We are often of time and place, the long years of our lives formed, perhaps unduly, by the briefest of moments, the almost imagined events of the past.
We move on, literally and figuratively. But a part of us always remains anchored in that long ago place. Perhaps we're like birds, imprinted by our surrounding at our first moments of awareness. Perhaps certain locations speak to us in a language we instinctively understand and we carry those rhythms with us forever, always hear that voice in our memory.
I lived as a full-time resident of the state of Oklahoma for exactly the four years I attended the University of Oklahoma. And while my family still lives there and I have visited often, it would take a gigantic belief in cultural identity to proclaim me an Oklahoman.
However, I feel like I do know a thing or two about the place. I know the last syllable of the name of the town of Cyrill rhymes with "shrill" and the town of Miami ends in an imaginary "a." I know there's a working oil well in the petunia patch just in front of the state Capitol, its location like that of a religious shrine placed before some ancient seat of council.
And I know on top of the Capitol dome is a statue of a Native American. It's called "The Guardian." If you could get close enough to see it, you'd notice the brave's lance is thrust through his legging and into the earth. That's in keeping with the tradition that in battle, warriors would stake themselves to the ground to demonstrate they would never run in the face of adversity.
Aside from the Gobi Desert, I can't imagine a harder place to live than Oklahoma. When it's hot, it's too hot. When it's cold, it's too cold. The wind blows all the time and periodically turns into a tornado that destroys your town. Flooding follows drought and bust follows boom like night follows day. An oil executive I went to college with said, "you don't prosper in Oklahoma. You just barely survive in a higher tax bracket."
And yet, for the harshness of their surroundings, the people of Oklahoma are warm, friendly, genuine and welcoming. They help strangers and friends alike and hold family dear. And they are more than willing to extend that definition of family to any and every one they've come in contact with.
They also understand tragedy. They know what it's like to see your world turned upside down, to realize how little control you have of your circumstances in the face of nature or evil or just the maelstrom of people's lives that, too frequently these days, sweeps up innocents in its raging waters.
They've seen a madman kill or maim nearly 1,000 people in downtown Oklahoma City, some of them children, in some twisted statement. They have to be specific as to which of the tornadoes that ripped through their towns they're referring to, which of the plane crashes that decimated the coaching staffs of their school they mean.
And some of them will have to explain what block they were on when a woman impaired by alcohol or drugs or whatever demons spoke to her at that moment drove her car through a crowd of people at Oklahoma State's Homecoming parade last Saturday, stopping only when she hit a pole and couldn't go any further.
College rivalries are often baseless squabbles of imagined superiority and implied inferiority. The difference between the experience is a matter of geography, the quality of the education dependent more on your own effort than we care to admit.
While I am proud of my school, I always bore a grudging respect for the atmosphere in Stillwater. How the school and town seemed to embrace each other, how for years after graduation OSU alumni thought of themselves as part of the "Cowboy Family." I may have joked about the gaudy orange, but I admired the sense of community it seemed to represent.
A friend of mine from Fort Smith was a student at OSU when Arkansas beat Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl. He brought a copy of his local paper with its king-sized headline declaring the win back to school with him and plastered it to his fraternity room door, sure his fellow Cowboys would revel in OU's loss.
He came back from class to discover the paper was gone. He knew this, because his door was, as well. Oklahomans understand the first rule of family: I can beat up on my brother, but you don't get to.
I am not an Oklahoman. My time there has long since passed, and chances are I'm the last link in any chain connecting my immediate family to my university and to that state. But I can still feel their pain.
Someone once said the Russian people exist simply to serve as a warning to others. Well, the people of Oklahoma may exist to serve as something else. Perhaps they exist to show people what resilience is like.
It's like "The Guardian." Whatever happens, he doesn't run.
Commentary on 10/30/2015