Forgive me for indulging a bit. This has nothing to do with books I'm reading :)
I fell in love with Texas long before “Friday Night Lights”. I remember, vaguely, watching “Dallas” with my mom as a kid. Later, when I was about 18 or so, a country music cable channel started showing “Dallas” every morning at 10 a.m. I saw the whole series from beginning to end over a year or so. I loved the opening credits: everything really was bigger in Texas. I loved the idea of oil rigs and cattle and big glass buildings. I saw “Giant” with James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor and was enchanted. When I discovered Larry McMurtry (to this day, one of my favorite authors and “Lonesome Dove” remains my favorite book of all time) I thought I had found my place in life. When I grew up, I was going to move to Texas. Simple as that.
In January of 2005 I got to take a two day trip to Dallas, and it was literally a dream come true. I went with my boyfriend at the time, and he too liked the idea of moving to Texas once we had finished college. Everyone was so friendly and cheerful and it was wide open and flat--you could see forever. The cost of living was so ridiculously high in California, and everything was so cramped. We would have room to sprawl out in Texas, own a big home for a fraction of the cost that a similar home would set us back in California. We saw adorable little condos for sale for $60,000 with financing available. Financing? We laughed. We could buy one right now with what we had saved for a down payment. We even considered doing it, and using it as a rental property to generate some income to speed up our move to Texas. In the end we didn’t do it, but while there I bought a “Texan by Choice” bumper sticker, a Texas flag, and a “Don’t mess with Texas” tee shirt. I saw a license plate frame that said “I wasn’t born in Texas but I got here as quick as I could” and knew that I would buy one once we moved. It summed up how I felt exactly. I started collecting Texas quarters in a jar and still do, to this day. I have over $50 worth. All Texas. Who cares about the other states anyway?
By the end of 2006 the boyfriend was gone, but I was more determined than ever to move to the great state. I was getting my master’s degree and decided once I did I could move. After all, I really didn’t have too many ties to California. Sure, my parents and sister were there, but not *my* family. I wanted to get married, have kids. I saw Texas as the perfect place to raise a family. I dreamed about a small, dusty town, where everyone knew everyone else and it was safe. I would be the town librarian in charge of a little bitty library, and I would close early on Friday nights to go to the football game.
Of course the town would have a high school football team, and a good one. I looked forward to those games, and I would meet a wonderful man there who loved the game and Texas as much as I did, and we would get married and have babies and once our sons were old enough they would play football too. It would all be so, so perfect.
Once I graduated in 2008 I actually did look at jobs in Texas. The logistics of moving didn’t seem too daunting. I didn’t have any major furniture, just books. I would fly out for a job interview, find a little house to rent, move.
In the meantime, I fell in love with “Friday Night Lights”. I saw the movie first because Billy Bob Thornton is in it. Oh it was wonderful. If I could go back in time to be a teenager in Texas I would have done it in a heartbeat. They had the life I’d always wanted, where the football players ruled the halls with cheerleaders on their arms. I wanted it so bad I could taste it.
I knew I couldn’t go back in time, so the next best thing would be to give my kids that perfect life. I watched “Friday Night Lights” when it first premiered on NBC, and I loved that Kyle Chandler was playing Coach Taylor. I had adored him in the short lived but wonderful show “Homefront”, which only lasted for two seasons but was one of my favorites while it was on. The TV show was absolutely perfect and then some. The fictional town of Dillon, Texas was exactly what I wanted. If I’d woken up in the morning and been in the middle of Dillon I would have known exactly where to go. I knew that town. I knew where every thing would be. I would walk down the main street and people would smile and wave and ask me if the new James Patterson had come in yet. And I would follow the lights on Friday night to the game.
Every time I hear the theme song to the show my heart aches with a longing I can’t quite name, a longing of something that should have been but never was and now never might be. I followed the show all around the different times it was aired, but I never did make it to my dusty little town in Texas. But watching the show, and rewatching the show, and watching it again and again, fills me with an odd mixture of profound peace and bitter sorrow. Everything I’ve ever wanted and will never have.
It kills me that vapid, brainless reality television can garner higher ratings and stay on the air longer than an intelligent, moving, beautifully written and acted show like “Friday Night Lights”. I wonder what kind of society I live in that doesn’t value something as amazing as “Friday Night Lights”. It’s more than just television, it’s magic. It takes me to a time and a place that doesn’t really exist except in my head, where I live in that dusty little town with my husband and babies, going to the games on Friday nights. All while I live here by the beach in California, still single, still childless, still hoping someday I can follow the lights and make it home.
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