Nebraska Quotes

I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it.

You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." To a divorced mother of three, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005

Nobody's that naive," she muttered. "Nobody's that guileless." "He's from Nebraska." Peabody scanned her pocket unit. "From where?" "Nebraska." Peabody waived a hand, vaguely west.... "They still grow them pretty guileless in Nebraska. I think it's all that soy and corn.

Wow. This makes grand central look like a bus stop in Buttfuck Nebraska.

The earth turned to bring us closer, it spun on itself and within us, and finally joined us together in this dream as written in the Symposium. Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices; time passed in minutes and millennia. An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh arrived in Nebraska. A rooster was singing some distance from the world, in one of the thousand pre-lives of our fathers. The earth was spinning with its music carrying us on board; it didn't stop turning a single moment as if so much love, so much that's miraculous was only an adagio written long ago in the Symposium's score.

When I was young I wanted to be just like him. One of the charm, of a bright orange smile and muscular laughter. Bold brown eyes flashing fearless when he sat not alone on cold blue nights in empty boxcars. Riding a freight train's solitary wail away from Nebraska Depression, accompanying dreams withered farms. Nothing left but the leaves of possibilities.

I find Ugg boots really comforting... Because they remind me that we live in a place you can still get away with, even get excited by, Ugg boots. In fashionable places, you have to pretend that you're over them, or that you've always hated them. But in Nebraska, you can still be happy about new Ugg boots. That's nice. There's no end to the innocence.

We're in Des Moines, Iowa today, were in Omaha, Nebraska yesterday and Boise, Idaho the day before. When we landed at the airport in Boise, from Portland, Oregon this lady from our plane came up from behind as we walked down the terminal. She approached me and said "Taylor, I just love your song and want to wish you great things in you career." I looked and her and said "Well, THANK YOU!" and then said " who did you talk to?". (and then pointed to my Mom and the Label rep we were traveling with) I was convinced that one of them had talked to the lady on the plane and told her about me and my song. The lady said "neither one" and then I said "Well, how did you know who I was?" and the lady said "because I listen to radio and I watched your video". This was the first time someone had actually KNOWN who I was and MY NAME. wow. I just walked over and hugged her, and said ...."You're the first person who's ever done that, thankyou." It was an amazing moment to remember, and I always will.

She wore a cantilevered, augmented-breast-skimming satin dress the colour of egg-yolk. Somewhere in deepest Nebraska, a prom queen two sizes smaller than Selena was wondering where the fuck her outfit had disappeared to.

Her smile was the same knee-weakening smile that she’d given me the first time she said she loved me, in the parking lot of the animal shelter in Ogallala, Nebraska.

If you've had good gin on a hot day in Southern California with the people you love, you forget Nebraska. The two things cannot coexist. The stronger, better of the two wins.

What do people eat in Nebraska?" "Their dreams.

He too had watched as the outer limits of his life had narrowed from the world at large, to the island of Manhattan, to that book-lined office in which he awaited with a philosophical resignation the closing of the finger and thumb. And then this... This! A little boy from Nebraska appears at his doorstep with a gentle demeanor and a fantastical tale. A tale not from a leather-bound tome mind you... But from life itself. How easily we forget-we in the business of storytelling- that life was the point all along.

They're all gone, my tribe is gone. Those blankets they gave us, infected with smallpox, have killed us. I'm the last, the very last, and I'm sick, too. So very sick. Hot. My fever burning so hot. I have to take off my clothes, feel the cold air, splash water across my bare skin. And dance. I'll dance a Ghost Dance. I'll bring them back. Can you hear the drums? I can hear them, and it's my grandfather and grandmother singing. Can you hear them? I dance one step and my sister rises from the ash. I dance another and a buffalo crashes down from the sky onto a log cabin in Nebraska. With every step, an Indian rises. With every other step, a buffalo falls. I'm growing, too. My blisters heal, my muscles stretch, expand. My tribe dances behind me. At first they are no bigger than children. Then they begin to grow, larger than me, larger than the trees around us. The buffalo come to join us and their hooves shake the earth, knock all the white people from their beds, send their plates crashing to the floor. We dance in circles growing larger and larger until we are standing on the shore, watching all the ships returning to Europe. All the white hands are waving good-bye and we continue to dance, dance until the ships fall off the horizon, dance until we are so tall and strong that the sun is nearly jealous. We dance that way.

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.

—Colton, ¿qué tú quieres que los lectores aprendan de tu historia? Sin dudarlo, la miró a los ojos y le dijo: —Quiero que sepan que el cielo es real. Todd Burpo Imperial, Nebraska Mayo de 2010

Instead, the terrain looked like Nebraska—perpetual plains that faded into the horizon. When I asked Taukane where the forest was, he said, simply, “Gone.

Our hearts may have broken in Nebraska but in Colorado they split open along the fractures, crumble to pieces, blow away. The peaks and green valleys, the lakes set at the foot of mountains like offerings. Beautiful and doomed and thus terrible.

Omaha, Nebraska. Sac City, Iowa. Alexandria, Indiana. Darwin, Minnesota. Hollywood, California. Alliance, Nebraska.

way clean over in Nebraska. He’d even showed her the pictures in his wallet of his kids, two little boys in baseball uniforms, Bobby and Billy. So no matter how many times her father asked who the man

Here’s something else I believe: if you’re going into a very dark place—like Wilf James’s Nebraska farmhouse in “1922”—then you should take a bright light, and shine it on everything. If you don’t want to see, why in God’s name would you dare the dark at all?

Sometimes I think the city is naturally conducive to coincidences in the same way that Plains states like Nebraska and Oklahoma are conducive to twisters, in the same way that mountain lakes are conducive to lightning.

Most people would live in an outhouse in Bangladesh before they would voluntarily move to Nebraska.

Nebraska’s like Kansas. But in color.

The sun hitched up her trousers and soldiered on up into the sky. September squinted at it and wondered if the sun here was different than the sun in Nebraska. It seemed gentler, more golden, deeper. The shadows it cast seemed more profound. But September could not be sure. When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean that it is brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.

...Nebraska was white, a page as still as fallen snow. It was not crosshatched with roads, overrun with the hard lines of interstate systems. It was a state on which you could make lists, jot down phone numbers, draw pictures.

