Bob Wills Day in Turkey, Texas

Last weekend—that would be the last weekend in April—we went to Turkey, Texas. Have you ever been there? Us neither. In fact, scarily enough, we’d never even heard of it. And The EGE has lived in Texas his entire life and been to every little tiny podunk town that’s ever hosted a United Girls’ Softball tournament or a pre-season basketball game. And I’ve been to most of them. Hell, my parents grew up in Levelland, Texas, back when it wasn’t much larger than Turkey is today.
That’s a tiny town:

And, as you may know, my husband loves country music. When I say “country music” here, I am not talking about Shania Twain and Travis Tritt. Oh, no. I’m talking Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Charley Pride, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline. And, of course, Bob Wills.
Our favorite  dance band, Jody Nix and the Texas Cowboys, plays a lot of those old songs. Jody’s dad, Hoyle Nix, played and toured with Bob Wills. Hoyle and Jody recorded with him on his last record. So who else is going to be the band for the last big dance of Bob Wills Week? Who else?
When we settled my mother’s estate, people thought we should go to Europe. The EGE and I kind of looked at each other, like, “Huh?” I asked him if he had any desire to go to Europe, and he said, “No, there’s too much I haven’t seen in the US.” And then, when we thought about it a little more, we realized there are all these places in Texas that neither of us has seen. Hence that whole South Texas Road Trip last month and the big honkin’-ass map pinned to the wall over there with orange-highlighted roads:  all the places we’ve driven together in Texas. There’s a whole lotta highway left to be highlighted.
So when we heard that Jody was playing in Turkey, we said, why not?  We got out the map and called the cat sitter.
Our work allows us to do pretty much whatever we want. We don’t have any family we have to tell when we leave town. For us, the only control on where we go is The Cat Sitter, to wit:  I periodically leave her a bottle of wine sitting on the counter, just as a continuing sort of bribe. She’d the only one we tell where we’re going. On the day she quits coming to take care of the cats, we’ll have to either stay home all the time or buy a travel trailer and take them all with us. Oy.
The trip was great fun in the kind of way you have fun without planning and without really having anything momentous happen. You know? Where you just sort of wander around and see what you can see. We put 700 miles on Merlin and saw a lot of country we hadn’t seen before.
First stop was in O’Donnell, between Midland and Tahoka on Highway 87. I’ve driven by O’Donnell at least 100 times in my life,, going back and forth to Tech, back and forth to my mother’s, but I’ve never stopped. On one of the silos along the highway, there’s the image of Dan Blocker, known to us Old People as Hoss Cartwright, on Bonanza. That show was one of the few constants of my life as a kid because we made sure to watch it every Sunday night because my father had played football at Sul Ross with Blocker. So, even though I had never met the man, he was Someone We Knew.
The least I can do is go to his museum, right? So we did. It’s one of those little museums that’s marvelous and sad, cheesy and touching, all at the same time. Across the street from the park and monuments,



It’s the O’Donnell Museum,
with just half of a large room devoted to Dan Blocker, with his stuff in little glassed-in cubicles.


The funny thing is that he wasn’t really from O’Donnell. His family moved there for a while, and the town claimed him after he got famous. Gee, does that sound familiar? Kind of like Midland and George W. Bush? Yeah, like I said:  kind of cheesy.
This was an outfit from when Blocker was 11, it says.
  He hit the growth spurt early on, apparently.
Most of the museum was filled with just regular old stuff, like an old ice scraper, the kind you ran over a block of ice to shave off pieces. The little hand-lettered sign had fallen down and landed on something else, and I asked The EGE how this ice shaver worked. He knows all this stuff, because, although he’s only three years older than I am, the things he remembers from his childhood are more like the things my parents remembered from theirs. Tools and kitchen utensils and hardware that's all a mystery to me. And so I have no clue how this ice shaver works.
He says, “That’s a measuring tape. The ice scraper is on the shelf above it.”
How the hell am I supposed to know this stuff?  I mean, really. I grew up with an ice maker in the freezer. Well, until we moved here to Midland, where the water is so hard it will kill an ice machine in, oh, about a week.
Anyway. Make Fun of The Silly White Woman Who Doesn’t Know A Measuring Tape. Go ahead.
The other side of this sign says “Hoss Cartwright,” which I loved; but there was a glare.

Sigh.
Then we drove to Lubbock and ate at La Diosa, the winery right in the middle of downtown. I love this place for many reasons:  it’s in an old garage, it’s full of funky old velvet sofas and mismatched chandeliers,

there’s local art on the walls.

Plants everywhere.


And it’s the only place inside the city limits of Lubbock, a dry town, where you can buy a bottle of wine. Because the rules are different for wineries.
Most people who post photographs of their meals take the photographs when the meal is still New, before it’s been decimated. I never even think of that. I think of taking photographs only when I’ve gotten tired of eating.

