other news sources.

I was glad to leave Texas. It makes me too sad to visit these days. Not that Georgia is much better--but my heart isn't in Georgia.