Falling off the grid

Roads around here are straight. Houses sit on square lots. There's an awful lot of asphalt.

I met Larry Cobb in the Christian Science church parking lot in August, 1967. I'd just graduated from high school. He was in the Air Force, stationed at Reese, an Air Training Command base. Lots of guys stationed at Reese attended church in town, but they usually were first lieutenants, pilots in training, college grads with a career path in mind. Larry, by contrast, was a jet engine mechanic, no particular aim in life, who had enlisted as an airman to avoid the draft. He'd been in college, but it really wasn't his thing. He didn't really support the war, but his grades made him a prime prospect for a future on the ground in Vietnam.

He was nowhere near what Mom and Dad had in mind for a future husband for their first-born. Mom asked him home for Sunday dinner anyhow. Two years later we were married.

It was probably the most rebellious act of my young life. Even at that, we waited until I'd had my twentieth birthday in July. You know, teenage marriages never last. I'm sure that that three weeks we waited made all the difference in our life together.

It took a long time for Mom and Dad to warm up to Larry. The ideals we have for others are the hardest to die. So fiercely did they want what was "best" for me.

"Your family," my husband said to me, "either loves or hates. Nothing's in the middle." This from a man who was greeting every meal his bride presented with a pleasant expression, a perfunctory nod, and "It's OK!"

"OK??!!" I'd rail. "Just OK???!!!!" I wanted kudos, bravos, over-the-top appreciation. I wanted him to LOVE what I cooked. "OK" just seemed wishy-washy -- wimping out because you didn't want to express an opinion. And my opinion would be the one which I'd prefer to hear from him.

Maybe it's the long straight horizon with razor straight rows of cotton that surrounds the town, the implacable grid of section line roads turned into urban commerce zones with houses lined up straight and orderly on the avenues and streets in between. You always know where you stand around here. Which side of the road you're on. "Fer us or agin us." That stripe down the middle of the road is yeller. And God help you if you ever get on the wrong side of that stripe. Just ask Dixie Chick Natalie Maines. Hometown girl that she is, her name around here might as well be Jane Fonda.

It's been thirty-five years since I left Lubbock, twenty-five since I got totally out of West Texas. Our marriage has lasted, probably because I eventually learned to say, "You know, you could be right. I'm really not sure. Let me think about that."

Sometimes the greatest freedom isn't to have an opinion, but the freedom NOT to have one. And the greatest gift: to love the other in spite of his.