When you are on your own, where do you see yourself living?
Do you dream of settling in your hometown, or somewhere close to it? Or do you set your sights on a faraway place — or somewhere in between?
In the Opinion essay “Why Texas Is Deep in My Heart,” Mimi Swartz writes:
Sticking around here was never even my plan. Growing up, I suffered with the other kids who were incapable of following a football game but had mastered “Oliver Twist” (the book, not the movie). My best friend in middle school despaired at my incompetence with hair and makeup. (“You could be so pretty if you tried.”)
So when I headed for college on the East Coast in 1972, I never intended to return. I would move to Greenwich Village after graduation, and grow red geraniums in window boxes.
Instead, in a few years, I was back. There were sensible reasons: I had a job offer in Houston, a newly booming city that, even in the ’70s, featured some of the amenities of New York and Los Angeles without the cost-of-living sticker shock. Back here, no one asked me why I didn’t have a Texas accent. I had learned the dirty little secret that there was provincialism on the East Coast as well as in Texas.
I was homesick, too. From Houston, my parents and younger brothers were just a three-hour drive away, down a highway beside which grows in spring a carpet of bluebonnets.
I had missed the sounds of Spanish-language radio and barbecue on demand. I had missed people who were glad to see me, even if they barely knew me. And yes, I had missed a certain habit of being — witnessing a hilarious parade of people who had more money than sense, and legislators who came to work with five-star hangovers but who, back then, still saw the value of funding public education.
These may sound like the sentimental rationalizations of someone who couldn’t make it elsewhere, and maybe they are. Yet, there’s something to be said for finding one’s place in the world, especially when the world is such an irascible place, so in need of improvement.
Students: Read the entire essay, then tell us:
— Does Ms. Swartz’s personal story resonate with you?
— Do you know anyone who had a similar experience?
— Where do you think you will live when you are on your own? Why?
— What is special about the place you live now?
— Ms. Swartz says that “there’s something to be said for finding one’s place in the world.” What does that mean to you?
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