Immortal Ogallala

WHAT IS THERE TO TELL you of the place I am from? It’s a nowhere place. The kind of town you drive through and thank God you never had to live there. A few dilapidated houses and a fourway stop interrupt an otherwise empty Texas countryside. If you go down Broadway, you’ll see a handful of buildings—a lumber store, one small café, a bank, a grocery store, a post office, and novelty shops. Weekday mornings, you’ll find the Longhorn Café dotted with the usual group of farmers, sipping coffee and shooting bull, waiting for daylight when they’ll begin slow work on dry land. And Friday nights, you’ll catch every Sue, Jack, and Sally heading to the high school field to grumble about the football players, now struggling as a six-man team.

My childhood in Hart was dappled with typical Americana: days spent at the hamburger joint drinking Big Red sodas and playing Pac-Man, summer nights full of neighborhood cops-and-robbers games, bike rides to Fast Stop to buy a package of Sixlets, and bus rides steaming