The UnTexan

MANNISH, BOYISH, OBAMA-ISH: THE VOTE IN MASSACHUSETTS

Ted Kennedy was a senator for so long that the Democrats forgot how to spell Massachusetts, much less how to win there. And there is no doubt that yesterday's election was about the president much more than it was about filling a Senate seat. This morning the Republicans are crowing, the Democrats are dithering, and the Obama camp is disappointed or insulted or both.

I am neither disappointed nor insulted. I voted for Obama, but I expected things to go this way. I have felt all along that he was not grown up enough to be president and should have waited a few years to run. Electing Obama was a good thing that happened at a bad time. He is not unfit to be president; he was unready to be president

But he is president.

Perhaps political correctness has kept the words "boy" and "Obama" too far apart within earshot of the President. But Barack Obama needs to hear it. He is the boy who became president but he cannot go on being a boyish president. It's time to close the gap and put away childish things. One of the messages to Obama from Massachusetts is, "Oh, grow up." It is a message he needs to hear. And to prove he has heard it, he needs to do something -- well -- something presidential.

Recommended additions to the presidential iPod as he contemplates the future: Massachusetts by the Bee Gees and Mannish Boy by Muddy Waters. But he should stay away from Hoochie-Coochie Man. Not the best way for any boy to prove he's a man. Besides, Bill Clinton pretty much wore that one out.

THE GRAVE IN THE HOUSE: THE LINGERING SOUTH

Here in Texas it is Confederate Heroes Day. It is also the birthday of Robert E. Lee (so, happy birthday Bob!), who is one of the celebrated heroes; the other is Jefferson Davis. Yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, celebrating another kind of hero. Sometimes Confederate Heroes Day and MLK Day are celebrated on the same day. It's complicated living in the lingering south. And brings to mind these lines from Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead":

"What shall we say who have knowledge
Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act
To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave
In the house? The ravenous grave?"

It is an interesting thing to think about: graves and houses, graves in houses, graves, houses. I used to think Southerners long ago cornered the graves-in-houses market (I grew up in one; many people I knew grew up in one), but I have been lots of places and visited in lots of houses. There are graves everywhere. But no one wants to talk much about setting them.

I don't celebrate Confederate Heroes Day. And if I were to celebrate a dead Confederate general it would be Stonewall Jackson, the grim old Presbyterian who understood what war was about (I grew up a Presbyterian, too) and, when it came to the end, was a man whose heart sang with poetry. His last words? "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees."

It is a good day to read "Ode to the Confederate Dead" and to think about graves and houses, heroes of necessity and necessary heroes.

HUNKERED DOWN AND HUMMING

We are still here.

I never intended to stay in Texas. We never intended to stay. And here I am. And here we are. Now my wife has a new job, a job she wants, a job she deserves, a job I am sure she will really like and will be very good at doing. It is a Texas job. And here we are. I almost said, "Here we are, still stuck in Texas," but I am trying not to say things like that. And I really do have to try hard not to, but I will because I love my wife and will do what it takes because she deserves it (not to be confused with the notion that I am staying here because I am starting to like it; I'm not, and will continue to insist that my remains will NEVER remain here). I want my wife to get what she deserves and has worked hard for -- and get the chance to use that Ph.D. that brought us here from New Mexico in the first place. So I will refrain from saying things like, "Here we are, stuck in Texas." I will take my sort-of happy face and my cowboy hat down from their hooks on the wall and put them on. I will practice saying new and more hopeful things. And if I can't do that, I will say nothing at all. I will even try to believe it when we tell ourselves we might leave here someday. I intend to do my part.

We have decided we will do what it takes to stay (even though I think we both sort of envy those guys who died at the Alamo because they didn't have to go on living in Texas). And here we are, all hunkered down and humming "Texas, Our Texas" but determined never to sing the words out loud. And those must have been tears of determination we were shedding at the movies yesterday. We went to see Crazy Heart, which is a good movie to go and see, Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, good music, and a sad enough story. But not a story to make us weep. What made our tears well up was the landscape of New Mexico that served as the backdrop for the story. Broad vistas, mountains, cliffs. We knew the places. We knew Phoenix wasn't Phoenix, it was Albuquerque. We knew the passing landscape was here and there, patched together for continuity. We know that place. We love it. And we miss it. We miss it so much it brings us to tears as we sit in a dark movie theater hundreds of miles away in Austin, Texas, the place we have agreed to do what it takes and stay even if we don't like it very much. How crazy is that?