They have live music on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. The band was setting up, but it was time for us to hit the road again.
We head east, driving along highways and through tiny little towns we’ve never seen before, making left-hand turns onto brand-new-to-us roads.
We finally get to Turkey, and damn if, when we drive in, there aren’t wild turkey on the side of the road. Like ambassadors to the town. No, they weren’t stuffed. Real turkeys!
Since the town is so tiny, I was wondering where all the Bob Wills Day visitors were going to sleep. The celebration lasts all week, and there’s one hotel with 17 rooms, and they get from 5,000 – 10,000 people coming in. How do they do it? I had no clue.
Because I’m a goober. Duh:  RV’s.
See, I’ve never stayed in an RV. No Real Toilets, you know? So I can’t go there.
Literally.
The idea of driving down the highway, pulling a trailer with an attached tank filled with your own waste? I shudder. Just like the Porto Potty Man!
But, oh, honeys:  there were RV’s. They were EVERYWHERE. In parking lots, in vacant fields, on the sides of every street. Everywhere. Tons and tons of them. Like a convention of RV’s.
We drove down the main street, just trying to get our bearings and figure out where the dance was going to be, and there in the middle of town was a big cement square, with a metal roof, and a little stage with a band and three fiddlers. People were dancing, and I said, quick, quick, let’s dance!
One of us was ready to go. All she had to do was pull on her boots, which she had handily stashed behind the seat, with socks inside waiting.
The other of us had to dig out the hanging bag, find the jeans, climb into the back seat and change pants, wrestle on the boots, blah, blah, blah.
Someone is just better prepared, is all I’m saying.
We cross the street and immediately run into the only other Person of Color in the entire town. Shit:  in the entire county. He and The EGE start talking, and damn if he’s not a musician who’s scheduled to play at The EGE’s brother’s club in Midland. So they schmooze. Later, he gets up and plays a couple songs with the band. His singing voice isn’t great, but he can hurt you with his harmonica playing. Even a Brother in a Hawaiian shirt can find love in Turkey, Texas, if he can play.
That’s the key.
Those first few moments, when we walk out on some scuffed-up floor to dance, are always interesting. Everyone else there, whether it’s a church ballroom or an old falling-apart honky tonk or a little cement square on the main drag of Turkey, Texas, looks pretty much alike. Boots and jeans, maybe some skirts, a woman who’s forsaken her boots for a comfy pair of moccasins. And the guy who’s giddily wearing a beanie with a propeller on top—that’s about it for standing-out-in-the-crowd-ish-ness.
Until we walk out. There’s nothing we can do about it:  even if I wore the boots and jeans with the red-white-and-blue cowgirl shirt, there isn’t any way I’m going to fit in in the land of big hair, in the age of liver spots that add the only color to otherwise Whiter-Than-White Skin.
And as for The Ever-Gorgeous Earl? Well.
If we couldn’t dance, it would be a sad thing. And scary. There would be the disgusted looks, the snickers, the nudging elbows. And, in some places, maybe something more, perhaps a suggestion that we might just possibly have wandered into The Wrong Place.
We know this because people tell us about it later. The first time we went to the Stardust to dance, people had no idea what we were doing there. It was only months later, after we’d become regulars, that they’d come up and tell us that, at first, they thought we were in The Wrong Place.
As it is, people wait, watching every move to see if perhaps we ARE lost, if perhaps we’re going to get up there and start doing the Stanky Leg
The two-step, the waltz, the Schottische, the polka, the cotton-eyed Joe—we can do all those. But what secures our Right to Be There is the western swing. Think jitterbug crossed with two-step, lots of spins, never slowing from start to finish. It’s not a dance I could ever do with anyone else:  it’s fast, there’s a reliance on gravity and centrifugal force, and if The EGE missed my hand a single turn, I’d end up in the corner on my butt. It’s taken years for me to learn the amount of trust it takes to let him spin me continuously around the floor, hand behind the back, hand over his head, hand around my waist. The trick is that he keeps one hand on me somewhere, somehow, at all times. In that split second when his hand leaves mine and crosses behind, the fingers of his other hand brush my waist—it’s the only way I can trust I won’t go sailing out into space.
On bad days, the knuckles ache, and every grab is painful., but it’s still as close as I’ll ever get to Jesus, dancing with my husband.
So we get out on the little cement floor and dance. And it turns out that there are half a dozen couples we know from the Stardust .One couple tells us they’ve been there all week long, dancing and listening to music every day, drinking beer and eating and having a grand time. These are mostly people who have the resources to have retired early enough to enjoy it, buying an RV and taking their time traveling wherever they want to go. But I’m guessing there are more than a few who plan their vacations around Bob Wills Week.
The dance itself is in the old high school. I don’t know when it was built—the town was settled in the 1890’s—but it’s old, and the Bob Wills Foundation bought all the school buildings. I don’t know where the kids go to school, but if the total population is only 494, I’m guessing they didn’t build a brand-new school.
The dance was fun. Jody always puts on a good show, and although his voice isn’t that great, the music is imminently danceable—you can dance to almost every single song. Duh:  it’s a dance band. (The EGE sees absolutely no point in going to listen to any music where there’s no dance:  if you can’t dance, why bother?)
The people were friendly. Although everyone else was complaining about the heat, it felt about right to me. The only problem—and it was a big one, as far as I’m concerned—was that someone had put too much dance wax on the old floors. A little dance wax is a good thing, but too much is dangerous. People were slipping, and kids were running and sliding in between the dancers. I had to hang on for dear life lest my boots shoot out from under me and send me crashing into the wall.
