Dream Bigger
Coffee, tea or predestination?
This will take a little explaining, so bear with me. Nancy Hunter — Northern-born and a former overseas flight attendant — is the mayor of Stephenville, Texas only because she went to a funeral in Oklahoma 13 years ago.
She’s a native of Massachusetts, but Hunter isn’t one of those Boston types who would, for instance, describe a particularly intelligent person as “wicked smaaht.” She’s from the western part of the state, a small town called Agawam, and her style of speaking is … well, normal. But she married a Texan, which gave her what in the beginning was only a tenuous connection to the state. The Hunters lived in Washington, D.C. for a while, then moved to South Florida. Texas was, basically, a spot on the map. Not a place to call home.
In 1996, Hunter’s husband received news that his grandmother had died. The funeral would be held in Oklahoma, but Stephenville was designated as a rendezvous point. Other family members lived there, and the Hunters would collect them on their way north. After the funeral, and after returning to Stephenville, the Hunters lingered in the town for a couple of days. In that short stretch of time, something happened: They realized they truly, madly, deeply wanted to live in Stephenville.
Four months later, the Hunters arrived with all their belongings.
Nancy opened a dance studio. Her husband opened an insurance business. At some point a civic impulse struck, ignited mostly by Nancy’s realization that if her two children were going to grow up in Stephenville, she ought to care how the town is administered. She ran for a council seat in 2005 and won. She ran again in 2007, and that time there wasn’t even an opponent. The year after that, she was elected mayor.
But here’s the thing: When Hunter was young, she didn’t imagine any of this would unfold. Her dream was to be a flight attendant, and she made that happen. She worked the international routes out of New York — the big leagues of commercial air travel. Now that she’s far away from that life, living happily in a small town in rural Texas, Hunter says she understands something about fate: “You don’t know your future. But your course is charted.”
Yeah, maybe. But what I take from all this is that it pays to go to funerals.
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