EDITOR’S CORNER
We’ve recently returned from a press convention in nearby La Grange. In fact, during our stay I got to thinking about the “nearby” part.
And came to the conclusion La Grange is the nearest to Rockdale I have ever intentionally spent a night.
I say “intentionally” to specifically rule out the night spent 29 years ago in the Milam County Courthouse—in Cameron, of course—awaiting election returns.
Our courthouse is a beautiful and important piece of history, but it does not make a very good hotel.
Now, I’ve been going through La Grange, traveling someplace or other, for much of my life. But that’s the key, going through La Grange. This time I went to La Grange.
(Football games don’t count, especially when you are working every second you are at one).
My wife, Sue, and I enjoyed absorbing the sights and culture in a town about which I knew virtually nothing.
Well, I knew one thing and so, probably, do you, but we will leave that out. They say you can’t choose your family but you can’t choose your history, either.
La Grange has some beautiful facilities—The Texas Czech Heritage Center is amazing—but what we enjoyed most was interacting with its people.
For instance, the folks at that gorgeous Czech Center, noticing that Sue was on crutches from a painful ankle-foot injury, totally unasked, swarmed us to offer golf cart transportation, which we readily accepted.
And the lady running the Czech Library inside was extremely nice to us. In fact, she was from Cameron and she was even nice to us after she found out we were from Rockdale.
My point is not that La Grange and its people are exceptional, even though we found them to be. It is that most people in most towns are exceptional.
By its very nature, news can be so negative. Example: If I drive the 22 stunning miles from Silverton to Ouray, Colorado, that’s not news.
But if I—God forbid—take the same drive, swerve off the road and end up in the bottom of the Uncompahgre River Gorge, that’s news.
Most of those people in all those towns we drive through—nearby and not so nearby—are just as nice and delightful as the people we met in La Grange last week. But we will never know them unless one of a couple of thing happen, either they become prominent in some way, good or bad, or we seek them out, perhaps by simply spending some time in their towns.
For instance. I can’t begin to estimate the number of times I’ve been in the aforementioned Cameron.
But several decades ago I found myself on “daddy duty” every Sunday morning pushing my infant son in a stroller through its streets for about an hour and a half.
It was wonderful. I loved it, experienced Cameron at “ground level” and interacted with many of its people.
A little too much interaction at points. A longtime friend—I was on her street and did not know it—yelled at me from her front porch: “Get that baby in out of this rain right now!”
It wasn’t rain. Just a little water falling out of the sky.
I could give you similar, although less dramatic, examples about Lexington, Caldwell, Taylor and, of course, Thorndale.
I don’t know of a place where people just enjoy living so much as Thorndale. I took a charter bus ride with a bunch of Thorndale people once and they made bets on who would be the first person to avail themselves of the bus’s restroom facilities, then cheered when it happened.
Want an antidote to gloom and doom? Spend some time in a nearby town instead of going through it.
Better yet, spend the night.
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