Land of the Brand

Every student in the class was to pick a different US state. My best friend Tommy (who really ought to drop me a line one of these days) as I recall was stuck with Indiana, having relatives in judaeo-hungarian Hoosierdom as I recollect. Kids were fighting tooth and nail over New York and California. Somehow I was the only kid to whom it occurred to pick Texas.

What a great decision! Send a Texas bureaucrat a letter saying "I'm a Canadian sixth grader doing a project on a US state, and I picked Texas" and you'll get a twenty pound package of brochures and stuff. They must have gone all around Austin pickin stuff up for me.

I easily had the best project in the class.

I recall the part where I did something on each of the ten biggest cities in Texas. This may have somehting to do with my peculiar inclination to visit Wichita Falls, which came in tenth at the time. It's probably fiftieth now, but that always makes for good pictures...

Anyway, I've been in Texas for six months, and this event had completely slipped my mind. But I was a Texas fanatic once before in my life, long before I learned that you have to peel a tamale. I guess I spent several weeks totally obsessed with Texas, land of the brand.