'What do I know?' asks the skeptic, Montaigne, a question hardly heard today outside ideological disputes. As a teacher who has returned to classrooms and libraries after an absence of fifteen years, I ask myself what I have learned in five decades that is worth passing on.

What I know best is a certain restlessness, which I believe to be fairly common in my generation, though less common than heart disease and ulcers. Perhaps I am spared these latter maladies by being muddle-headed and unsure of myself. Perhaps I lack character, but I can't help feeling that my confusion is in some part the confusion of my age. Twenty-odd years ago I missed seeing a planetary conjunction which was billed in the media as the truth about the Star of Bethlehem. But I and my family watched humans walk on the moon that year, on our black and white TV set in Durham, North Carolina.

In Texas, the easy certainties have always come from family, land, and religion. Habits arising from those easy certainties have broadened into the larger society amongst our timely and untimely adventures, so that non-Texans take Billy Sol Estes and Lyndon Johnson to be symbolic of the breed. Western movies are dead. Today's cowboys get shot down in the jungles of Nicaragua, or sit out the season in contract disputes. Cowboying and the pious land-grabbing that goes with it have by and large failed us Americans as a nation, but the drama of the old-time land grabbers is still being played out around the world.

To be a West Texan is to have credit for a college course which might be called GREAT FRONTIER I as one's birthright - the history of the Indian wars, the Alamo, the Spanish conquest and colonization of Cibola. This is particularly true for me, since I am half a New Mexican. But GREAT FRONTIER II, the history of the self-willed gallantry of Dixie, with its yankee and Elizabethan roots, is a story I can tell from family memory. Texas voted for secession 46,129 to 14,697 over Sam Houston's opposition. Great Granddaddy Colonel Wm. T., with 104 slaves at the time, was in the vanguard of secessionists. On the other hand, Robert E. Lee was Commandant of ill-fated Camp Cooper, not far from Abilene, in the 1850's, and I never knew it until I read it in A. C. Greene's A Personal Country (1969). We weren't fighting the war of northern aggression in my family. Granddaddy was a Roosevelt Democrat and a union man. He had put the south behind him, I think, when he came west in 1926.

Granddaddy tried to get to Albuquerque but never made it, just as my father never made it around the world and back, returning to Texas because my grandmother, whom he always called 'love,' hated the desert. She had never really liked Abilene. When I first saw the Louisiana bayou country, from whence she came, I understood. Still, I'm glad that Granddaddy had the urge to light out for the territory, especially since he died years later, sadly, in his mind, before his body failed him.

A. C. Greene has written that every man has a village in his heart. He and I happen to share the same village, Abilene, Texas, though my Abilene is different from A. C.'s, haunted by different ghosts, and neither exists any longer. The southern story is part of a past with which my own life and blood are continuous - in that village. I know that story first and chiefly not from books, but in the rise and fall of my grandfather's voice. As I sift my village memories, I know them to begin my sense of belonging to the culture of civilized things.

One of the loveliest memories of all comes from a Christmas party given by Miss Nancy Craig Lasley, Abilene's piano teacher. To be sure there were others who taught the keyboard in my village, but Miss Lasley was the chief, just as the Clack sisters and Selma Bishop were schoolmarms to the generations at Abilene High. This particular party was one of the last times Miss Lasley lit candles on her Christmas tree, around 1953. After music and punch and cookies, we students and guests and firemen -there had to be a fire truck handy - were allowed to take the candles from the tree and keep them. I still have mine, somewhere, with its little German silver holder. That's my village, Mozart sonatas at Christmas in an old house on Grape Street, when Grape Street still had brick paving. I should like my story of the ultimate west to end there, but it doesn't.

In the continuing city that surrounds my village, there remains a great fund of uncivilized energy, and more, something far more fearful. I think my ancestors slaughtered the southwestern wolves because of the ruined dog in themselves. Great Granddaddy Wm. T. shot Robert Potter, I was always told. As the originator of the crime of Potterism and an original of the expression 'Gone to Texas,' Potter may have needed killing, but where does the good fight end and something else take over? Potter himself might have asked the question. At some point even righteous anger becomes gratuitous. 'What's the matter with you Texans?' I remember being asked after Charles Whitman shot sixteen people from the library tower at the University in Austin. 'What's the matter with you Greeks?' cry Aeschylus and the tragedians. We reply that blind Homer long ago invoked the rage of doomed Achilles as the ground of poetry.

These days I sometimes find myself humming the old prophetic hymns I remember from Sunday evenings, when we let our hair down and recalled the claims of the historic church militant. "Doubt and fear and things of earth/in vain to me are calling./ None of these shall move me . . . !" Ten thousand years in the promised land, the greed, the visionary idealism, the tenacity, the dogmatism, the bravado that tells you to suck it up when somebody dies - "Methinks I see a strong and puissant nation," but let that go. The ultimate west may be the shine on God's backside - or only a media event.

When I was a student at SMU, a friend's father died back in Abilene. My friend called to tell me about it and when the funeral was, and to ask me to come and help him with his mother, who was pretty bad off, and to ask me to bring him his car, which he had left with me the week before.

I drove my friend's car the 180 miles from Dallas to Abilene in under three hours, flat out ninety miles an hour most of the way. A semi almost ran me down near Ranger, driving on the wrong side of the road. I swerved into the ditch and kept on trucking, as the saying goes.

I don't remember very much about the funeral, or consoling my friend's mother, but I remember the ride in that 300 horsepower 1953 Olds Rocket 88 with a fourspeed hydramatic and power steering - my God, I remember that ride.

And now that I've said that I think I'll tell my best Lyndon Johnson story just for the hell of it. It must have been the summer of 1948. I would have been about 11, I guess, prowling around in the streets and alleys of Abilene, wearing a pair of cutoff blue jeans which was my summer uniform, no shoes, no shirt, my shoulder blades sticking out, looking for trouble with my treasured Daisy Red Rider Carbine, when I heard this weird noise in the sky that turned out to be a helecopter.

I ran to the high school athletic field just down the block and watched that bird land (bird, get it—remember MacBird?). As I was standing there in front of the crowd with my trusty rifle more or less at port arms, the helecopter door opened and this tall gangly man with big ears sort of shuffled out. He had on a white suit. Looked at me, did a big double take and said "Don't shoot, son!" In those days grownups always called me 'son.' It was a custom, don'cha know.  

Well, my day was made. I had had been noticed by the great and mighty. It's probably one reason I would have voted for Lyndon after I had come to hate him later (not in 1964 though, didn't hate him then). Now it's a different world. Lyndon is long and sadly dead. And I hope wherever he is if he's anywhere, he has a couple cases of scotch, a big Lincoln and a pasture to drive it in, and a good crapper on which to sit and do whatever talking he may do with his companions. He always liked to do that, I'm told.

[The first of this is the concluding section of an essay entitled "The Ultimate West" that was published in Pembroke Magazine in 1992. If I were to write it again, I might change some of the language, or I might not. My grandfather was from an old-time east Texas family. There is a little town, now a suburb of Marshall, named Scottsville, for his people. My father went to the Philippines in August 1941, as a medical officer with what was called the Two Hundredth Coast Artillery from New Mexico, and never returned. My Texas home town, though I was born in Albuquerque and have always wanted to return there, is Abilene, Texas, almost in the geographic center of the state, but part of the region known as West Texas. The essay contains a section on ruined wild dogs who, according to John Graves, have moved into the niche in the food chain left by wolves who were systematically slaughtered in an earlier time. The part I've tacked on at the end was posted at Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms, 29 July1999. ]