by Laura Bush
In Houston, after my brief flirtation with working in a brokerage house, I dated a stockbroker while, one by one, my friends settled down. Regan, who had bounced from house to house and even from state to state during her growing up, was one of the first to say "I do," with Billy Gammon, who worked in his family's insurance business. Then Peggy married Ronnie Weiss, and Janet married Fred Heyne. Right after their wedding, Regan and Billy moved east, to New York, so he could train at a top insurance firm. In the fall of 1970, my stockbroker boyfriend invited me to New York, where he had meetings, and we went out to dinner with Regan and Billy. The next day, my boyfriend took Regan and me, in our fashionable miniskirted dresses, down to Wall Street. We walked onto one of the brokerage trading floors with him to get a glimpse of high finance. I saw a sea of desks and agitated men grabbing at ringing phones, until some guy yelled out, "Hey, who are the bimbos?"
We thought it was hilarious. Regan was a newlywed and newly pregnant. As for me, how many bimbos are able to moonlight as second-grade teachers and school librarians?
In Houston, I lived in the place for singles, the Chateaux Dijon, a sprawling, block-long apartment complex with several swimming pools and turrets rising on each side. With its sloping gray roof, it had pretensions of being a brown-brick Versailles. My suite was a revolving door of four roommates, including Jan Donnelly, one of my Midland friends, who moved home in 1972 to marry Joey O'Neill. One summer, I spent nearly every day at the pool reading the classics of Russian literature, traveling through the frigid, snow-laden novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in the swampy heat of Houston, where by midmorning you could break a sweat simply by stepping outside.
Reading and books were my passion, and I began to think seriously of enrolling in graduate school for library science. Also, as much as I loved Houston, I wanted a change. Like my parents moving from house to house, I had uncovered a similar restlessness, from teaching to setting off for the East Coast, moving to Houston, working in a brokerage house, going back to the classroom. I had so many options that I was seeking an anchor to ground myself. Here my married friends had it almost easier; they had already made their choices, and a quadrant of their lives was settled. I was determined to settle on a job, and I wanted to be surrounded by books.
I applied to the library science program at University of Texas and was accepted. But before I left for Austin, I wanted to take two of my favorite students from Kennedy to AstroWorld, an amusement park near the baseball stadium. My boyfriend, Ralph, and I arrived on a Saturday morning to pick them up. One of the boys was waiting, all dressed, with his sister; their mother obviously hoped that we couldn't resist an outing for the two of them. And we couldn't. We put both in the car and headed over to the other boy's house. He opened the door in his underwear and couldn't manage to get dressed while we were there. He was nine and going into fourth grade. We could hear his mother in the back of the house, but she never came to the door. I hugged him good-bye with an extra squeeze. There were many kids like him. The disarray of their parents' lives repeatedly spilled over into their own.
Three decades later, in 2003, a couple of days before Christmas, the John F. Kennedy Elementary School found me again. I was sitting in a television studio in Washington, D.C., with the then host of NBC's Meet the Press, Tim Russert. We were taping his Christmas show, and the other guest for the morning was Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the president. The red lights on the cameras were lit, and their giant eyes were swiveling just out of sight in the set when Tim announced, "In 1969 and the early 1970s, you taught at the John F. Kennedy School."
And I turned to Caroline Kennedy to say that I had once taught at a school named for her father.
My first apartment in Austin was a hand-me-down from my friend Bobbie Jo, who had come back to Texas after her year of self-imposed exile. She had left the world of department store retail to return to school to earn a graduate degree in education. Like me, she had spent that first year out of college teaching in Dallas.
The apartment was on the second floor of an old wood-frame house. I had to walk up a metal fire escape that groaned and clanged to reach it. Once when I stepped into a tiny storage space under the eves, my leg sank through the cheap Sheetrock into the apartment below. Bobbie Jo left behind a kitten from her cat's litter. I named her Dewey, for the Dewey decimal system, a library staple. My home was now two rooms, a living room in front, a bedroom in the back, and a slim pass-through kitchen in between. I painted the cabinets cobalt blue. My painting jobs were never as good upon completion as they were in my imagination. My furnishings were secondhand pieces from junk shops.
The library school was located in the Harry Ransom Center on the UT campus, a treasure trove of rare manuscripts from Shakespeare's First Folio to manuscripts by the Bronte sisters and John Keats and the page proofs from James Joyce's Ulysses. I was learning about the conservation of books in a place with some of the most beautiful pieces of literature in the world.
In January of 1973, the day after Richard Nixon was inaugurated for his second term, Lyndon Johnson died in his bed at his ranch. His flag-draped coffin was brought to lie in state at the Johnson Presidential Library on the UT campus. I was one of thousands who lined up to file past the casket of "our Texas president." One of my library professors had wept that day in class, saying, "President Johnson made it possible for me to get the money to go on to graduate school." Lady Bird Johnson and her daughters, Lynda and Luci, stood at the entrance, shaking hands with everyone who walked through that afternoon. I extended mine, never imagining that someday we would meet again.
