Deep in the heart of...

Here we are in Houston. We only stopped three times between Little Rock and here on Sunday, which isn't too bad considering we had a 2-year-old in the car.

We're staying at my parents' house, which is really in Richmond. Yesterday we had a big time at First Colony Mall. Today we are doing the Children's Museum in Houston, tomorrow we are going to Baytown to hang out with my best Baytown girlfriend Lois and other dear friends from our old church there, Thursday we are driving from Baytown to Galveston -- where we hope to meet up with Chad's dad somewhere along the way -- and Friday my brother Brian is coming and we are all going to Buca di Beppo.

It will be good to get home Saturday night. We have plans to abduct my mom and bring her back with us.

One note from the road: Once we got into Texas, we stopped at the first Dairy Queen we saw and got Kit Kat blizzards. Yum. DQ is a little hard to come by in Arkansas.

Family Values

Even though I'm an Arkansan now, I'm still loving Texas Monthly. I've been reading it for years, since junior high when my mom mistakenly subscribed thinking she was getting "Texas Highways." Texas Monthly consistently features the best writing you could find anywhere. It's always been my dream to see my byline in its pages.

This month the magazine features an interesting story about gay parenting in Texas.

Also in this issue is a collection of survivors' accounts of the school explosion in New London in 1937. I haven't been able to get through this one in one sitting. It's absolutely heart-wrenching -- on the level of the Texas City disaster in 1947, in which a ship packed with ammonium nitrate (the same stuff used in the Oklahoma City attack) exploded at the Texas City docks, killing about 600 Texas City residents. (No one knows exact numbers because some bodies were never found.) It remains the worst industrial disaster in U.S. history. Several years ago, I wrote a three-part series on the Texas City explosion for The Baytown Sun. Texas City is about 30 miles from Baytown, and there are still a lot of blast survivors living around there. An elder at our church in Baytown survived the blast (he was a teen then) but lost a younger brother that day. He gave me a book of eyewitness accounts for my research and as I studied it in the city library, I had to keep getting up and walking away from it. The images were too much to take in all it once, and it's the same with the New London story.

Anyway, thank you, Texas Monthly, for such well-written, insightful stuff. (And please ask me to write...)