Usually when you have lived somewhere for any length of time the people who lived there before you will accept you as one of their own, especially your own family. That's not what I saw in Texas.
When I first arrived there I was met at Love Field, the airport for the Dallas-Fort Worth area at the time, by a slew of new relatives as my rather new spouse was in the Army and could not come to meet me. So all these people were introduced to me, I don't know how they expected me to remember them all, there must have been at least 10 of them, coming in several cars. It was July and hotter than anything I had ever experienced or even imagined. The air seemed to be too thick to breathe with all that humidity, I was tired, suffering from jet lag and absolutely overwhelmed. People talked funny, I had a hard time understanding them although they did not seem to be bothered by the way I talked which was more like what they heard on TV. Culture shock, omigod! All these strange people hugging me. This was not something I was used to. Then somebody got me a cold drink, ugh, it tasted awful. It was DrPepper which I had never tasted before and to this day I don't like it. (Apologies to those who just love the stuff, just don't force it on me.) Then some ice cream. That was better, but I had never had "soft-serve" ice cream and in this heat it melted in no time and I had a hard time keeping it off my clothes. Even bone-hard ice cream would have been a soggy mess in just a few minutes. After the ice cream I was put in a different car for the rest of the journey so that some of the other relatives could gawk at this creature from another world and get reintroduced. Most of that went by in a blur, but one thing did stand out: while everybody else was introduced by name and what relation they were, like "this is Uncle Bob", this one fortyish man was introduced as "this is Whitey, he's from Massachusetts". I didn't think anything at the time but that this was perhaps somebody who was visiting from Massachusetts and had come along for the ride. But as I found out later, he was married to one of this clan and had lived there in Texas for over 20 years. So why the emphasis that he was from Massachusetts? He talked just like they did, dressed the same etc., was he not the same, was he not one of them? Obviously not, and as I found out as time passed, that is the general attitude. You will always be an outsider no matter how long you live there or who you are married to.
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