The most characteristic thing I can tell you about Houston comes in the form of an anecdote. I was a teenager visiting New York City and a resident there told me it was natural that Houston would be a friendly place because “everybody knows everybody.” I told her that wasn’t true and she asked me how many people lived here, how many thousands. I told her we had a population that topped three million and she was incredulous.
Houstonians are friendly. We don’t all know each other. We don’t all own oil wells. And we don’t all ride horses to work and to school, though we would like to if we could get by with it. We do, however, have an on-going love affair with cowboy boots, pick-up trucks, and Tex-Mex. And once a year we close down major boulevards and freeways and turn them over to incoming trail riders, who end up camping in our parks in order to participate in the rodeo parade. Central Park has art projects of saffron fabric; we have campfire down at the ranch. It’s all good.
I’m one of those rare individuals—I was actually born in the Bayou City. A lot of our population moves here from somewhere else. Not that we mind; Houston is that kind of a place. We take on any and all comers—the more, the better; the bigger, the better. Bring on more people and we’ll just keep annexing land mass until we eventually consume the whole state.
A couple of brothers floated up the bayou and put down their stake and the city of Houston was born. It has no real reason to exist: it was hewn out of a swamp and one of its oldest neighborhoods, the Heights, was built by people desperate to escape the cholera and malaria that seemed to be an inevitable part of living in Houston central. Houston is 50 miles from the coast, yet it is one of the largest ports in the United States and is the epicenter of the petroleum industry. Not only that, but we are the ones to turn to if you have a problem out in space or a problem in your body—the Texas Medical Center here admits patients from all over the world to be treated for cardiac disease, cancer, and pretty much whatever ails you.
But this is a fun, funky kind of place where we have Art Car parades every May (www.houstonartcarklub.com/), Art Car Relief concerts to raise money for Hurricane Katrina victims, yearly international festival, art festivals, and a livestock show and rodeo every year since 1932 (www.hlsr.com/) where anyone who wants to can be a real Texan from his ten-gallon hat down to his pointy-toed Tony Llama boots at least once a year even if he was born in some state where Willie Nelson isn’t a hero and they don’t know cowchips are not a snack food. We have opera, ballet, a symphony, dozens of theatres from the Tony-award-winning Alley Theater down to experimental ones, dozens of museums, five professional sports teams (Texans, Rockets, Comets, Astros, and Aeros), and an internationally diverse population that includes people from just about every nationality you can think of.
In addition to me, we are the home town of Randy & Dennis Quaid, Renee Zellweger (Katy is really just an extension of Houston), Tommy Tune, Hilary Duff, and John Wayne. OK —I made up the John Wayne part. A lot of people only wish he was born here.
It’s a good place to live and a nice place to visit. Only don’t come in August or early September because it is too darned hot!
