Hats For My Panthers

As Uncle Hugh used to say, “A hat ought to do more than keep the sun off your head. The right hat can keep you from being recognized by the wrong people.”

As I disembarked at my Houston Street hotel in Fort Worth, I realized that I had once threatened a wino on the very spot where I was handing a prim concierge my car keys.

I used to drive a beer truck and deliver to a string of wino bars, to which noun the modifier “seedy” would have been gracious.

Patronage would have been like drinking in a bus station toilet.

As I loaded their succor onto my dolly, the benighted wretches employed the cleverest to the most desperate ruses to get at my wares.

Holding onto the goods required cunning, alertness, and a tire tool.

I recalled these brutal moments from my misspent youth as I was trying to explain to Tuan Nay-than my perceptions of Fort Worth.

Were Fort Worth moved 50 miles or more West of its present location, it would be Austin or Corpus.

Not the Capital nor the bureaucratic repository of learning and avarice, not the beach nor the oil business salaries, but a city with a reputation for being a pretty good place to live.

But alas, Fort Worth suffers from neither being a suburb of, nor independent from the meanest, coldest, greediest place on earth: Dallas, Texas.

Fort Worth has always struggled for its own identity; certainly it has one, but it is overshadowed by its neighbor, which would, as it has, sold its own heart by the pound.

For example, back in the