Nightlife is not for sissies, except of course for career sissies; an evening out requires at least a full day of minute preparation. . . . People move to New York to invent themselves, and nightclubs provide a runway for the results. It’s easy to spend twenty hours per day slaving in a Pennsylvania coal mine or threshing some Nebraska oat crop; going out in New York is work.

One of these days I'm going to leave Nebraska, cut all those strings and ties and travel to the other prairies of this earth. I must know if the people who live on those other prairies feel the same way about their horizons as we do about ours.

Nebraska,” I said. “What’s in Nebraska?” “A top-secret Earth Defense Alliance base.

he had a family in Lincoln, all the way clean over in Nebraska. He’d even showed her the pictures in his wallet of his kids, two little boys in baseball uniforms,

I bet you guys can’t name three things invented in Nebraska,” Coke asked the family. “No, but I’m sure you can,” his sister replied. “Kool-Aid, CliffsNotes, and Eskimo Pies!

hurricane down in Florida somewhere. Who in Iowa thought about Florida? People in Iowa had problems of their own—maybe not dust storms like the ones out in Nebraska and Oklahoma,

In Omaha, we were part of the largest African American extended family in Nebraska. In Pleasanton, we would be the chocolate chip in the cookie.

It pulled out of the dirt lot, kicking up a rooster-tail of dust behind it. The taillights dwindled away to red points down Highway 63, and the Nebraska nightwind began to pull the hanging dust apart.

Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans -- vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming.

You're not from around here, are you?" That got a smile out oof Neal, a real smile, with both sides of his mouth. "Nebraska," he said. "Is that like Kansas?" "It's more like Kansas than other things, I guess. Do you know a lot about Kansas?" "I've watched The Wizard of Oz many, manny times." "Well then," he said, "Nebraska's like Kansas. But in color.

sometimes things turn inside out and twist and swirl and you lose yourself and sometimes they turn out and you find yourself again.  And you go on.

To pass the time, I made valiant strides in my effort to read Ulysses, but feared I was losing the war. A hundred pages in, I was getting the sneaking suspicion that James Joyce might have been an asshole, and by Nebraska I was in a foul mood.

Old-time ranchers planted cheatgrass because it would green up fast in the spring and provide early forage for grazing cattle,” Oyster says, nodding his head at the world outside. This first patch of cheatgrass was in southern British Columbia, Canada, in 1889. But fire spreads it. Every year, it dries to gunpowder, and now land that used to burn every ten years, it burns every year. And the cheatgrass recovers fast. Cheatgrass loves fire. But the native plants, the sagebrush and desert phlox, they don’t. And every year it burns, there’s more cheatgrass and less anything else. And the deer and antelope that depended on those other plants are gone now. So are the rabbits. So are the hawks and owls that ate the rabbits. The mice starve, so the snakes that ate the mice starve. Today, cheatgrass dominates the inland deserts from Canada to Nevada, covering an area over twice the size of the state of Nebraska and spreading by thousands of acres per year. The big irony is, even cattle hate cheatgrass, Oyster says. So the cows, they eat the rare native bunch grasses. What’s left of them... “When you think about it from a native plant perspective,” Oyster says, “Johnny Appleseed was a fucking biological terrorist.” Johnny Appleseed, he says, might as well be handing out smallpox.

Sunlight stretched across the Nebraska miles, burning fiery pink-gold through a bank of clouds on the horizon. It was almost sunset, and the land spread out, an expanse of never-ending cornfields broken only by the rising silhouette of a windmill or grain silo.

Like after a prairie fire. I saw one, years ago, when we were in Nebraska. It seems like the end of the world. The earth is all scorched and black and everything green is gone. But after the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow.” She held Izzy at arm’s length, wiped her cheek with a fingertip, smoothed her hair one last time. “People are like that, too, you know. They start over. They find a way.

I really want us to grow old together, you know? Go through all the typical life stuff together, even if that means we can only e-mail each other once a week because you moved to the middle of nowhere in Nebraska with your ten kids, and I'm still California because it's amazing. Just like in that one movie - we'll never lose touch with each other, ever. Is that weird?! No, Feenie said. It's perfectly fucking normal.

LAST summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden—Jim Burden, as we still call him in the West. He and I are old friends—we grew up together in the same Nebraska town—and we had much to say to each other. While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one's childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.

I have said that there is no "average" American. That is due to the circumstance that the people of the United States differ from each as widely as the parts they live in. The New Yorker is a different specimen of man from the Westerner; the latter is entirely different again from the people of Texas. The Middle West, such States for instance as Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska or Iowa, have an entirely different psychology from that of Florida or Lower California. Their habits of life, their modes of thought, even their language is different. Still further, it must also be considered that millions of foreigners and descendants of foreign born people live in the United States and are part of the entire population that is known as "American". Add to this more than 10 million negroes, not to mention the score of different Indian (red-skin) tribes, who are the real, indigenous Americans. In this conglomeration of races it is impossible to speak of the "average" American, nor can any adequate estimate of American psychology be made on such a basis.

The last thing he saw before cobwebs clouded his vision was the blue beauty of a Nebraska sky.

Son, if you were any farther from fine you'd be in Nebraska.

Riding across Nebraska in a covered wagon was a monthlong immersion therapy in kindness, a reminder of the essential decency of my country.

I wondered how many Americans knew what states bordered Nebraska, especially when fifty percent of America’s high school students think New Mexico is a foreign country.

Bonnie Jean said, “You don’t understand. Daddy’s taking us away. To Nebraska.” Bess Hartman looked at the mother,

Art, like Nebraska, is a journey into thin air, a walk into whiteness, where you lose everything but yourself.

You're a vampire, Richie. And I've got a gun the size of Nebraska. What's the worst that could happen?

The north of Islington,’ Ning said. ‘Some place called Nebraska House.’ *

She said from the moment she met him she could tell that all he wanted was to find a way to strap her into Nebraska’s electric chair. But the joke was on him. Because she requested hanging.

If someone were to have pressed a sheet of glass down over the top of Alliance, Nebraska, in winter, it would have resembled an ant farm. Everything was a tunnel eaten neatly, carefully into the snow. The tunnel of the streets branching into the narrower tunnels of driveways and carved-out sidewalks. The snow banked over cars, lawn furniture, porches, like frozen animal carcasses stored for future need.

