Transcripts

SPEAKER: It took five metropolitan airports to bring my mom and dad and my sister and me with our kids, three generations, together again for our first family vacation in years. Our ears were still ringing as we untangled the ropey wrangle of roadway out of San Antonio and into hill country, where, after three days of seeing what the guidebooks said we had to see, my sister finally persuaded us to hit the sticks off Ranch Road 1376 until our rental cars rocked to a stop in a gravel lot beside a weathered shack in a thick shade made famous in that country song called Luckenbach, Texas.

At most, a ghost of a ghost of a ghost town, a stable of, well-broke picnic tables, a platform stage, and a dance hall patched with tin, it wasn't much. But as the sign by the roadside said, it was good enough for anybody to be somebody in. We sat down. The kids ran around. We found us four Shiner Bocks at the bar in the rear of the shack where some white-haired boys were picking the Atkins and Robbins and Ritter out of their fenders and Gibsons and Taylors. We can almost feel the pegs untwisting the tensions in our shoulders.

We started dropping G's from our INGs. You are here said our inner locators. Right here. Something earthen was in the air. My sister pushed her sunglasses up into her hair and grinned at me like I was her brother. And brother, I don't care how slick you are. There's a hick in you somewhere, some folkie in a tie-dyed tee. You don't belong in your deadend job any more than we belonged in that dead end town. But we choose our deadends in the end, don't we, friend?

My mom and dad don't farm anymore. My sister manages infotech. And as for me, I live in a city where only recently have I begun to let my small town farm roots show. I've been a fool. But as our cars ticked cool under Luckenbach's moon and the crazy calm of that afternoon and the roosters crowed and the whole hollow glowed in a sepia haze, it seemed our ghosts at last restored.

Out amongst the ghosts of that ghost town poured and hitching up there things got down to the dizzying business of two-stepping up the fence posted avenue and around and down through leaves to the creek cheek to cheek to the music ghosts love most. And now, I can say it like I knew it all along. That crick in your neck is the heck you've got from being somebody you're not. But that's OK because, as the old folks say, somewhere they're playing your song.