Hunkered Down and Humming. Maybe we can get Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal to play us in the movie version someday. It will be a touching story, touching in the way stories about displaced persons usually are. The opening shot will be of a car on a long and empty stretch of highway passing a sign. The sign will say "You are now leaving New Mexico." Who knows where the story will go after that. Or where it might end up without ever intending to. Or the crazy things Jeff and Maggie do when they get there.

JESSE WINCHESTER: SOUL MAN

When Jesse Winchester's draft notice showed up in his mailbox in 1967, he did something lots of guys talked about, some thought about and a few actually did. He went to Canada and stayed. "When I first moved to Canada, I was really narrow-minded and thought you had to be from the South to have soul," he said in an interview. "I learned that wasn't true; it doesn't have anything to do with where you're from," he said. He's not the only person to leave the South with that assumption. And he isn't the only southern boy to learn that the geography of the soul covers some unfamiliar ground, despite what he was taught growing up. But it is a topography that takes some getting used to. You can hear that in some of his early songs.

I first heard Winchester's songs when I lived in Atlanta in the early 1970s. A young folksinger named Fox Watson sang them, explaining that the Vietnam war had driven Winchester to Canada and he couldn't come and sing them himself. I think the first one he sang was "Yankee Lady" and I know he sang "That's a Touch I Like." I fell in love with them. I don't know what happened to Fox Watson, but someday I would like to thank him for introducing me to Jesse Winchester's music. I wore out one copy of Winchester's first album and bought another. And even in the age of iTunes, I am downloaded and still listening. Winchester's songs are gently wonderful, hopeful, thankful, and often sepia-toned (it is no wonder that members of The Band had a hand in that first album). They are incredibly well written. The simple fact is that Jesse Winchester songs are worth listening to over and over for years and years, especially when he sings them.

Winchester says the territory of his songwriting extends to "God and women." And he covers that old ground pretty well. Listen to "Brand New Tennessee Waltz" (which Winchester says in the first song he ever wrote), "Yankee Lady" (a homesick southern boy gets cold feet in Vermont), "Mississippi on My Mind" (which can make me miss Mississippi and I never have spent any time there or wanted to), "Defying Gravity" (something a bit more global), "Talk Memphis" (Texas singer Toni Price has a wonderful version of this one), or "The Showman's Life" (which is about the unintended consequences of success: "Nobody told me about this part"). Get hold of The Best of Jesse Winchester. They are all on there.

Which brings me to Winchester's most recent album, Love Filling Station. There are songs about the thrill of love, the foolishness of love, the labor of love, the mystery of love, the loss of love, the choice of loneliness (for a while), a gospel song that gives eternal love some human passion and makes it something worth dying for when the time comes. He sings "Stand By Me" and closes the album with "Loose Talk," an old country duet about married people who might have to leave town to get some peace from their neighbors. Some he wrote and others he covered. And they are wonderful, gentle, delicately southern accented. As long as Jesse Winchester keeps singing about God and women, I will keep listening. He sings in a language I can heart down in my well-traveled southern soul. My wife gave the new album to me and I don't intend to stop listening to it. She likes it too. It is in a loving language we understand.

Jesse Winchester's website.

CHRISTMAS ISN'T CHRISTMAS IF YOU DON'T KNOW THE WORDS!

I spent many years of my youth singing in the Civitan Boys Choir. I began as a soprano and ended up as a bass. That's how long I sang. I think of Mrs. Bachtel, our beloved director. She knew how to make boys sing in perfect harmony. And it wasn't always pleasant. Mrs. Bachtel was the cattle prod for many a flubbed chorus. I know Cartman's pain. All I can say is, "Sing, Cartman! Sing!"