Once or twice every night, serving dinner at the big round table, Enid glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking, and made him blush. Al was Kansan. After two months he found courage to take her skating. They drank cocoa and he told her that human beings were born to suffer. He took her to a steel-company Christmas party and told her that the intelligent were doomed to be tormented by the stupid. He was a good dancer and a good earner, however, and she kissed him in the elevator. Soon they were engaged and they chastely rode a night train to McCook, Nebraska, to visit his aged parents. His father kept a slave whom he was married to.

And just like that, as if I hadn't said anything at all, the ladies sprang into a conversation about the sinful nature the Jews possessed when killing their Lord Jesus. I didn't know if I was hearing this right because I had become so intoxicated, but I couldn't believe that anyone would talk about religion while on vacation. How could Miss Nebraska think this was a proper environment to discuss something so controversial? One woman went on to say that if she had her way not only would President Bush serve a second four-year term, but she hoped they would overturn Roe v. Wade. This woman was obviously a menace to society and needed to be stopped.

Another example, this one from the 2000 crash of the dot-com bubble, concerns a self-described introvert based in Omaha, Nebraska, where he’s well known for shutting himself inside his office for hours at a time. Warren Buffett, the legendary

There’s a widespread conviction, spoken and unspoken, that the road to riches is trimmed in Ivy and the reins of power held by those who’ve donned Harvard’s crimson, Yale’s blue and Princeton’s orange, not just on their chests but in their souls. No one told that to the Fortune 500. They’re the American corporations with the highest gross revenues. The list is revised yearly. As I write this paragraph in the summer of 2014, the top ten are, in order, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Phillips 66, General Motors, Ford Motor, General Electric and Valero Energy. And here’s the list, in the same order, of schools where their chief executives got their undergraduate degrees: the University of Arkansas; the University of Texas; the University of California, Davis; the University of Nebraska; Auburn; Texas A&M; the General Motors Institute (now called Kettering University); the University of Kansas; Dartmouth College and the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Just one Ivy League school shows up.

FOR SOME TIME, I have believed that everyone should be allowed to have, say, ten things that they dislike without having to justify or explain to anyone why they don’t like them. Reflex loathings, I call them. Mine are: Power walkers. Those vibrating things restaurants give you to let you know when a table is ready. Television programs in which people bid on the contents of locked garages. All pigeons everywhere, at all times. Lawyers, too. Douglas Brinkley, a minor academic and sometime book reviewer whose powers of observation and generosity of spirit would fit comfortably into a proton and still leave room for an echo. Color names like taupe and teal that don’t mean anything. Saying that you are going to “reach out” to someone when what you mean is that you are going to call or get in touch with them. People who give their telephone number so rapidly at the end of long phone messages that you have to listen over and over and eventually go and get someone else to come and listen with you, and even then you still can’t get it. Nebraska. Mispronouncing “buoy.” The thing that floats in a navigation channel is not a “boo-ee.” It’s a “boy.” Think about it. Would you call something that floats “boo-ee-ant”? Also, in a similar vein, pronouncing Brett Favre’s last name as if the “r” comes before the “v.” It doesn’t, so stop it. Hotel showers that don’t give any indication of which way is hot and which cold. All the sneaky taxes, like “visitor tax” and “hospitality tax” and “fuck you because you’re from out of town tax,” that are added to hotel bills. Baseball commentators who get bored with the game by about the third inning and start talking about their golf game or where they ate last night. Brett Favre. I know that is more than ten, but this is my concept, so I get some bonus ones.

Why, these men would destroy the Bible on evidence that would not convict a habitual criminal of a misdemeanor. They found a tooth in a sand pit in Nebraska with no other bones about it, and from that one tooth decided that it was the remains of the missing link. They have queer ideas about age too. They find a fossil and when they are asked how old it is they say they can't tell without knowing what rock it was in, and when they are asked how old the rock is they say they can't tell unless they know how old the fossil is.

But Nebraska was not always a bed of roses. When the first settlers arrived, they found a harsh, unforgiving place, a vast treeless expanse of barren, drought-parched soil. And so, summoning up the dynamic pioneer spirit of hope and steely determination, they left. But a few of them remained and built sod houses, which are actually made of dirt. Think about that. You can’t clean a sod house, because it would be gone. The early settlers had a hell of a time getting this through to their children. “You kids stop tracking dirt out of the house!” they’d yell.

North Platte, Nebraska, is about as isolated as a small town can conceivably be. It’s in the middle of the middle of the country, alone out on the plains; it is hours by car even from the cities of Omaha and Lincoln. Few people venture there unless they live there, or have family there.

In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow. West of the 98TH Meridian - where it sometimes rain and it sometimes doesn’t – towns, like weeds, spring up when it rains, dry up when it stops. But in a dry climate, the husk of the plant remains. The stranger might find, as if preserved in amber, something of the green life that was once lived there, and the ghosts of men who have gone on to a better place. The withered towns are empty, but not uninhabited. Faces sometimes peer out from the broken windows, or whisper from the sagging balconies, as if this place – now that is dead – had come to life. As if empty it is forever occupied. Reproduced in THE BORSCHT BELT from The Works of Love by Wright Morris by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1949, 1951 by Wright Morris.

McGovern is very sensitive about this sort of thing, and for excellent reason. In three of the last four big primaries (Ohio, Nebraska & California) he has spent an alarmingly big chunk of his campaign time denying that behind his calm and decent facade he is really a sort of Trojan Horse candidate—coming on in public as a bucolic Jeffersonian Democrat while secretly plotting to seize the reins of power and turn them over at midnight on Inauguration Day to a Red-bent hellbroth of radicals, Dopers, Traitors, Sex Fiends, Anarchists, Winos, and “extremists” of every description.

He "had business at Boys Town in Omaha, Nebraska" where the wayward boys were being traumatized and sexually abused in accordance with the Catholic involvement in Project Monarch. Survivor Paul Bonacci of the infamous Franklin Cover-up case has named Alex Houston as one of his abusers there in Boys Town.

was headed for Nebraska. Now there’s a sentence you don’t want to have to say too often if you can possibly help it. Nebraska must be the most unexciting of all the states. Compared with it, Iowa is paradise. Iowa at least is fertile and green and has a hill. Nebraska is like a 75,000-square-mile bare patch.

