Samuel Johnson said “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”, but I consider myself a patriot. The fact that the United States of America is the birthplace of the blues, jazz, rock and roll, and Mohammed Ali is argument enough for me that we are a place worthy of pride.

Texas, however, was, for most of my life, a foreign land — a place and a culture far from the one I grew up in in New York City and suburban New Jersey. And I will shamefacedly admit that for most of those years, I entertained the same lazy prejudices and assumptions about what Texas was like — and who, I believed, lived there.