After I got my degree, I returned to Houston. My plan was to work in a public library, which would have a far more extensive collection than a school. I envisioned working in the main, downtown branch, where I could help readers and researchers and where I might meet an eligible man on my lunch hour. I was offered a post in the Kashmere Gardens Neighborhood Library, in an African-American section of Houston, sandwiched between a rail line and an industrial building corridor. Instead of businessmen looking for mystery novels, I helped families find books, and as soon as school ended, we were overrun with children who had no place else safe to go; I was their de facto caregiver. I read stories and devised activities, and I began to visit the neighborhood elementary schools to lend them library books for their classrooms. When the library was quiet, I read. Inspired by my mother and Lady Bird Johnson's love of wildflowers, I devoured books about landscaping. I read every book in the library with advice about how to quit smoking, and I read stacks of literary classics. One of my library colleagues invited me to join her women's consciousness-raising group, and I did. We talked about sisterhood and read still more books, including Sisterhood Is Powerful and works by Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer.
But I missed Austin. I missed being able to gaze up at the edge of the Texas Hill Country, where at dusk the sun cast a violet crown around the rising land. I enjoyed Austin's small space, its lake and trails. And I missed working in a school. In the summer, I quit my job in Houston and returned to Austin, to a tiny apartment in another old, converted house near the downtown, and began applying for jobs. Regan and Billy had also moved to Austin from New York, and Regan and I slipped back into the easy flow of friendship that had been the compass of our teenage lives. Indeed, I was in Regan's house, borrowing her iron to press my skirts and watching television on the afternoon when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency.
Countless other afternoons, I would head to Regan and Billy's around five o'clock and watch as Regan cooked dinner; I really learned to cook in her kitchen. Billy often invited friends over, and we would eat and then I would head home. Other nights we wandered to Armadillo World Headquarters to hear country music or rock 'n' roll. Austin in those years billed itself as the anti-Nashville, showcasing music without the corporate side, and the Armadillo was the central symbol of its musical underground. Once, I took my parents to eat in the Armadillo's beer garden, where Daddy ran into Johnny Hackney's daughter, M
andy. The shocked look on her face told me that I was one of the few people to ever take their parents anywhere near the Armadillo World Headquarters.
I had a new job working in a library, this time as the school librarian for the Molly Dawson Elementary School, in a largely Hispanic neighborhood. Now my day was spent with children and books, and each class was my much-loved story hour. For many small children, there is a fine line between reality and fantasy, and it's easy for them to cross back and forth, just as little boys trot off to face imaginary bad guys in their Superman capes. Books and their stories help children do just that. I wanted these children, like the ones at John F. Kennedy, to dream of possibilities beyond their web of city blocks and brick school walls.
Unlike other urban schools during that era, Dawson was lucky enough to have music, art, and physical education teachers, along with a librarian, and we were the only educators who had a chance to work with every student in the school. But we went a step beyond that. Dawson's music teacher came up with the idea of applying for a special grant to develop and teach an entire interdisciplinary curriculum based on the nation's bicentennial. We taught our students about American history not simply with textbooks and time lines but through the music, art, and literature of the Revolutionary period. During gym, the students played Revolutionary-era games and learned colonial dances. We used grant money to take the children on field trips to the historic sites of Laredo and San Antonio. Many of our kids had barely been out of the confines of greater Austin.
My life had found its routine: work in Austin, visits to Midland a few times a year. Although while at Kennedy I had spent the summer of 1971 taking a University of California course in England, living in Oxford, where I studied the schools in Bath and Exeter and took quick jaunts out to the English countryside, now my summer vacations consisted of a week or two of visiting Mother and Daddy and trips around Texas to visit friends. I was back on the flat asphalt highway between Austin and Midland, bisecting the geography of Texas, the Big Empty, as it is often known. And I was thirty years old.
For at least a year, my friend Jan Donnelly's husband, Joey O'Neill, had been telling me that he wanted to introduce me to one of his friends. Jan had gone to Lee High School and had lived with me in Houston at the Chateaux Dijon. After spending a few years in San Francisco, Jan and Joey had come home to live in Midland. Joey was working in his dad's oil business, and his childhood friend George Bush was working as an oil landman, scouring county courthouse records for land that might be leased for drilling wells. Joey talked up George every time I stopped by to visit with Jan.
I was in no rush. I had a vague memory of George from the seventh grade, almost twenty years before. I knew that his dad had run for Senate and lost in 1970, when I first moved to Houston, and I assumed that George would be very interested in politics, while I was not.
It was late July, one of those high heat days when, come dusk, the sun had, as Willa Cather wrote, "left behind it a spent and exhausted world." I put on a blue sundress, drove the car around the corner, and walked up to the door of Jan and Joey's brown-brick town house. Even the roof was a cedar-shake brown. The cicadas were droning, and overlaying their vibrating wings was the steady whir of air conditioners to keep the baking-hot houses cool. Joey was at the grill. It was not some elaborate party; it was just the four of us--Jan, Joey, George, and me--sitting out back, eating hamburgers. We laughed and talked until it was nearly midnight. The next day, the phone rang. It was George saying, "Let's go play miniature golf." And so we did, with Jan and Joey tagging along as our chaperones.
