Victory or Death

There is a subdivision near my daughter’s school called ”Travis Country.”  We pass by the limestone sign every day, surrounded by verbenas and turk’s caps, shining brightly in the sun.

“Who’s Travis?” she asked one morning. “And why did they name this place after him?”  Despite my various inadequacies, I felt relatively comfortable explaining who this person was that so important to our state’s history.  After all – I was born and raised in Texas.  I grew up forty-five minutes from the Alamo. If anyone could tell her who Travis was, I could.  Here was my very helpful answer:

 

 I think he was a Colonel in the Republic who fought at the Alamo.  Did he wear a coonskin cap?  No, wait.  That was Davy Crocket.  Anywho, it was either he or some other dude that met with a Mexican leader under a tree regarding surrender.  No wait, that can’t be right.  Well I don’t know his first name, honey. But I think his middle name started with a B.

Yes, folks.  That’s it.  Colonel Travis wore a coonskin cap while not dying at one of the biggest battles in Texas history because he apparently morphed his ghost-like dead self into Sam Houston and was busy negotiating a surrender.  Most importantly, however, his middle name started with a B.  Of that, I’m certain.  Well thanks a lot, small-town history teacher.  Thanks a lot.

That night, I asked my husband to better explain it.  His first response was “please tell me you didn’t try.”  What?  Why would he jump to such accusatory conclusions?  I lied and said no, even though I’m very well-versed on the subject and all.  He snickered at that.  So at bedtime,  my husband allowed my daughter to stay up late in order to re-tell the story of William Barret Travis dying in a hard-fought battle against Mexican soldiers, leading a team of outnumbered and starving misfit settlers.  He dramatically drew his hand across the bedcovers to imitate how Lt. Col. Travis drew a line in the sand, urging those who wouldn’t fight-to-the-death to walk away.  No one walked.  They all crossed that line. My daughter sat up with rapt attention.  Please don’t mention the coonskin cap, I thought as I tried to beam it directly into my daughter’s head.  I’ll never live that one down.     

The way my husband wove the tale you’d think it was a work of fiction, with William Travis walking away from a sordid past in Tennessee to find his home in this rugged new place, leading a pack of dirty men, all huddled behind a Catholic mission’s dirt-and-mortar walls.  They all died bloody deaths in the battle of the Alamo, but the Mexican soldiers finally prevailed.  “A woman named Susana Dickenson survived to tell the tale,” my husband said with raised eyebrows.  My daughter breathed in fast. What did she do? Where did she run? Why did they let her go?  The stinging smell of independence hung like fog in the air around her pink covers.  The Battle of San Jacinto.   Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.  The capture and surrender.  Gunsmoke.

I passed the sign again today and it had new significance.  It reminded me of why I live in the great state of Texas, tucked away in the hill country amidst bluebonnets and wild Indian blankets,  the soil fertilized with the blood of those who died for our right to stake a home onto this great land.  The tall, blowing grasses are moistened by their tears, and their yet untold lives whisper to me in the afternoon winds.  This state is special not just because of the stories told today, but of stories long since past.

On February 24, 1836, mere days before the end, Travis wrote to the people of Texas and all Americans in the world, saying “I am besieged, by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna. I have sustained continual bombardment and for twenty-four hours and have not lost a man. . . I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, and our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of liberty, of patriotism and everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch. The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily and will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country. Victory or death.”

Thank you, William Barret Travis.  For the fight.  For the intensity for which you loved this place.   For drawing that line in the sand.  I thank God for you, for what you did for us so many years ago, and for your unyielding urge to never give up even as solders were climbing the wall and closing in. I salute you, my dear patriot.  Even if it makes people look at me funny while I drive by that sign, in my sweats, possibly talking on my cell phone, on a Tuesday afternoon.

Others might have chosen to walk away – but you?  In that dark day in March, 1836, as you breathed your last breath, you thought not of these things. You thought of victory.

Infinity, plus one

“I sure love your daddy,” I said to my daughter once as we were walking hand-in-hand though the grocery store parking lot.  Sometimes I do that – say things I’ m thinking out loud.  It often gets me in trouble, like when I’m judgmental or harsh or wish someone would move the freak over in the fast lane.   But this particular day I was thinking about her father.  My husband.  The man I love more each passing day of our almost thirteen-year marriage.

“You love him more than anyone in the whole world?” she asked.  “Like the entire earth?” Her little hand was clutching mine as she looked up and squinted through the sun.  I’m wondering what she’s getting at, like if we lived on a smaller planet I’d just sorta hang out with him.  Maybe buy him a soda or get him a ticket to Sea World.

“Do you love him more than me?” she asked.

The question hit my face like a slap as we walked into the grocery store.  Right there by the pineapples.  How do I answer such a question?  How can I possibly explain such a love while picking out grapefruit?  This was my first-born.  My precious child.  I was the center of her little world.

“Well it’s just different,” I said.  I was really hoping she’d just let this go so I could head to the cheese section in peace.  But she was so fixated on my response that she flat-out ignored the free samples.  This was serious.  I could have just said I loved them both exactly the same – children like for things to be fair and equal and perfectly symmetrical.  Half the pie.  We each get a balloon.  Three candies each.  But I couldn’t lie.  Not to my own child.

My daughter and I gush a lot.  It makes my husband roll his eyes and leave the room, mostly because it’s (1) annoying; (2) loud; and (3) insanely repetitive.

“I love you a million times,” I’d say to her.  Of course she loved me too.  Except a million zillion times, plus infinity.

“I love you that much, plus one,” I’d say.

I do love her so.  I have an immense longing to protect my children at all costs and surround their world with freedom and creativity.  And they love me, to the extent they know how.  It’s so innocent.  Full of happy bubbles and sparkles.  It’s so squeaky and pure I wish I could bathe in it.  But my daughter has so much yet to learn.

I met my husband our last year in college. He was a fraternity boy with political ambitions.  He wore beat-up, red wing boots, pulling his hat low on his head to cover up his red, tired eyes.  I was drawn to him in a strange way that ignored all consequences.  His crooked smile kept flashing through my mind all the moments of my days, and the world was somehow off balance without him in it.  That was how things always were with us. From the very first moment we spoke, it was like that big wheel in Lost where all time and space shifted.  We didn’t really have a choice.  We were all but helpless participants in God’s master plan to yoke us together, one pushing and one pulling in all the right moments.  I melted when he touched me.  I would have followed him anywhere, to the very ends of the earth.  No matter what the size.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love my children with an emotion I didn’t know existed until their faces were raised to meet my eyes.  My throat closed up when I saw their bodies like tiny angels and thought I wasn’t worthy to own such beautiful things, even for such a little while.   Sometimes I stop folding laundry or scraping old oatmeal off cereal bowls and just look at them, my sweet precious little children, basking in the glow of the everyday.  They are the big miracles of life.

But someday, they will go.  They will take the extra china and good thread count sheets and beg me to make them cookies, but they will still leave.  Some other mother, who rocked and held and loved their child as fiercely as I have loved, will send their offspring out into the world and the two will meet.  And I will be but a memory of past days.  The woman of remember when and you just won’t believe. Then, it will just be us, my husband and I, rocking away on the quiet front porch, alone.   Or sitting in some café in France, drinking wine with grins on our faces.

I suppose when my daughter is older, after she struts headstrong into her own separate world, she might understand.  After she survives her own youthful heartbreak and finds a partner who feeds her soul.  Maybe then, she will know the answer, standing in the produce section, with refrigerated air blowing into her face and melon in hand, how to answer a question from her child about the intricacies of love.