Home, but not on the range

I’ll try to fill in a little detail on life in Texas, piece by piece, starting with my neighborhood.

A friend and I used to talk about the vision of the neighborhood where we wanted to live. No, not the one where we had a commune and ate meals together and shared a boat and snowmobiles with the other commune members. The other one, with the happy, racially diverse doctors, lawyers, and professors living side by side like a Jehovah's Witness tract.

That's kind of like my neighborhood. Across the street is a Hispanic sales executive and his Caucasian wife, on the other side is a Vietnamese family doctor and nurse, and next door on either side are a Caucasian cardiologist and internist and a small business owner. Down the street a few houses is my son’s friend, whose dad is an oil engineer from Australia and whose mom is a Realtor from Nigeria.

The neighborhood overall probably isn't quite that diverse, but it is still a pleasant surprise, since ethnic communities tend to congregate together even when they are well-off. It makes for a nice neighborhood, and we have lots of good medical care readily available, to boot. Many of our neighbors are older folks who built their homes here 25 years ago and are still here, but they are large homes, so they've started recycling as people downsize.

The elementary school is right behind our house, so the kids can walk without taking a street. That’s nice, because one drawback of living here is that many neighborhoods, including ours, don’t have sidewalks. The school is racially mixed, but I'm not aware of any racial overtones or problems they’ve had. The academic standards are high, and the teachers are demanding—sometimes too demanding, I think

Another related benefit of living in a city with immigrants from the world over is there are tons of great ethnic restaurants here: Mexican, Vietnamese, Indian, Cajun, and bbq are probably the strongest offerings, but you can easily find most any kind of food, and we live in the relatively white suburbs, some distance away from the city center. Since H and I like trying new foods, including every one of the cuisines I mentioned above, we are never short of a place to eat. Of course, we are at the crossroads of the Southwest, Midwest, and South, which explains the tacos al pastor, beef brisket, and Gulf shrimp, but there are other influences, like the large Vietnamese population that immigrated in the 1970’s. Above all, the oil business brings in professional-level employees from all over the world, and businesses are happy to give them a slice of home with everything from halal meat markets to French cafés to Asian grocery stores (all examples I pass on my daily commute). I look forward to exploring more of these places as we get to know our community better.

Up this weekend, though, is a slice of traditional Texas: we plan to attend the official Texas Bluebonnet Festival this weekend in a small town near where Texans declared their independence from Mexico. It sits between Houston, Austin, and Dallas and seems as authentic Texan as you could wish. Except that I'm quckly discovering, in a state of this size and diversity, authentic Texan means something different depending on who you ask.