Molly Ivins

I hate losing Molly Ivins. She was a Texas woman the likes of which you don’t run across often. She grew up in ritzy River Oaks in Houston, but she only grew up there. Her blood came from somewhere else. Her mind was sharp, her environment privileged, her perspective worldly. But wherever in the world she went, her feet stayed stuck up to the ankles in the mud of a Brazos River bank. Wherever she closed her eyes, she saw faded-denim Texas sky.

Never met Molly Ivins. But I’ve known Texas women like her. In “I’m from Texas, Too,” Ray Benson sings: “There’s no mistaking the brand.” And so I wish I had. Met her. Been friends. Talked about stuff. Driven some Texas highways, slow and with a cooler in the back. Closest I got to her was probably the late A.C. Greene, who went to Abilene High School with my mother. Later A.C. ran the Abilene Book Store on Cypress Street before he went on to greater things in Texas literature.

I know Molly and A.C. talked about Texas, and about writing. Couldn’t not have. A.C. and I conversed a time or two as well. Some years ago, when he had a heart transplant, he wrote a magazine piece about it. He said that in Texas at that time, heart transplant candidates were nervous because of a shortage of donors. It seemed that survivors wouldn’t allow the hearts of their lost loved ones to be taken, because a person’s soul resides in his heart, and they just couldn’t give up the loved one’s soul.

So, A.C. wrote, the Texas Legislature passed a law proclaiming that a person’s soul does not reside in the heart, but in the brain. I thought that was one of the funniest things I had ever read. Molly made a career of the daily hilarity in The Lege, as she called it, and I thought about how many times she sat down to write, stunned but tickled, at the end of a Lege session.

I wrote about the heart thing, too. The mission of the Texas Legislature, I wrote, is to remove any situation that would require a resident of the State of Texas to have to think. It could get a thinker from California in trouble. Stopped by a state trooper for speeding, and the trooper says, “Okay, sir, where does the soul reside?” “I don’t know,” says the speeding thinker, “all over the body, probably.” And off the thinker goes, escorted by the trooper to the Callahan County JP for undue process.

I worried, behind the safety of the California border, about the Lege being so pre-emptive. I thought the soul probably was rationed throughout the body, large percentages in the heart and brain, yes, but some also in the spleen, and pancreas, eyes, hair, toes, each toe possessing its teeny ration of soul.

Challenged by the Callahan County JP on this, I would simply call Molly Ivins to the stand. She was Texas soul from head to toe. Now she’s not there any more, and I know with certainty that something is missing in Texas. It is not Texas that is diminished; nothing could do that. It is Texans that have been diminished, sure as hell. One less among us who close our eyes and see that sky. Molly is a ground star, snuffed out.