I’ll be in the Lone Star State pretty soon and I’m scared.

Texans are tough. I was in the service with a bunch and, in the street level vernacular, they “took no shit from the company commander. “

In those days, we were ammunition handlers, driving truckloads of bombs and bags of black powder and such from the storage point to a nearby runway where the bombs would be loaded on airplanes and then dropped on bombing ranges as practice for the real thing. I don’t know what happened to the black powder, but I always had a sneaking suspicion the Texans were rolling and smoking BP roaches.

My Tejas Compadres rode their trucks like they’d ride bucking broncs or bulls at the Houston Rodeo while the rest of us pussy-footed wimps inched along the road as if a single bump would blow us to hell and back.

Just to illustrate how really tough Texans are, practically the whole Arkansas Razorbacks football team was once made up of Texans who couldn’t make the Longhorns.  And Arkansas was perennially ranked among the Top Ten football teams in the nation.

Depending on their geographic locations, Texans wrestle alligators or rattlesnakes, gulp slabs of bleeding beef in a single swallow, and say “Yes, Ma’am” to women.  They drink their beer from longnecks while leaning against the bar, one booted foot propped on the rail and the other at the ready just in case some damned Easterner or Californian who needs an ass-kicking walks by.

Texas, parts of it, anyway, has always been a state of memories for me. My granddad was a foreman on a Texas ranch. So it is said. I’m always mindful, though, that two chickens equal a ranch in Texas.

My grandmother died of the flu in Texas. No one knows exactly where she lived at the time or where she’s buried. I’m still researching the mystery.

My mother loved Texas and Texas music. Her favorite kind was Texas Swing and her favorite song was San Antonio Rose. If anyone ever spoke ill of Gene Autry, she’d likely lay a skillet alongside their face. She had a hell of a temper and it didn’t take much to set her off.

I was trained in the arts of war in Wichita Falls, Texas, where, while undergoing basic training in the middle of the coldest winter in the history of the Earth, my testicles shriveled and turned blue on a 50 yard march from the barracks to the mess hall one February morning.

There is a great deal more that connects me to Texas, not the least of which is, one of my beautiful daughters lives there. As long as I’m with her, I can handle anything those tough Texans throw at me.

Her husband is a police officer. He owns enough weaponry to outfit an infantry division with some left over. I’m not kidding. A couple of months ago, he broke out his personal collection and just for the heck of it, I handled a few just to see if I retained any of the old feel. Not hardly.

One of them was a frontier rifle, a Remington something-or-other, I believe, that looked like a Red Ryder BB gun. I distinctly remember the old Red Ryder’s. Some dumb ass kid was pretending to be the Rifleman or someone by twirling a Red Ryder gun around and firing from the hip.

When I saw the gun pointed at me, I ducked behind a pile of cotton hulls. Too late. A BB hit me right between the eyes where the bridge of the nose meets the skull. A millimeter one way or the other and the tiny pellet would have gone in an eye. As it was, the BB felt like it was the size of a large marble. The thing broke the skin and blood started running down my nose. Other than that, the pellet did no harm. But it was a momentarily frightening experience.

That’s what I thought about as I handled that real, live lever-action Remington. I wasn’t afraid. The memory of Red Ryder just popped up in my mind and then just as quickly went away as we talked. I certainly would be afraid today if some adult dumb-ass shit-for-brains started playing Red Ryder, whether I was armed or not. Guns are dangerous toys, and Texans own a lot.

But guns are not my major fear when I visit Texas. The Texas cuisine is loaded with enough cholesterol to slow the water over Niagara Falls. A person in Texas is probably more likely to die of arteriosclerosis than from a gunshot.

But, Jay-Dus, Tex-Mex food is freaking Delicious with a Capital D. If I can make it back to Hawaii without crapping out at the Texas Generic Roadhouse, I’ll count myself a fortunate man indeed.