And then there was The Retired US Marshall. He was an old friend of Jody’s, and he got up to give Jody some award. He was a skinny, crew-cut guy, seemingly with no sense of humor, intent on not letting anyone forget, for a nanosecond, that he was A Retired US Marshall. As in,
“As A Retired US Marshall, I’m proud to be able to come here tonight to present my friend Jody with this plaque, signed by me, A Retired US Marshall, in my capacity as A Retired US Marshall.”
Like that. And it was just silly and boring until he got to the part where he said he had been commissioned—or whatever it is—by the president. And I swear he looked right at me, sitting on the front row, and said, “That would be President George W. Bush.” And the crowd went wild.
And I thought, “What the fuck am I doing here?”
Does this ever happen to you? You’re going along, having a fine time, feeling all’s right with the world, and then someone says something, and everyone around you responds in a way that makes you immediately aware that you’re surrounded by people with whom you share almost nothing beyond that one little thing you were doing, i.e., dancing?
It happens to me. It happened to me once too often at the UU Church, which is why I quit going. The minister was talking about keeping the Sabbath holy and tithing, and I was astounded (this is a UU Church—hello!), and thought others would be making little grimaces and shaking their heads. But they all seemed to think this was a perfectly sane and logical idea. And I realized then, as I did sitting in the old high school in Turkey, Texas, that I do not fit in there. Or there. Or probably there. These are not my people.
Where were y’all, anyway? We could have had fun in Turkey. The first thing we would have done is buy us a city block. Other towns have:  they’ve bought blocks for their own Bob Wills Day ceremonies—we talked to the Official Organizer, and he told us.
So we’d buy our own block, and then we’d get busy designing some better t-shirts, because, honeys, let me tell you:  these Bob Wills t-shirts sucked the big winkie. No color, no cool graphics. No glitter.
OK, so maybe they don’t need glitter, but surely something could be done to perk up old Bob’s likeness on the front. And then we’d open our own winery and art studio. Do any of y’all know anything about grapes?
We left about 10:30 and headed out into the night to Amarillo to our room, since we do not own an RV. And then I remembered why we do not travel at night. Oh, I love to ride at night, listening to music and gliding down the highway in the dark. It’s an adventure. I love it.
But: there are the deer. In Texas, there are fucking deer everywhere. And they use the nighttime highway as their own personal gathering place.
One of my horrid fears is that we will hit a deer, and it won’t be dead but will be mortally injured. And it will be Our Responsibility to put it “out of its misery.” Could I do it? And how? I couldn’t chicken out this way. This poem haunts me.
This is my brain. Not my brain on drugs. Just my regular brain, fucking with me as usual.
So, what with the slick floors that kept me tighter than a Baptist spinster librarian and then the hall full of rabid Republicans and then watching constantly for the deer who were dancing happily across the road, it was like someone had reached in through my skin and tied all the muscles in my neck and back into big raggedy knots.
Anyway. We made it. No deer suffered any injury on our part. Of course, it took us fucking forever, since we drove about 45 miles an hour a good deal of the time. But. Nothing was hit by The EGE, not even the mice scurrying through the beams of the headlights.
[Note to self:  no more night driving. Ever.]
We spend the night in Amarillo, just so The EGE can get up the next morning and go to The Donut Stop and get coconut cinnamon rolls. These are as close as he’s found to the Fabled Cinnamon Rolls of His Childhood, for which he’s been looking forEVER. Those did not have coconut but were perfect in every other way, crispy on the outside and, well, I don’t know what else—I’m not a fan. But he was, and he tries every deep-fried cinnamon roll he encounters, always shaking his head sadly and saying, “Not crispy enough.” He can make the mouth sound that should accompany biting into The Perfect Cinnamon Roll. As him when you see him.
We find one of the seven Donut Stop locations and go in and order half a dozen, and they tell us they don’t have any. We ask how to get to another shop, and we go out to try to find it, and one of the young women runs out after us and says, “We’ll make you some!” And she does. And all is right with the world.
And I even eat one. Yes!  The first donut I’ve eaten in many, many years. And which, of course, lies in my stomach like a lump of lard all day long, never mind that I ate only the icing and coconut off the top. Evils bastard donuts.
We did not eat ANYTHING until we’d left Amarillo behind because, let me tell you, I do not see how anyone lives in that town. I do not. I forget that, in addition to Not Driving At Night, my other rule is:  Avoid Amarillo. Like Death.
I’m sure there are many, many very nice people there leading wonderful, fabulous lives. I do not know how they do it. Amarillo is filled with feed lots. Hundreds and thousands of cows packed together in tiny spaces, being fed up those final few weeks until they’re shipped off to die. You can smell it everywhere, the cow shit. And the misery:  even worse, to me, than the gagging odor of tons and tons of manure packed into these open pens is the misery of animals awaiting harvest. They are nothing more than meat, nothing more than beasts that are already dead and just don’t know it yet, pumped full of hormones and drugs and crammed into tiny spaces where they walk and lie in their own shit and wait to see what will happen next.
I rode with the map over my head so I wouldn’t have to see them. It just depresses the hell out of me, every time. How people can make a living raising living creatures only to kill them and sell them is beyond me. Raising tomatoes? That makes sense. Raising baby animals into animals big enough to bring a profit? No.
We headed southwest.
We stopped and ate a cinnamon roll:

