I’m in the Texas Panhandle. I wish I could tell you where, specifically, but I don’t know. Outside Amarillo.
There are no landmarks. No trees. No water. Just dirt, wind, and prairie. I am at a rundown barbecue trailer, parked outside a filling station. I am ordering food. My wife is waiting in the vehicle with our bloodhound.
The woman at the window is a gray-haired sweetheart.
When I first arrive, she is smoking a cigarette out front. When she sees me, she moseys into the trailer. I’ve always wanted to use that word—“mosey.”
She gives me a Texas barbecue lesson. Her voice sounds like a tuba.
“Our barbecue’s different than your Southern style, baby,” she says. “You need to know that.”
Fair enough. Since I am a Southerner, I ask her what the regional differences are.
“Oh, lotsa differences. Mainly, in Texas we actually know how to cook.”
Texans.
“Also,” she adds. “We don’t care ‘bout side dishes like y’all do.”
Say it ain’t so. Side dishes are sacred to people in my parts. In
fact, each year local heathens visit Southern Baptist barbecues simply to eat their yearly requirement of coleslaw.
The fourth time I got baptized, for instance, I ate so much coleslaw I had to ask the congregation for forgiveness the following Sunday.
I order a pulled pork sandwich.
“Pork?” The old lady gives a hoarse laugh. “We don’t do pork. This is Texas. Brisket.”
“Okay,” I say. “A brisket sandwich, then.”
“No sandwiches, neither. Brisket.”
I order brisket and ask for extra sauce on the side.
“No sauce,” she says. “Brisket.”
Texans.
So I’m eating brisket that’s wrapped in foil. And we are having a conversation.
Beneath the woman’s rough skin is a lady who was born in Amarillo. She married a man in the military. She saw the whole world with him. Top to…