Rushing's Ramblings

As a trained psychotherapist, I was once reasonably accurate in detecting less-than-factual statements. I learned to read body language and immediately discern when the verbiage did not match the behavior. I was married to an attorney while working on a doctorate at the University of North Texas in organizational psychology. We had quite a few discussions about applying what I had learned to jury selection. One of my classmates, Phil McGraw, would later specialize in jury selection, meet Oprah Winfrey, and become rich and famous. He now drives a Bentley. I don’t.  I’m a bit rusty now and maybe overconfident in skills learned long ago. It sometimes comes as a huge surprise when I discover I’ve been deceived. I usually react with anger when I have been “played” rather than being hurt or disappointed; I typically respond with anger…mostly because I was fooled. I pride myself in being authentic, sometimes too direct and honest, which I realize is probably not to many people’s ta...

There’s nothing like walking outside in the middle of the day and not seeing your hand in front of your face. People might be nearby and are heard, but they can’t be seen. I was a young child when I experienced a black dust storm in the Texas Panhandle. My mother soaked towels and sheets to place around the doors and windows of our house. We stayed inside until the dirt blizzard passed, but she allowed us to go outside for a brief moment. She knew that dust could kill you if you inhaled it for too long, as she had lived through the Oklahoma dust bowl of the ’30s, with the major one occurring in 1935. Many of her neighbors would die from “dust pneumonia.” People surviving the disaster called it the massive “Black Sunday” storm. In the 1910s through the 1920s, when war raged in Europe, the Southern Plains experienced an unusually wet period. The government created a land boom in the Plains to grow more wheat, especially since grain prices were escalating. 5.2 million acres of native ...

Mike Lucksinger had worked all day on his ranch, removing brush and mending fences. The day’s work had been exhausting, but he wasn’t quite finished. Even though it was in May, the temperature had risen to a sweltering 90 degrees. Mike entered his house at dusk and removed his hat before going to the kitchen for more water. After doffing his boots and donning his loafers, Mike headed out the door to pick up a limb that had fallen from the big Oak tree in his well-manicured yard. As he stepped out, he thought about how he would soon be able to relax in his family room with the huge window and watch the birds swarming around the bird feeder hanging from his favorite tree. Mike was reaching for a limb when he suddenly felt a sharp pain in the upper part of his foot. Mike was horrified to see a rattlesnake slither away. Mike is an analytic type and has a quiet demeanor, but at this particular moment, he was panic-stricken and did a lot of self-talking to remain calm. As a founding me...

I don't know exactly when I started my love affair with Texas, but maybe it was when I was born on a cold November day in the Texas Panhandle over seven decades ago. I'm confident I associated snuggling tightly against my mother with everything good about the world, particularly the place where I was born. My father took us on many trips by automobile when I was growing up. We traveled all over Texas, camped in most state parks, and swam in its pristine lakes. Additionally, we ventured out to many states in the western part of the United States. Anything east of us, other than my relatives in Oklahoma, was never given a thought. We were provincial in our thinking, but I would later make up for that in spades when I grew up and wandered around the planet. When Texans brag about our home state, we  don't include the big cities for the most part, although I'd give them a slight nod. Instead, we're referring to the vastness, beauty, and uniqueness found in ...