The miniature golf course is one of the prettiest places in Midland. It was built among a veritable forest of old elm trees, which had grown tall and graceful even in the West Texas ground. We played golf under the stars and laughed again. Then I went back to Austin, and George started visiting on the weekends. Sometimes he would fly over on a Friday night, or he would drive, but he came every weekend, except for the very end of August, when he left for Maine to see his family. Bar Bush loves to tell the story that George spent exactly one day in Kennebunkport that summer. When he called my apartment, she says that "some guy answered, and he raced for a plane and flew right back down."
I returned to the library at Dawson and worked all through September. By the end of the month, George had asked me to marry him. We had been dating only six or seven weeks but our childhoods overlapped so completely and our worlds were so intertwined, it was as if we had known each other our whole lives. I loved how he made me laugh and his steadfastness. I knew in my heart that he was the one. I looked at him and said yes. That Sunday night, when George arrived in Midland, he headed to Humble Avenue to speak to my parents. A week later, early on a Sunday morning, George and I drove to Houston for his niece Noelle's christening. Jeb and Columba Bush had a little house in Larchmont, a neighborhood just past the Chateaux Dijon. The senior Bushes and their good friends Susan and Jim Baker were already there. I said hello to the Bakers first, and then George took my hand and led me to meet his parents. He introduced me with the news that we were getting married.
After lunch at the Bushes' home, George's dad pulled out his pocket calendar and looked over each weekend that fall. In a few minutes, we had picked a wedding date: November 5, 1977, one day after my birthday, one day before the anniversary of the awful accident, and only about three weeks away. There was no time even to order printed wedding invitations. Mother wrote and addressed all of ours by hand.
I gave my two weeks' notice at Dawson and went wedding dress shopping with Regan in Austin. I had been in a number of large Texas weddings, where the brides wore long, white gowns and elaborate, lacy veils and had acres of bridesmaids. George and I wanted a very simple celebration. I bought my dress, an ivory silk skirt and blouse, at a store called Maharani's, where most of the clothing came from India or Afghanistan. I would carry a bouquet of gardenias and pin gardenias in my hair. We had no groomsmen or bridesmaids and invited only our immediate family and close friends, about seventy-five people, a very small wedding by Texas standards.
Far more nervous than either the bride or the groom were Jan and Joey O'Neill. Joey and Jan had dated for years before they got married. Neither had dreamed that their invitation to dinner would lead us to the altar in a mere three months. And perhaps it wouldn't have if Joey had introduced us when we were growing up in Midland, or when George and I had lived on opposite sides of the sprawling Chateaux Dijon in Houston, or at almost any other moment prior to that night. But at that particular moment, on that warm summer night, both of us were hoping to find someone. We were not looking for someone to date but for someone with whom to share life, for the rest of our lives. We both wanted children. We were ready to build an enduring future.
Those were the facts of our lives when we went to dinner that night. It was the right timing for both of us.
Of course, not everyone in Midland agreed.
As I was packing to leave Austin, Regan and Billy were selling their house. A week before the wedding, the mother of a friend of mine from Midland came to see Regan and Billy's house. She was thinking of buying it for her daughter. She didn't recognize Regan, but Regan recognized her and said, "We're going to be in Midland next weekend. We're going to Laura and George's wedding." And without a second's hesitation, this woman said to Regan, "Yes, can you imagine? The most eligible bachelor in Midland marrying the old maid of Midland?"
Regan was speechless. But I thought it was funny. After all, I am four months less two days younger than George.
The movers loaded up my few things. After the last box was stowed, my cat, Dewey, and I began the drive that I had never quite imagined making, back to live in Midland. Right outside of San Angelo, I came upon a few scattered trees lining the edge of the road. Now, on the verge of November, the frost had already settled on the land, and their leaves had fallen and blown away. Trunks and branches stood dark and empty against the sky. Suddenly, from one naked tree, a great mass of winged birds lifted up, feathe
rs pulsing, air swirling as they rose. I slowed and watched in silence as they beat their migratory way south, then glanced back at the unremarkable tree that had extended its branches for rest and refuge. The sight was like a beautiful wedding gift on the long road toward home.
We were married on a Saturday morning at the First Methodist Church in Midland, the church I had gone to all my childhood, where I was baptized as a baby, where I had learned to sing in the choir, and where my mother still went every Sunday. Methodist weddings are brief, and ours was particularly so. There were no bridesmaids to add a few extra minutes as they walked down the aisle. It was perfect for the "old maid" and the "eligible bachelor." The rehearsal dinner had been held the night before in the windowless basement ballroom of the new Hilton Hotel. Bar and George Bush had hosted it, and the menu was chicken and rice. When dinner was served, my mother blanched. Our wedding reception was to be a post-ceremony luncheon at the Midland Racquet Club the next day, and Mother and the caterer had settled on chicken and rice. Mother and Bar had never thought to compare menus. The next morning, Mother called the caterer at the crack of dawn to see if something could be changed, pasta instead of rice, anything. But the meal was already in motion, so our guests ate chicken and rice all over again.