When I was a child, my older brother told me stories about tarantulas living under beds and rocks that tasted like candy. When I believed him (as I always did), he’d howl with laughter and tell me how gullible I was. In a fit of fury, I’d call him a liar. My mother was quick to intervene. “We don’t ...

The U.S.A. recently had another birthday, its 244th, if you begin counting with the Declaration of Independence. The people living here then didn’t think of themselves as a single nation, but the union they formed has been around long enough for everyone to assume this wild democratic experiment is ...

here’s something about one American telling another American how to behave when the national anthem is played that reminds me of a corseted school marm.  I had one of those once, not a corset, but a corseted school marm. She stood before the class as straight as an arrow, as if she had swallowed a l...

ike everyone else, Texans are well capable of   whining and complaining, but the story doesn’t end there. Scratch that surface and there’s a dogged toughness in most people living here. Maybe it seeps up through the land; maybe it’s a contagious attitude carried along by frontier genes.       Most f...

This column is part of a "Point-Counterpoint" pair. Read I Could Be Wrong on the issue here. ay missed his calling. Had he chosen science fiction as a career, he might now be rich, and I could be borrowing money from him. In discussions with friends about scifi and fantasy writing, I’ve discovered t...

exans got a reminder this weekend of what our state can do when we set our minds to it. News of former Governor Mark White’s death on Saturday brought back memories of our public education system before he took office in 1978,   a reminder of how resistant to change we are, even when change is for t...

ortunately my column is titled “I Could Be Wrong,” and I fall back on the latitude my title affords me.   About a month ago “Tutta’s Take” by Wynette Barton taught me a lesson about overstating facts. Since she still counts me as a friend I can appreciate the gentleness of her evisceration. I said e...

ill (AKA Mo)   Johnson, Hays CISD superintendent for umpteen years, once noted that of the 16 graduates in his 1947 Buda High School class, 11 graduated from college.   That’s an astounding 69%, and it happened before a college education was touted as the sure way to a make more   money.     The rea...

nteresting – don’t you think? –   that so many people in the Greatest Generation grew up with little money but turned out well. Named partly for heroic effort during World War II, this “Greatest Generation”, born roughly between 1915 and 1935, managed some other heroic tasks. They were your parents,...

ay Wolbrecht, my favorite dentist, retired without my permission, which I’d never have given had he asked. My trust is complete in his skill in all things between the nose and chin; his reasoning, however, sometimes leaves me baffled. Ray’s dumpster rummage for Truth is as good as any. One never kno...