Lonesome Dove

Good afternoon.

My mother had the great gift of her Scotch-Irish ancestry:  she was a great storyteller, one of a huge long line of loquacious folk who could hold you spellbound while she talked away.

On a visit to her in the late part of life, before she became ill with cancer, she delighted me once, saying,  "Linda,"  (she said that with a beautiful Texas music that held me in my tracks)  "Come over here and bring up a chair and I'll tell you a story."  What pleasure.

That story as with most of her later life recountings was pure gossip, but she invested her tellings with imaginary detail that convinced any listener...until you realize that she was repeating a conversation between husband and wife that took place a mile from her house at two o'clock in the morning,   "And then he said, and then she said back.....," well, she had a gift.

She also had a gift for larger prophecy that came to her from an irrefutable source deep inside her.  She had not had the education nor the experience to know  the great implications of world affairs, but she did.  In the midst of World War II, she was able to say with great conviction that the big enemy of the United States in the "future" would be China, not Japan.  She said that China and Russia together would create great peril for the United States. Who's to say she was wrong, here in 2012?

She looked upon the relationship  between Mexico and the USA with a jaundiced eye, and had no faith in any of it. She's the person who told me that when the Treaty of Guadalupe was signed, determining the boundary between the two countries, the Mexicans wanted it to be the Nueces River, not the Rio Bravo del Norte otherwise known as the Rio Grande.  She said, as Mexicans began pushing into southern Texas thirty years ago, that they would not be happy until they had taken over that huge land between the two nations and made it Mexico  Who can say she was wrong?  Of course, it's turned out that they could not be happy until they took over the whole United States, but that was so preposterous that nobody could have thought the way things have evolved.

I have been watching, belatedly, the TV series Lonesome Dove, from stories of Larry McMurtry.  It makes me homesick.  I too feel far from home sometimes.  I am a Lonesome Dove for wild, terrible Texas, sometimes.  Real lonesome for it. YAZZYBEL