Pre-emptive homesickness

“The farther from Texas a Texan gets, the more Texan he becomes,” wrote Willie Morris. Even though he was from Mississippi, he got that right. He’d spent some time at the University of Texas in Austin before moving to New York, writing books, and editing Harpers magazine. After a few years in Massachusetts, I developed a taste for something I had disdained while growing up: country western music. C&W for short.

All that “born to lose” and “your cheatin’ heart” music, I’d concluded, contributed to the pervasive sense of depression and defeatism I experienced in the part of rural Texas in which I grew up. I wanted nothing to do with that. Give me jazz and folk music and rock. Then, after a few years, I began to re-discover Ray Charles and Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn and Willie Nelson. Next thing I knew, I’d begun to care, for the first time, if Oklahoma beat Texas in the Cotton Bowl. Suddenly, I could be brought almost to tears by hearing Dolly Parton sing about how she would always love me. Yee gads! Football? Country music? Thousands of miles from Texas, I had, in fact, become more Texan than I’d ever been.

Now, although I’m living in an entirely different hemisphere, I don’t feel so distant from “the old country.” The world is tighter because of this – the Internet and email – and because of air travel and cheap long distance phone cards. On so many different levels, everything is interconnected now and we’re only beginning to realize how profoundly that is so. I’m in Australia and one of every 20 Australians is living somewhere else, many in the United States, some in Texas. I wonder if it’s all different now, or if some of them have begun to develop new-found appreciation for Slim Dusty?

For sure they have to miss the sound of kookaburras. Just thinking about a time when I might be living somewhere else and unable to occasionally hear their loud, racous, insane, laughter-like sounds gives me a taste of what a nephew of mine refers to as “pre-emptive homesickness.”

Now there’s a term that could form the basis of a country and western song: homesickness for something you haven’t left yet.

Oh, wait… I think it’s already been done. I vaguely remember a C&W song that says “I miss you already and you’re not even gone.” Drat! My song-writing career is over before it could soar.

Hmmm. Maybe not. Let’s see... in the key of G… “Before I got started…”