There is no identifiable accent here unless you’ve cultivated a very careful ear. This is an easy place to live, milder in feel than Nebraska to the west, negligibly warmer in the winter than Minnesota to the north, of less imagined consequence to the world than Illinois to the east or Missouri to the south.

John, you don’t like me.” “I’ve never said I didn’t like you.” “You don’t have to say it. You just look at me and I know it’s true.” His brows drew together. “How do I look at you?” She sat back. “You scowl and frown at me as if I’d done something tacky, like scratch myself in public.” He smiled. “That bad, huh?” “Yes.” “What if I promise not to scowl at you?” “I don’t think that’s a promise you can keep. You are a very moody person.” He removed one hand from his pocket and placed it over the even pleats of his shirt. “I’m very easygoing.” Georgeanne rolled her eyes. “And Elvis is alive and raising minks somewhere in Nebraska.

Another example, this one from the 2000 crash of the dot-com bubble, concerns a self-described introvert based in Omaha, Nebraska, where he’s well known for shutting himself inside his office for hours at a time. Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and one of the wealthiest men in the world, has used exactly the attributes we’ve explored in this chapter—

In the Midwest “interesting” is inevitably negative. It functions as a euphemism for incomprehensible, horrendous, or even fucking stupid.

were familiar with this, the great lie upon which modern medical practice rests, that the doctor is always busy doing something more important than keeping scheduled

Just then, the music stopped. The band needed a break from Mike’s requests. As they were exiting the stage, a sudden uproar--an explosion--erupted from the first floor of the country club. ASU had shocked the world by beating Nebraska. The final score: 19--0. September twenty-first was about to go down in history as the most memorable date of Marlboro Man’s life.

I was on the point of saying something about the power of positive thinking, but anyone who’s reached the age of thirty ought to know at a glance when something is irredeemably fucked, and be mature enough to admit it.

gonna need this if you go out on the next set of rounds.” “Apart from the weather, how is it out there?” said Bob. “What kind of activity is taking place around town?” “Awful quiet,” replied Fred, shrugging out of his own bulky slicker and carrying it over to hang it on a peg next to where Bob had hung his earlier. “The storm’s got everybody sort of hunkered in close and tight. Only a handful of customers in Bullock’s, nothing like it usually would be. Little livelier up in New Town. You know how those miners are hell-bent on having their fun, no matter what, when they get down out of the hills. But even there, in the saloons and gambling dens, it’s a little slower than normal. And all those tents up and down Gold Avenue? Boy, are they flapping and shivering and shuddering in this wind. Wouldn’t be surprised if some of them don’t tear loose and end up over in Nebraska somewhere before

He was the one, however, with whom no one wanted his or her picture taken, the one to whom no one wanted to introduce his son or daughter. Louis and Gage knew him; they had met him and faced him down in New England, some time ago. He was waiting to choke you on a marble, to smother you with a dry-cleaning bag, to sizzle you into eternity with a fast and lethal boggie of electricity—Available at Your Nearest Switchplate or Vacant Light Socket Right Now. There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nurdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too—Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who’s out there? you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don’t be afraid, it’s just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leukemia! Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let’s go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night. Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation—in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name’s Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want—hell, we’re old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can’t stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I’ve got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha. And that thin voice is crying, “I love you, Tigger! I love you! I believe in you, Tigger! I will always love you and believe in you, and I will stay young, and the only Oz to ever live in my heart will be that gentle faker from Nebraska! I love you . . .” We cruise . . . my son and I . . . because the essence of it isn’t war or sex but only that sickening, noble, hopeless battle against Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. He and I, in our white van under this bright Florida sky, we cruise. And the red flasher is hooded, but it is there if we need it . . . and none need know but us because the soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can . . . and tends it.

About thirty truckers in Brighton, Colorado, refused to move their rigs in protest of the high cost of diesel fuel, fuel shortages, and the fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. Other drivers followed suit in Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, Nebraska, Connecticut, and Delaware. In New Jersey, the governor had to call on the National Guard to remove blockading trucks. The truckers complained that higher fuel prices and lower speed limits were threatening their profits.

A Lutheran church in Nebraska is typically a place where any mad passion for Christ is politely concealed. Men and women recite the various creeds in hypnotic monotone; the hymns, pumped from wheezy organ pipes, are sung with no lilt or musicality. The members of the choirs not only don't dance, they don't sway. That's not to say no one is ever smacked hard with God's love or filled up to the eyeballs with the Holy Spirit, but when you are, you keep it to yourself." (48)

This night is a cold, deep lake, and I am lying on its bottom, surprised to be able to breathe. The bellied sail of the moon has been wafted out of sight, but thousands of starlights sparkle up there on the surface, just bright enough that I can hold up the fish of my fingers and watch them dart this way and that, hungrily feeding on the darkness. Who could be happier to be alive than I? - Ted Kooser, from “April,” The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book (University of Nebraska Press, 2014)

I’ve applied to Brentwood every semester since I was a freshman. My mom fought me on it at first, but I think at this point she’s resigned herself to the fact that I’m never going to get in, so she just signs the forms without arguing. I mean, it’s Brentwood, so to get accepted you not only have to dance like you’re in Black Swan and belt out a B over high C like it’s a middle G and cry on cue through a memorized six thousand lines of Shakespeare, but you have to do it all at once, while having a 4.0 and forking over a hundred thousand dollars and giving the admissions director a blow job, apparently, but once you’re in, you’re in, it’s Brentwood then Juilliard then fame and fortune, and even if not, it’s New York City, baby, and the most important part of this equation is Brooklyn Bridge at midnight and tiny dogs in Chelsea and the Staten Island Ferry and that ex-girlfriend (don’t think about that, should I think about that?) and the answer to the goddamn equation is the absolute value of not Nebraska.

Before coming to the Black Wood, I had read as widely in tree lore as possible. As well as the many accounts I encountered of damage to trees and woodland -- of what in German is called Waldsterben, or 'forest-death' -- I also met with and noted down stories of astonishment at woods and trees. Stories of how Chinese woodsmen in the T'ang and S'ung dynasties -- in obedience to the Taoist philosophy of a continuity of nature between humans and other species -- would bow to the trees which they felled, and offer a promise that the tree would be used well, in buildings that would dignify the wood once it had become timber. The story of Xerxes, the Persian king who so loved sycamores that, when marching to war with the Greeks, he halted his army of many thousands of men in order that they might contemplate and admire one outstanding specimen. Thoreau's story of how he felt so attached to the trees in the woods around his home-town of Concord, Massachusetts, that he would call regularly on them, gladly tramping 'eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines. When Willa Cather moved to the prairies of Nebraska, she missed the wooded hills of her native Virginia. Pining for trees, she would sometimes travel south 'to our German neighbors, to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew out of a crack in the earth. Trees were so rare in that country that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons'....

