VOICES
Falling in Love in an Arranged Marriage
7
What I Love About
Houston Rachel Dvoretzky
One night years ago on KPFT the DJ’s played a hometown paean to Houston so sincere in sentiment, so earnest in performance, but so clumsy in composition that after less than a minute they cut the music and, between snorts of laughter, began dissecting the finer points of the lyrics. Only the first two dreadful lines of the ballad remain in memory: Oh, my beloved City of Houston, you have so many cultural amenities You have so many educational opportunities... The songwriting went downhill from there. There was truth not only in the laundry list of civic virtues, but also in the very need to make that list. Why do we Houstonians so often feel compelled to remind ourselves of why we love our city? Could it be because so many of us came here not for natural beauty or the pleasures of traditional city life, but by economic circumstance? Is this why we work a little extra on living with, and loving, our less-than-perfect mate? The Allen Brothers founded Houston on canny economic prognostications, real estate speculation and outright lies. A wooded swamp at the junction of two sluggish, unpredictable inland waterways, the city had no natural reason for being. But the Allens figured that advertising lots for sale cheap at a place big enough to turn a boat around would sell just fine back East. Never mind that their descriptions of rolling hills and a salubrious climate was an outright fabrication. Mud, floods and yellow fever epidemics greeted the first citizens of the modern Houston. But the price was right, the energy was high and there were few fetters on entrepreneurs, or on much of anything else for that matter. The die was cast, the DNA inscribed. Generations of settlers, including my immigrant grandparents, who met in English night school, were drawn by economic opportunity, the low cost of living, and the freewheeling attitude. The philanthropy of wealthy cotton, timber, oil and finance families established
“so many cultural amenities and educational opportunities” which today, are high on Houstonians’ gratitude lists. A constant, ever-changing influx of immigrants both domestic and international has kept Houston growing and percolating. We have more than 80 consulates, the Ship Channel and the Medical Center, art cars and Bentleys, HGO and zydeco, high culture and titty bars, fashion boutiques and feed stores, hip-hop and mariachi, skyscrapers and horse barns, immense wealth and immense poverty — all right next door to each other. We have beautiful skies, a rich mix of cultures, a great sense of humor, and lots of really smart people (and plenty of stupid ones, often found multi-tasking at 60 mph). And we are hands down the best eating-out city in the United States of America. Houston is also infamous as a center for cough syrup abuse, Medicaid fraud, drug smuggling, human trafficking, and petrochemical emissions. But even Paradise would be awfully boring after a while. Houston is out of its wild adolescence and comfortably in its young adulthood, addressing serious issues with more thoughtfulness and perspective than ever before. This is a significant and positive evolution. But despite its richness, is Houston the city we would have chosen rationally for our destiny? Let’s be honest. Comparing Houston to a city located in beautiful mountains with clean air or on a coast with white sand and clear blue sea, or one scaled and designed for humans and not automobiles, or with more history or less poverty or competent school leadership or, dare we say it, zoning — where would a reasoning person want to live? But here we are, committed to a city perhaps not of our own choosing, always looking hard to find and honor its best, most endearing qualities. How can anyone not fall in love with this hard-working, free-wheeling subtropical conundrum of a city? Like an arranged marriage, the rewards are all the sweeter for the effort.
Rachel Dvoretzky is a native and longtime resident of Houston. Her background and interests include the improvement and growth of civic, cultural, and educational institutions, the remediation of problems in these areas, and the promotion of the best of what they create for their communities. She has broad professional experience in nonprofit fundraising, as well as previous careers in art curatorship and music performance. Her other interests include food and foodways, humor and satire, and rearing her teenage sons into manhood.