We drove through Littlefield, the home of Waylon Jennings.


They grow cotton.

And then we went to Levelland, where my mother was born and raised, and where my father moved when he was a senior in high school. They got married there, and it was the place they took me when I was born, 12 years later, and they wanted to get me back to Texas (where I was conceived) as quickly as possible. So Levelland was the closest thing to home for me until we moved to Midland right as I turned 14.
Some little town we’d passed through had had a Dairy Mart, and I wondered if the Dairy Mart at the end of my grandmother’s street was still there. She worked there part time after my grandfather died, and I thought it would be fun to go in.
Alas, there’s a huge bank in its place. I knew my grandmother’s house had been sold and taken away shortly after she died. I hadn’t been there since, oh, about 1975. I hadn’t seen nor heard from my grandmother since I got married, of course. But still—I guess I thought there’d be something there, some sign of the house that always felt like home to me.
Not a damn thing.


On the left-hand side of that photo is where my grandfather’s wood shop was. He made the most gorgeous wooden furniture—a true artist, although he would never have said that about himself.
We drove by the address where my father’s parents lived. Same thing:  just a vacant lot. I didn’t even take a photograph.
It’s funny. It’s like everyone I ever knew, all the relatives from childhood, never even existed. I got a note via Facebook a couple of weeks ago from someone who said, “Hi. It’s your cousin.” And sure enough, it was a cousin—someone I hadn’t heard from since, gee, maybe 1973? I think the last time I saw him must have been at his dad’s funeral. He wanted to get in touch, maybe meet for coffee. I said sure, that would be great, and then reminded him that I hadn’t had any contact with anyone since I got married.
And that’s the last I heard from him. Guess he followed the link here. Ahh, my relatives.
Anyway. So Levelland was kind of depressing, and I have no reason to ever go back. We drove east to Lubbock and then north to New Deal and then about 5 miles out into the country to Pheasant Ridge Winery, and dang if, right at the turnoff, we didn’t see:  a pheasant. Yes!Turkeys in Turkey, pheasants at Pheasant Ridge.
The winery closed at 5, and it was 4:30 on a Sunday afternoon, so I wasn’t sure there’d be anyone there. But there was a veritable crowd, for a little winery:  four med students from Tech and a retired couple from Chicago who were driving their RV (it’s a theme weekend!) back from Arizona. They’d been there all afternoon, they said. I believed them: a lot of wine had been tasted. Rather than charging for tastings, the guy just poured whatever you wanted, as much as you wanted. He was a really cool kid:  a student at Tech, he’d woken up one morning and realized that on the days he had to go work at the winery, those were the days he woke up happy. So he switched his major to viniculture, and he’s happy every day. Two of his friends were there keeping him company, and they were full of enthusiasm for the things they wanted to do, the places they wanted to go, the things the guy was learning about growing grapes and making wine.
It was great, and I bought a case of wine. If we stop at a winery where the people are stiff and grouchy or snooty or whatever, I get off easily. But if they’re friendly—as they almost always are—I end up buying wine when I already have a closet full of the cheapo cabernet I like best. We have no more room for wine. But it doesn't stop me. Plus I had interesting wine to take to the preview party of the UU Garage sale. Ha.
And then we drove home. And Cutie Pie wasn’t doing well, and then there was all of last week.
Whew.
So that was our road trip. We’re getting better with Packing Lite. Snort. Well, OK:  our version of packing lite. Hey:  we’re working on it!
And our giganto map of Texas is filling up nicely with orange-highlighted highways.
Where are you off to?