Bleeding Kansas and the Caning of Charles Sumner   The reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act was intense, and in many ways violent. In the early nineteenth century, the two dominant political parties were the Whigs, who were anti slavery, favored strong central government, and were principally represented in the north and on the western frontier, and the Democrats, who were largely pro slavery, favored popular sovereignty and the rights of states to defy the rule of the federal government, and were predominantly represented by southerners.

By 1986 the CIA was spending 70 per cent of its entire operations budget funding a Muslim jihad to kill Russians. The whole campaign was managed by a bunch of Islamists who were giving the lion’s share of the US money and weapons to people who wanted to kill Americans. The US was happy to use Islam as a rallying cry. The CIA funded the printing of Korans to be distributed throughout the region, and the University of Nebraska produced primary-school textbooks, known as ‘the ABC of Jihad’, which taught children the alphabet and to count with Kalashnikovs and swords instead of apples and oranges, and were filled with images of Islamic warriors. Alphabet

I recently had dinner with George. We did not eat fish. Instead we ate at a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant. I had lemon-grass chicken with chile, and George had stir-fried vegetables. Both meals were excellent, and both consisted of foods originating far from Spokane. Although we didn’t ask the cook where the chicken and other foodstuffs came from, it isn’t difficult to construct an entirely plausible scenario. Here it is: the chicken was raised on a factory farm in Arkansas. The factory is owned by Tyson Foods, which supplies one-quarter of this nation’s chickens and sends them as far away as Japan, The chicken was fed corn from Nebraska and grain from Kansas. One of seventeen million chickens processed by Tyson that week, this bird was frozen and put onto a truck made by PACCAR. The truck was made from plastics manufactured in Texas, steel milled in Japan from ore mined in Australia and chromium from South Africa, and aluminum processed in the United States from bauxite mined in Jamaica. The parts were assembled in Mexico. As this truck, with its cargo of frozen chickens, made its way toward Spokane, it burned fuel refined in Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Washington from oil originating beneath Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Mexico, Texas, and Alaska. All this, and I have chickens outside my door.

Eventually, I headed to the bathroom, and I mention this only because I saw in that bathroom the most quintessentially American artifact I have ever encountered: a bright blue rubber mat resting in the bottom of the urinal emblazoned with the following legend: Epply World's Cleanest Airport Omaha, NE God bless our relentless idiotic optimism.

I suspect, Austin, that the Americans you’ve met in the banking world aren’t the high-school drop-outs from Nebraska whose best friend got shot by a smiley Iraqi teenager holding bug of apples. A teenager whose dad shredded by a gunner on a passing Humvee last week while he fixed the TV aerial. A gunner whose best friend took a dum dum bullet through the neck from a sniper on the roof only yesterday. A sniper whose sister was in a car that stalled at an intersection as a military attaché’ convoy drove up, prompting the bodyguards to pepper the vehicle with automatic fire, knowing they’d save the convoy from a suicide bomber if they were right , but that the Iraqi law wouldn’t apply to them if they were wrong. Ultimately , wars escalate by eating their own shit...

But then I don’t begin to understand a lot of things about Sweden and Norway. It’s as if they are determined to squeeze all the pleasure out of life. They have the highest income-tax rates, the highest VAT rates, the harshest drinking laws, the dreariest bars, the dullest restaurants, and television that’s like two weeks in Nebraska. Everything costs a fortune. Even the purchase of a bar of chocolate leaves you staring in dismay at your change, and anything larger than that brings tears of pain to your eyes. It’s bone-crackingly cold in the winter and it does nothing but rain the rest of the year. The most fun thing to do in these countries is walk around semi-darkened shopping centers after they have closed, looking in the windows of stores selling wheelbarrows and plastic garden furniture at prices no one can afford. On top of that, they have shackled themselves with some of the most inane and restrictive laws imaginable, laws that leave you wondering what on earth they were thinking about. In Norway, for instance, it is illegal for a barman to serve you a fresh drink until you have finished the previous one. Does that sound to you like a matter that needs to be covered by legislation? It is also illegal in Norway for a bakery to bake bread on a Saturday or Sunday. Well, thank God for that, say I. Think of the consequences if some ruthless Norwegian baker tried to foist fresh bread on people at the weekend. But the most preposterous law of all, a law so pointless as to scamper along the outer margins of the surreal, is the Swedish one that requires motorists to drive with their headlights on during the daytime, even on the sunniest summer afternoon. I would love to meet the guy who thought up that one. He must be head of the Department of Dreariness. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if on my next visit to Sweden all the pedestrians are wearing miners’ lamps.

The Ingallses had no way of knowing it, but the locust swarm descending upon them was the largest in recorded human history. It would become known as “Albert’s swarm”: in Nebraska, a meteorologist named Albert Child measured its flight for ten days in June, telegraphing for further information from east and west, noting wind speed and carefully calculating the extent of the cloud of insects. He startled himself with his conclusions: the swarm appeared to be 110 miles wide, 1,800 miles long, and a quarter to a half mile in depth. The wind was blowing at ten miles an hour, but the locusts were moving even faster, at fifteen. They covered 198,000 square miles, Child concluded, an area equal to the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont combined.49 “This is utterly incredible,” he wrote, “yet how can we put it aside?”50 The cloud consisted of some 3.5 trillion insects.

