Knowing Cannot Save Us
History is a good teacher — we’re just lousy students
“You are SUCH a nerd!”
My daughter Ceili’s exclamation resounded through the rotunda of the Texas State Capitol. She has her father’s capacity to project.
We were in Austin with Ceili’s mom, Marilyn, who was organizing a conference event for her employer. We were left to roam in a city full of music and history, and I was as content as a pig in slop. The nice Texas Dept. of Public Safety cop had waved me through security despite the knife in my pocket, which I declared and begged forgiveness for.
“This is Texas,” he said. Which may have meant, “That’s not a knife…”
Anyways… we strolled into the capitol building built of gorgeous Sunset Red Granite, with a dome taller than the U.S. Capitol (they’ll be the first to tell you). I stopped, gaping at the floor-to-ceiling paintings on each side of the vast room — one a full-length portrait of Col. David Crockett in his buckskins and toting his long rifle; the other a vivid depiction of the surrender of Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna to General Sam Houston at San Jacinto, the moment that won Texas independence in 1836. I told Ceili, marveling, that I had been looking at those very pictures in books since I was a kid.
Hence, she proclaimed her father the biggest nerd in Texas.
