Although I can quash it with a great deal of focused effort, I have a pretty thick Texas accent. People in NY usually say “oh, you have such a great southern accent” which would horrify southerners and Texans, equally. But that’s ok, I can’t tell the difference between Staten Island, Long Island, Bronx, and NJ accents. I don’t blame them. People who are well-versed in Texas accents would immediately identify mine as the north Texas/west Texas/hick version. It really is awl, not oil, frah not fry, and if I’m very tarred (not tired), it can even be aint not ant (with a nod to this brilliant poster by a wonderful artist I know). But anyway, over the years I’ve loved and hated my accent, accepted it and tried to eliminate it – mainly because Yankees tend to think you’re stupid if you sound like me. My ear is so finely tuned, I can hear the residual Texas accent underneath the voices of actors who have undoubtedly trained for hours and hours to eliminate it. Ha – gotcha.

No surprise, when I’m tired or when I talk about Texas or when I talk to other Texans, my accent …. well, it expands. That’s a nice way to say it. It deepens. It gets thicker. And the muscles in my face that form words feel familiar again, and something clicks in my deepest self. Ah, I’m back to me. I actually think my very self changes a little when I talk to a Texan; when I dropped the last daughter off at college, I started talking to a Texan and the people with me kind of stood back in surprise, and told me that I’d changed while talking to her.

So today, in a desperate quest to locate my GRE scores, since ETS only keeps them for 5 years, I decided to try my former graduate program to see if they kept them as part of my application package. I emailed the generic Graduate Office Person, described my request as a likely wild goose chase, and clicked send. Within a few minutes I got a call from Chris, who said she did indeed have my scores. And she was a Texan (no surprise, since I was calling the University of Texas at Austin). And I felt happier than you can imagine, like I’d returned to the groove of my familiar. It’s such a funny thing, the way we can feel at home with sound, and smell, and the rhythm of an accent. I didn’t want to let her go, and stretched the conversation out as much as possible.

bah y’all (translation: goodbye everyone!)