Caleb!” I gasped. “What are you doing?” “Told you I wouldn’t let you make a mess. Gonna use my mouth on you. I’m going to suck you off, and swallow everything you’ve got.” A wave of burning hot lust shot down my spine. I flexed my hips upward, because I just had to. Caleb yanked down my underwear and moved, until he was kneeling over my body. And before I could even prepare myself, he’d bent his head down to lap his tongue against my cockhead. My shout of approval could probably be heard all over Nebraska. A big hand grasped the base of my shaft. Then, he began to bathe my dick in kisses. Wet, sloppy kisses everywhere. My hips began shaking with excitement. “Oh, Caleb. I can’t…” He opened his mouth and sucked me down. I never felt anything so amazing in my life. His mouth was tight and wet all around me. He gave a good hard suck. Just one. And then I was coming. And Caleb was swallowing. My whole body shook with joy. Caleb moaned and he cupped my balls in one hand and I’d forgotten to breathe for entirely too long…

La muerte podía estar en una bolsa de cacahuetes, en un trozo de carne que se te atravesara, en el siguiente paquete de cigarrillos. Siempre te andaba rondando, de guardia en todas las estaciones de control entre lo mortal y lo eterno. Agujas infectadas, insectos venenosos, cables mal aislados, incendios forestales. Patines que lanzaban a intrépidos chiquillos a cruces muy transitados. Cada vez que te metes en la bañera para darte una ducha, Oz te acompaña: ducha para dos. Cada vez que subes a un avión, Oz lleva tu misma tarjeta de embarque. Está en el agua que bebes y en la comida que comes. «¿Quién anda ahí?», gritas en la oscuridad cuando estás solo y asustado, y es él quien te responde: Tranquilo, soy yo. Eh, ¿cómo va eso? Tienes un cáncer en el vientre, qué lata, chico, sí que lo siento. ¡Cólera! ¡Septicemia! ¡Leucemia! ¡Arteriosclerosis! ¡Trombosis coronaria! ¡Encefalitis! ¡Osteomielitis! ¡Ajajá, vamos allá! Un chorizo en un portal, con una navaja en la mano. Una llamada telefónica a medianoche. Sangre que hierve con ácido de la batería en una rampa de salida de una autopista de Carolina del Norte. Puñados de píldoras: anda, traga. Ese tono azulado de las uñas que sigue a la muerte por asfixia; en su último esfuerzo por aferrarse a la vida, el cerebro absorbe todo el oxígeno que queda en el cuerpo, incluso el de las células vivas que están debajo de las uñas. Hola, chicos, me llamo Oz el Ggande y Teggible, pero podéis llamarme Oz a secas. Al fin y al cabo, somos viejos amigos. Pasaba por aquí y he entrado un momento para traerte este pequeño infarto, este derrame cerebral, etcétera; lo siento, no puedo quedarme, tengo un parto con hemorragia y, luego, inhalación de humo tóxico en Omaha. Y la vocecita sigue gritando: «¡Te quiero, Tigger, te quiero! ¡Creo en ti, Tigger! ¡Siempre te querré y creeré en ti, y seguiré siendo niña, y el único Oz que habitará en mi corazón será ese simpático impostor de Nebraska! Te quiero…». Vamos patrullando, mi hijo y yo…, porque lo que importa no es el sexo ni la guerra, sino la noble y terrible batalla sin esperanza contra Oz, el Ggande y Teggible.

Trump is an unintentional master of the art of rectal ventriloquism. No, I don’t mean he’s a champion farter. I mean he talks out of his ass, and the words magically start coming out of other peoples’ mouths. He says eminent domain is wonderful and suddenly conservatives start saying, “Yeah, it’s wonderful!” He floats a new entitlement for child care and almost instantaneously people once opposed to it start bragging about how sensitive they are to the plight of working moms. He says Social Security needs to be more generous and days later once proud tea partiers are saying the same thing, and the rest of us are left to marvel how we didn’t even see Trump’s lips, or cheeks, move. This is a perfect example of the corrupting effect of populism and personality cults. I keep mentioning my favorite line from William Jennings Bryan: “The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later.” For many Trump supporters, the rule of the day is, “Donald Trump is for X and I am for X. I will look up the arguments later (if ever).

Shortly after we returned from the Platte River in Nebraska, I scouted a few of our duck holes on my dad’s property. I wanted to see what kind of ducks had gathered on our land while we were gone. On this particular day, it was cool and crisp as it got close to sunset. As I sat in a deer stand waiting for nightfall, I was counting mallard ducks that flew over my head. Meanwhile, there were fox squirrels scurrying in the trees around me looking for acorns, while groups of wood ducks waited in the water for the squirrels to drop acorns. A few minutes later, fifteen wild turkeys walked in front of me. I thought to myself, Man, this is paradise. As I soaked in my surroundings, I heard the sounds of footsteps in shallow water. A majestic eight-point buck walked right in front of me. I raised my rifle and fired. The buck hit the ground. My dad was in the woods with me and heard me shoot. As we loaded up the deer, I shared the details of what I had seen with my dad. We both agreed that there is nothing better than the beauty of the outdoors. It was about as perfect a day as I’ve ever had in the woods.

The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska Too bad you weren’t here six months ago, was a lament I heard on my visit to Nebraska. You could have seen the astonishing spectacle of the sandhill cranes, thousands of them feeding and even dancing on the shores of the Platte River. There was no point in pointing out the impossibility of my being there then because I happened to be somewhere else, so I nodded and put on a look of mild disappointment if only to be part of the commiseration. It was the same look I remember wearing about six months ago in Georgia when I was told that I had just missed the spectacular annual outburst of azaleas, brilliant against the green backdrop of spring and the same in Vermont six months before that when I arrived shortly after the magnificent foliage had gloriously peaked, Mother Nature, as she is called, having touched the hills with her many-colored brush, a phenomenon that occurs, like the others, around the same time every year when I am apparently off in another state, stuck in a motel lobby with the local paper and a styrofoam cup of coffee, busily missing God knows what.

