Dream Bigger
The curtain comes down on a great gig
My month in Stephenville, Texas has concluded. By the time this is published, I’ll be on my way home. It might be the moment when you expect me to clear my throat, wait for the crowd to quiet itself, and then launch into an extended sociological analysis of Stephenville, teasing out lessons and drawing profound conclusions about life there. If so, you’re going to be disappointed. I’m neither qualified nor energetic enough to undertake anything so intellectually rigorous. But I will say that I became something of an expert in chicken fried steak. (My tip: Get the gravy on the side, and ladle it with a light hand.)
I learned a few other things during that month. For instance, it became quickly apparent that largeness in all things Texan isn’t a myth. Bigger is the norm. The countryside is big, distances are long, vehicles are oversized, hats are wide-brimmed, friendliness is expansive, and the belief that Texas is truly a place unto itself is huge. Most people think their hometowns and home states are special in some, or even many, ways. Texans — or the ones I met — seem to believe Texas is special in all ways. And a healthy number of Stephenville residents believe that if their town isn’t paradise, it’s at least in the same ZIP code.
I also learned something about the hard work behind an ambitious, innovative public relations campaign. The great challenge in these information-saturated times is getting people to pay attention to something. I was an auxiliary part of the campaign, but rather than explain the details I’ll steer you instead to this piece from Fast Company magazine’s Web site. This blog was a unique experiment in corporately funded feature writing, and earlier this month there was a spirited online debate over whether journalism financed by non-traditional means has a future. I think it does — in no small part because journalism financed by traditional means seems to have almost no future.
Does anybody know what time it is?
But most of all, my time in Stephenville reminded me that everyone has something interesting to tell. Stephenville proved to be particularly fertile ground in this regard. My list of people to write about was much longer than the number of days I had to do so. Just one example: Who got the numbers out of order on the huge clock in the courthouse tower? (Look closely at the photo at left, and you’ll see what I mean.)
By the way, Carpenter Co. — the Richmond, Va. corporation which funded this project — threw a big party in Stephenville two nights ago to mark the end of the campaign. A local woman sang some songs she’d written, and one of them — called, coincidentally, “Stephenville, Texas” — had a line that caught my ear: “Everything’s temporary if you give it enough time.” Nice turn of phrase, that. I think she’s got a future in the songwriting business. The next day, she stopped by the Oxford House, where I’ve been living this past month, and we sat on the front porch a while. As you can see, she’s a sweetie.
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