A Parable

Before I came to Texas, I was terrified of flying. No joke. I am no longer so afraid, I'm happy to say, and maybe that has something to do with becoming a Texan, who knows? But that’s not where I’m going here.

In those days I did not fly, period. Thus it was that I arrived in Texas at the Amtrak station in Fort Worth on a hot day in May of 1989.

Now I had heard lots of stories about cowboys and cattle drives and the wild, wild west. My bosses at the Super Collider had heard the same stories, which was why they had sent me, a relatively low-level person, to help set up the laboratory in Waxahachie; the lives of physicists were not to be risked. But even so I was hardly prepared for what happened next.

The kindly conductor helped me down from the train and had just placed my bags on the platform, when I heard a distant thunder, a strange sound that had nothing to do with the clear blue day.

Before you could say “Omigosh, what’s that?” the thundering grew closer and there came into view a huge dust cloud, and it was moving toward us.

“Omigosh, what’s that?” I cried, as out of the dust there materialized a mighty herd of red-eyed cows, goaded on by cowboys on horseback, whooping and hollering and cracking whips and firing pistols. And the whole doggone tangle was headed right toward me!

“Quick!” yelped the conductor, grabbing my arm. “We’re gonna have to run for it!”

This wasn’t supposed to happen in a modern city like Fort Worth, right? Yet closer and closer they came, the sound of their hooves like steel on the pavement; their horns were black and shiny and for just an instant I thought I could feel their hot breath, so close they came. Then I ran. Seriously.

Without my luggage, and without much dignity, I let the conductor pull me across the track and into the station.

The ruckus went past us, and then out of view, and I could finally breathe again.

Now, you can say what you want, you can be skeptical. You can say cowboys don’t drive thundering herds of longhorns through downtown Fort Worth at midday anymore. You can even accuse me of making it up. But I remember it that way, and I’m sticking to it.

Unless, of course, that’s not what happened that day. In which case, all I can say is “So? So I made a mistake, which just shows I’m human.”

Truth to tell, lots of us have memories, or so we think, of events that may have happened differently. And sometimes some of us consciously elaborate, even make things up. But events that happened not at all? No.

So. I made it up. But you know what? It doesn’t matter, because I’m just having fun with you, and when a relatively insignificant person like me makes things up, it doesn’t matter. Unless it’s to make a point.

Consider Hillary Clinton’s description of arriving in Bosnia with her teenage daughter and the two of them having to duck sniper fire and run for cover the moment they disembarked from their plan. Consider how, after irrefutable evidence proved the account to be untrue, she said she "made a mistake." It is irresistible to wonder how that could be.

The problem for Hillary Clinton is that there are only two possible explanations.

She may have made it up out of whole cloth (see above), which is troubling in a potential leader of the free world; or she may have come to believe it herself, which is even more troubling.

That’s why it’s a story that matters, and one that won’t go away.

Thanks for the memories: To Greg Jones, for "Ghost Riders in the Sky," a real memory that needs no embellishing.