She wants you back.” Her gaze held his for a half-dozen heartbeats before she broke away, increasing her pace through the lobby and into the warm air of eastern Florida in January. Richard followed her, a dozen denials and rebuttals fighting for position. “She does not.” “Ooh, good retort. Prove it.” “She needs someone to cosign her paperwork, and I’m the only one she could think of to do it. I spend time here. Hence, Palm Beach.” “She needs—” “And,” he cut in, warming to the argument, “and, the Society here is the type she feels comfortable with, anyway. A good dozen of her Patty’s Pack friends have winter homes here. I can’t see her moving to Dirt, Nebraska. Can you?” Samantha dove into the Bentley that waited at the curb and actually hesitated a moment before she unlocked the passenger door for him. “No, but I can see her in Paris or Venice or Milan or New York,” she retorted. “But like you said, you’re here. And hey, Mr. Denial, if she has her Patty’s Pack friends in town, why is it again you’re being recruited to cosign?” Richard barely had time to close his door before she peeled away from the curb. “You’re jealous,” he announced. “You’re an asshole

The process is taking place before our eyes and is already far advanced.” Under present trends, “the number of Jews in Europe by the year 2000 would then be not much more than 1 million—the lowest figure since the last Middle Ages.” In 1900, there were 8 million. The story elsewhere is even more dispiriting. The rest of what was once the diaspora is now either a museum or a graveyard. Eastern Europe has been effectively emptied of its Jews. In 1939, Poland had 3.2 million Jews. Today it is home to 3,500. The story is much the same in the other capitals of Eastern Europe. The Islamic world, cradle to the great Sephardic Jewish tradition and home to one-third of world Jewry three centuries ago, is now practically Judenrein. Not a single country in the Islamic world is home to more than 20,000 Jews. After Turkey with 19,000 and Iran with 14,000, the country with the largest Jewish community in the entire Islamic world is Morocco with 6,100. There are more Jews in Omaha, Nebraska. These communities do not figure in projections. There is nothing to project. They are fit subjects not for counting but for remembering. Their very sound has vanished. Yiddish and Ladino, the distinctive languages of the European and Sephardic diasporas, like the communities that invented them, are nearly extinct.

She told everything as quickly as she could, stringing sentences together the way she had when she was a little girl. By the end of the tale,she found herself defending her mother,angry at the world that made it necessary for her to explain.Impulsively, she grabbed a curry comb and began to brush Red Star's coat vigorously.She brushed for a long time,and tears began to blur her vision.She tried to resign herself to what seemed to be happening.Then a hand covered hers and squeezed affectionately. Mac took the curry comb away,and bent to kiss the back of her hand. "So,Miss King,will you do me the honor of accompanying me to the social next Friday evening at the Congregational Church?" Miss King embarrassed herself by saying yes! so loudly that the dozing horse in the stall next to Red Star jumped and kicked the side of his stall in fright.The two young people laughed, and MacKenzie lifted LisBeth into the air and swung her around in his arms. Sick with apprehension,Jesse had been unable to remain alone for long.She returned to the kitchen to help Augustus with meal preparations, praying earnestly for LisBeth and MacKenzie while she worked.When the two young people burst through the kitchen door together,their happy smiles told the older women all they needed to know. LisBeth was sobered when she saw her Mother. "Mother,I..." Jesse held up a hand to stop her. "It's all right,LisBeth. I'm glad everything turned out.I've been praying for you both." "Mother,all four of us know about Papa. Would you tell me a story about him while we make supper?" The culprit never came forward, but at some time that evening, the first book-burning in the State of Nebraska took place. Francis Day's Memoirs of the Savage West found its way into Augusta's cook stove.

Open All Night" (originally by Bruce Springsteen) I had the carburetor cleaned and checked With her line blown out, she's hummin' like a turbojet Propped her up in the backyard on concrete blocks For a new clutch plate and a new set of shocks Took her down to the carwash, check the plugs and points I'm goin' out tonight, I'm gonna rock that joint Early north Jersey industrial skyline I'm a all-set cobra jet creepin' through the nighttime Gotta find a gas station, gotta find a payphone This turnpike sure is spooky at night when you're all alone Gotta hit the gas, baby, I'm runnin' late This New Jersey in the mornin' like a lunar landscape The boss don't dig me, so he put me on the nightshift It takes me two hours to get back to where my baby lives In the wee wee hours, your mind gets hazy Radio relay towers, won't you lead me to my baby? Underneath the overpass, trooper hits his party light switch Goodnight, good luck, one two powershift I met Wanda when she was employed Behind the counter at the Route 60 Bob's Big Boy Fried chicken on the front seat, she's sittin' in my lap We're wipin' our fingers on a Texaco roadmap I remember Wanda up on scrap metal hill With them big brown eyes that make your heart stand still 5 A.M., oil pressure's sinkin' fast I make a pit stop, wipe the windshield, check the gas Gotta call my baby on the telephone Let her know that her daddy's comin' on home Sit tight, little mama, I'm comin' round I got three more hours, but I'm coverin' ground Your eyes get itchy in the wee wee hours Sun's just a red ball risin' over them refinery towers Radio's jammed up with gospel stations Lost souls callin' long distance salvation Hey Mr. DJ, won't you hear my last prayer? Hey ho rock 'n' roll, deliver me from nowhere Ryan Adams, Nebraska (2022)

Suddenly, I caught a glimpse of something moving behind me. When I turned, I saw two coyotes standing in an ambush positon. They were watching my brother Jep, who was working as our cameraman and was positioned to the right of us. The coyotes saw Jep moving, but because he was so camouflaged, they apparently didn’t realize he was a human. Our guide in Nebraska had warned us that he’d seen several coyotes jump from the top of the bluffs to the ducks below for a quick meal. The landowner was having a lot of problems with the coyotes, which were suspected of killing some of his farm animals. He even feared a few of them might have rabies. Evidently, the coyotes heard us blowing our duck calls and believed we were actual ducks. Now they were ready for their next meal. We had accidentally called in two predators using our duck calls and in essence became the hunted instead of the hunters! The two coyotes were licking their chops and were about to attack the only unarmed member of our hunting party! It was like a scene out of a bad horror film called Killer Coyotes. I looked at Jep and realized he was oblivious to what was going on behind him. I jumped out of our makeshift blind and ran toward the coyotes. One of the coyotes took off running, but the other one ran about twenty feet and stopped. It turned around and started growling at me. It looked at me like, “Hey, you want some of me?” I raised my shotgun and shot it dead. I had planned on shooting only ducks, but it’s a bad move when a coyote decides it wants to fight a human. Once it stood its ground and said, “You or me,” I wasn’t going to take a threat from a wild scavenger. It was a prime example of what happens when animals become overpopulated and lose their fear of humans. The lesson learned: don’t bring claws and teeth to a gunfight.

