Fall is here and the revered Texas tradition – the State Fair – has opened for its 127th anniversary. Big Tex, after a widely reported and mourned fiery demise last fall, is back standing 55 feet tall and costing around a half-million dollars. Seems Texans just couldn’t make their annual autumn pilgrimage without him. He stands guard over a recently remodeled midway and delicacies of fried almost-anything-edible announcing that our Texas autumn is here. I am aware that autumn is announced in other parts of the country with a real change in seasons and a burnished rainbow of leaves that soon gracefully drop their attachments and lie into heaps waiting for their eventual demise. All this reminds me that October blows in another autumn in my life.
R. Eddy Snell, president of the SRO Associates who built the new Big Tex icon was reported to have said in the Dallas Morning New, September 28th, “Pretty much everything we do is about telling a story.” So I wonder now as a maturing adult, what will be my autumn story? What attachments will the fall of my life invite me to drop? What will it enable me to leave behind as I enter winter? What legacies or traditions do I hope to leave to the next generation of my family? Can I leave a legacy with real spiritual meaning and memories for grandchildren and grandnephews? How do I live and relate to those in the spring of their lives in such a way to leave something meaningful and lasting behind? How will I be linked to the Texas generations who follow me as well as the generations who preceded me? What do I want my personal autumn to announce? What will be my story?