Standing in Line at the Omelet Bar

In early April 2016, I flew from San Diego to Houston for the Conference on College Composition and Communication.  The conference was held in downtown Houston at the Hilton next to the Convention Center, and thousands of writing teachers from colleges and universities were attending.  

On my first morning, I went down to the lobby to check out the food options.  There were two:  Starbucks or the hotel restaurant.  The line at Starbucks was out the door, and I had less than 30 minutes, so I headed to the hotel restaurant and plopped down $21.95 for the breakfast buffet and was grateful for my teacher's union’s funding of at least part of the cost of my breakfast.

The food on the buffet had been sitting for some time--most people were in line at the Starbucks--English teacher salaries, and all that.  But the cook at the omelet bar was cooking up omelets to order, and over I headed.  A long table was set up with bowls of spinach leaves, mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, olives, peppers, cheeses, broccoli, ham, chicken, tofu, and other delights.  I was to choose among these offerings, assembling the items I wanted on my plate to hand them to the cook.

As I grazed along the table, piling my plate high, a sign pulled me up short. 

There in the center of the table set up like a centerpiece on an altar was a tablet device, propped up as a display.  Was it showing delicious omelets?  No.  Menus or pictures of vegetables and meats?  No.  Flowers?  No.  Information of any sort, or at least something pretty?  No.  What someone at the hotel had chosen to display at that very moment on their newfangled tablet was a grainy black-and-white photo of a small-town street scene from the 1930s or so, barely a tree in sight on the street, a car or two, and not much else--it was a very plain town apparently, with not much to show for itself.  In big letters across the photo the word “Tomball” was scrawled across the top. 

I laughed at the randomness and weirdness of it.  How many people in this swank Hilton by the convention center in downtown Houston would know or care about Tomball?  What would it mean to them?  If they noticed it at all, these busy professionals from states like Ohio, Indiana, New York, California, New Mexico, Washington, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Alaska, would probably just think it was an odd attempt to romanticize old Texas. 

Maybe some would even wonder why this fancy restaurant would put such a strange picture among the food offerings.  If so, they may have noticed other bits of Texas nostalgia among the decorations in the restaurant, and maybe they even saw through the pitiful attempt to make an otherwise completely typical American convention hotel be Texan, because everything in Texas has to be Texan--that’s the Texas way.

Texas may not have invented branding, but it had caught on and branded everything it possibly could.  The convention center was painted red, white, and blue, the colors of the Texas state flag, from floor to ceiling, every door, every nook, every cranny.  The hotel gift shop only carried red, white, and blue Texas branded tchotchkes and clothing.

Would anyone that morning even be able to guess from the photo that Tomball was the name of a town about 30 miles north of Houston?  Or would they not even see the name, or would they think it was a person with a possibly laughable name?

Maybe some force put the picture there for me.  Because even though I grew up in Louisiana, and have lived all of my adult life in St. Louis, New York City, and now San Diego, I know Tomball, Texas. 

To help me digest the picture and all it meant to me, after lunch I went to the park across from the hotel, took off my shoes, and stood on the grass, my feet connecting with the land of my birth, of my ancestors, on both sides of my family: my mother’s family—the Beyette’s—to the northwest of Houston in the piney woods of Magnolia, Texas; my father’s mother’s family, the Pollard’s of Edna, Texas, to the southwest of Houston; and my father’s father’s family, due west in central Texas—the Barnes’ of Yoakum, Glenrose, Hearne, Calvert, and unnamed spots in the road.  My parents met in Eagle Lake, 66 miles west of Houston.  I was born in Wharton, 60 miles southwest of Houston.

Tomball played a major role in this, my family’s story.

In the middle of the depression, probably about the time the photo was taken, my grandfather Cecil Beyette went to high school in Tomball and worked there, to put himself through school and support his family. His father and youngest brother had both been killed within months of each other.  His father, Thomas, was a deputy sheriff, and he was killed in 1930 by a prisoner he was bringing to jail for stealing tires.  His youngest brother, named Thomas after his father, was killed a few months later after diving into a swimming hole.  

Cecil’s mother Janie was traumatized and never recovered, and Cecil set out to support her, his other brother, and himself.  They lived in Magnolia, Texas, about 15 miles from Tomball.  Magnolia didn’t have a high school.  It was a sawmill town and a crossroads, with a few houses scattered here and there.  Tomball had a real economy with stores, gas stations, better jobs than those in the sawmill, and schools.  He worked his way through high school and got his degree.  He went on to be a daring pilot in the early days of Texas crop-dusting, helping to develop the Grumman Ag-Cat and serving as a flight instructor in World War II, among his many adventures and accomplishments. 

Cecil married Eloise Williams, who he met walking on the sidewalk in Atmore, Alabama, where he’d gone to fly crop-dusters.  He thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and a week after he returned to Magnolia, he sent her a train ticket and asked her to come marry him.  She did.  They had four children, naming their youngest son after the two Thomases, and their youngest daughter Cecile, after my grandfather.  Their first daughter and second born child was my mother, Gale Beyette.

Until 2009 when my grandmother died, I went to Magnolia, Texas, at least once a year, and every time I did,  I also went to Tomball.  It is vital to the geography of my maternal inheritance.

In 1996 I got my first real job in St. Louis, Missouri, when Bill Seyle hired me and trained me as a speechwriter, partially because his family was also from Magnolia, Texas, and our grandparents had been best friends.  His father told him that his earliest memory in life was when my great grandfather Thomas had been killed.  He said he woke up in the middle of the night to see his mother by his side holding a Colt 45 because someone had shot Mr. Beyette, and the killer was on the loose and the men of the town were all out looking for him. 

I met Bill in St. Louis, through Sharon Hall, who cut my hair and his.  I was looking for a job.  He was looking for a writer to help him with his overload of work, and Sharon thought we would like each other.  We did, and he took a chance on me, forever changing my life. 

Neither of us had any idea that we had a shared heritage until he asked me for writing samples and commented that I had Texas in all of them, and asked if I was from Texas.  He said he had never met anyone who had even heard of Magnolia until he met me.  

When we discovered we both had family there, he called his mother, and I called my grandmother, and we heard the family stories.  My grandmother told me she painted his grandmother’s kitchen, and that our grandfathers surveyed the land all around those parts together.  They probably surveyed land together in Tomball.  Bill hired me.

My job with Bill Seyle eventually helped me land a job with Information Builders, a software company in New York City, which eventually led me to where I am now.

The clock radio my grandmother gave me when I graduated from high school and which I took to college with me and used until it died about 25 years later came from Tomball, from Worthley’s store, where my grandmother bought her appliances most of her life.  The radio's alarm trained me to take 20 minute naps in college because it had the time marked in 20 minute segments on the dial.  It’s a skill I still use every chance I get.  I remember standing with her in the store many, many times. 

I also remember many occasions when my Aunt Cecile took my brothers and sisters and I to the big town of Tomball to one of the few eating establishments around--Dairy Queen--for their Dilly Bars, vanilla ice cream coated with chocolate.  

And I remember going to Klein’s funeral home in Tomball for my grandfather, my grandmother, my cousin Jodie, my Aunt Cecile, and my mother.

This is what I felt when I stood in line at the omelet bar, and the screen said, “Tomball.” 

There is a history there, and I know it.  It is not romantic. It is not nostalgic or sentimental.  It is real, and it is in my bones and in my blood.