Consider the life of a pregnant sow. Her incredible fertility is the source of her particular hell. While a cow will give birth to only a single calf at a time, the modern factory sow will birth, nurse, and raise an average of nearly nine piglets — a number that has been increased annually by industry breeders. She will invariably be kept pregnant as much as possible, which will prove to be the majority of her life. When she is approaching her due date, drugs to induce labor may be administered to make the timing more convenient for the farmer. After her piglets are weaned, a hormone injection makes the sow rapidly “cycle” so that she will be ready to be artificially inseminated again in only three weeks. Four out of five times a sow will spend the sixteen weeks of her pregnancy confined in a “gestation crate” so small that she will not be able to turn around. Her bone density will decrease because of the lack of movement. She will be given no bedding and often will develop quarter-sized, blackened, pus-filled sores from chafing in the crate. (In one undercover investigation in Nebraska, pregnant pigs with multiple open sores on their faces, heads, shoulders, backs, and legs — some as large as a fist — were videotaped. A worker at the farm commented, “They all have sores. . . . There’s hardly a pig in there who doesn’t have a sore.”) More serious and pervasive is the suffering caused by boredom and isolation and the thwarting of the sow’s powerful urge to prepare for her coming piglets. In nature, she would spend much of her time before giving birth foraging and ultimately would build a nest of grass, leaves, or straw. To avoid excessive weight gain and to further reduce feed costs, the crated sow will be feed restricted and often hungry. Pigs also have an inborn tendency to use separate areas for sleeping and defecating that is totally thwarted in confinement. The pregnant pigs, like most all pigs in industrial systems, must lie or step in their excrement to force it through the slatted floor. The industry defends such confinement by arguing that it helps control and manage animals better, but the system makes good welfare practices more difficult because lame and diseased animals are almost impossible to identify when no animals are allowed to move.

We danced to John Michael Montgomery’s “I Swear.” We cut the seven-tiered cake, electing not to take the smear-it-on-our-faces route. We visited and laughed and toasted. We held hands and mingled. But after a while, I began to notice that I hadn’t seen any of the tuxedo-clad groomsmen--particularly Marlboro Man’s friends from college--for quite some time. “What happened to all the guys?” I asked. “Oh,” he said. “They’re down in the men’s locker room.” “Oh, really?” I asked. “Are they smoking cigars or something?” “Well…” He hesitated, grinning. “They’re watching a football game.” I laughed. “What game are they watching?” It had to be a good one. “It’s…ASU is playing Nebraska,” he answered. ASU? His alma mater? Playing Nebraska? Defending national champions? How had I missed this? Marlboro Man hadn’t said a word. He was such a rabid college football fan, I couldn’t believe such a monumental game hadn’t been cause to reschedule the wedding date. Aside from ranching, football had always been Marlboro Man’s primary interest in life. He’d played in high school and part of college. He watched every televised ASU game religiously--for the nontelevised games, he relied on live reporting from Tony, his best friend, who attended every game in person. “I didn’t even know they were playing!” I said. I don’t know why I shouldn’t have known. It was September, after all. But it just hadn’t crossed my mind. I’d been a little on the busy side, I guess, getting ready to change my entire life and all. “How come you’re not down there watching it?” I asked. “I didn’t want to leave you,” he said. “You might get hit on.” He chuckled his sweet, sexy chuckle. I laughed. I could just see it--a drunk old guest scooting down the bar, eyeing my poufy white dress and spouting off pickup lines: You live around here? I sure like what you’re wearing… So…you married? Marlboro Man wasn’t in any immediate danger. Of that I was absolutely certain. “Go watch the game!” I insisted, motioning downstairs. “Nah,” he said. “I don’t need to.” He wanted to watch the game so badly I could see it in the air. “No, seriously!” I said. “I need to go hang with the girls anyway. Go. Now.” I turned my back and walked away, refusing even to look back. I wanted to make it easy on him. I wouldn’t see him for over an hour. Poor Marlboro Man. Unsure of the protocol for grooms watching college football during their wedding receptions, he’d darted in and out of the locker room for the entire first half. The agony he must have felt. The deep, sustained agony. I was so glad he’d finally joined the guys.

So…,” I began. Was it just a high school thing? Or worse, I imagined, is it just that I’m not and never will be a country girl? Is it that country girls have some wild sense of abandon that I wasn’t born with? A reckless side, a fun, adventurous side that makes them worthy of riding next to boys in pickups? Am I untouchable? Am I too prim? Too proper? I’m not! I’m really not! I’m fun and adventurous. Reckless, too! I have a pair of jeans: Anne Kleins! And I want to be Middle Seat Worthy. Please, Marlboro Man…please. I’ve never wanted anything this much. “So, um…why don’t you do it anymore?” I asked. “Bucket seats,” Marlboro Man answered, his hand still resting on my leg. Made sense. I settled in and relaxed a bit. But I had another question I’d been mulling over. “Mind if I ask you another question?” I said. “Go ahead,” he replied. I cleared my throat and sat up straight in my seat. “How come…how come it took you so long to call me?” I couldn’t help but grin. It was one of the most direct questions I’d ever asked him. He looked in my direction, then back toward the road. “You don’t have to tell me,” I said. And he didn’t. But I’d wondered more than a handful of times, and as long as he was coming clean about bucket seats and other important matters, I thought it would be a good time to ask him why four months had passed between the first night we’d met in the smoky bar and the night he’d finally called to invite me to dinner. I remembered being knocked over by his magnetism that night during Christmas vacation. What had he thought of me? Had he forgotten me instantly, then remembered me in a flash that April night after my brother’s wedding? Or had he intentionally waited four months to call? Was it some kind of country boy protocol I didn’t know about? I was a girl. I simply had to know. “I was…,” he began. “Well, I was dating someone else.” I’ll kill her with my bare hands. “Oh,” I said in return. It was all I could muster. “Plus, I was running a herd of cows in Nebraska and having to drive up there every week,” he continued. “I just wasn’t here enough to break things off with her in the right way…and I didn’t want to call you and ask you out until that was all resolved.” I repeated myself. “Oh.” What was her name? She’s dead to me. “I liked you, though,” he said, flashing me a smile. “I thought about you.” I couldn’t help but smile back. “You did?” I asked quietly, still wondering what the girl’s name was. I wouldn’t rest till I knew. “I did,” he said sweetly, stroking my leg with his hand. “You were different.” I stopped short of interrogating him further, of asking him to specify what he meant by “different.” And it didn’t take much imagination to figure it out. As he drove me around his familiar homeland, it was obvious what he would have considered “different” about me. I didn’t know anything about the country.