The curious case of the TEXAS vanity plate
Family lore and an impossible coincidence taught me much about the larger-than-life state
My father’s car was notorious in our Massachusetts town. Not because of the make or model or the way my father drove, but because of his unique vanity plate: TEXAS.
One day in 2010, he was heading home when he noticed a car in the rearview mirror. The car drove behind him down the road, running along a stretch of beach that sometimes stinks with bacteria, past a liquor store that’s been in business as long as I can remember. It tailed him across the town line by the sign welcoming visitors to the “Birthplace of the American Navy.”
It followed him onto the side street that led to our home.
My father parked in our driveway. The other car parked in the street.
He didn’t know what was about to happen.
A man got out of the car and walked over. The way my father tells it, the man said something like: “Oh my god, I love your vanity plate — I tried to get it when I moved here.”
The man then put his boot up on my father’s fender and rolled up his pant leg to reveal a Texasshaped tattoo. They chatted about Texas before saying their goodbyes. The man, we found out later, was related to a woman who taught at the same elementary school as my mother. This is not entirely surprising in a town of just under 20,000 people, where everyone seems to know just enough about each other’s business to keep the gossip mill chugging.
A few years later, by my dad’s telling, the man walked his daughter into the figure skating club my sister and I went to. My father, a consummate girl dad, served as the club’s president and was working the front desk.
“I bet you don’t remember me…” the man began as he approached, but my father cut him off.
“Oh,” he said. “I remember you.”
My father’s tale became family lore, a favorite to trot out at dinners for different permutations of guests. We weren’t entirely sure if all the details held up through each telling, but we agreed on one point: The whole thing was just so very Texas.
My father grew up in Austin when it was still weird; I grew up in a 4square-mile town where decisions are made at annual town meetings and the colonial homes in Old
Town have plaques with the names and occupations of their original inhabitants. On a street lined with houses painted muted colors, my father flew the burnt-orange University of Texas flag during football season. When we drove on Route 128, people sometimes rolled down their windows to shoot a Hook ’em Horns sign. Occasionally, when my father smoked meat in one of his three grills, a new neighbor would call the fire department.
Even though I ate spicy food and preferred my meat medium-rare when many in my state blanched at the idea of salt and cooked their hamburgers to hockey pucks, I vowed, with all the snobbery of a New Englander, that I would never live in Texas. I applied to colleges only in the country’s northeast quadrant: no farther west than Chicago, no farther south than Washington, D.C.
But almost 12 years after I set out for college (a university safely along the Acela corridor), I can’t imagine wanting to move out of Houston. I’m going to marry a man who proudly refers to himself as a sixthgeneration Texan, who has a collection of Stetsons and cowboy boots and judges other cities by the price of their breakfast tacos. He leaned hard into his Texanness during the year and a half we lived in Atlanta, extra loyal in absentia. One of his proudest moments, he likes to say, is when we stopped in a Buc-ee’s en route to Nashville, and a woman asked him which beef jerky he recommended. My fiancé was wearing a cowboy hat. He looked, said the woman, like someone who knew what he was talking about.
My father, in many ways, was the same. He symbolized what many people in my town knew of Texas: A foreign land that produced people with strange habits and outsized pride. I didn’t think much of it growing up. Now, I find myself making comparisons to other states. I wonder if a New Yorker in North Carolina would follow a stranger home just because their vanity plate said “NY.” I wonder if someone from Utah would get the state’s outline tattooed on their body.
I want to explore Texas through these sorts of myths and legends and stereotypes. How our symbols became what they are, what they mean to us, what they mean to outsiders, how and why they’ve been co-opted. What we can learn from the stories we choose to retell. What it means to be a state that provokes such extreme responses, whether they be deep disgust or rabid pride.
I explained this conceit to my fiancé, who said he knew the perfect man for me to talk to: A friend of his named John Capshaw, a sixth-generation Texan with a passion for the highend boot brand Lucchese. John scours the internet for underpriced boots and, upon acquisition, either flips them for a profit or gives them to his friends at a steep discount. John also happened to have lived in my hometown for just over a decade.
Small world, we all agreed.
One Sunday night this past December, John texted my fiancé asking where I went to elementary school.
I told him the school’s name, and John texted back quickly. His former mother-in-law had been a teacher at my elementary school, he said. Did I know her?
Something tickled in my memory. Surely not, I thought. Surely the odds were too low. Surely…
“Ask him if he ever noticed a vanity plate that said TEXAS,” I told my fiancé.
Instead of responding by text, John called. He was, as I had suspected, the Texasobsessed man of family lore who once tailed my father home.
The next day, John texted my fiancé. Facebook had shown him what he’d posted after meeting my father: A picture of the vanity plate with the caption, “I can’t believe I live in the same town in Massachusetts with the guy that has this plate.”
The post’s 13-year anniversary was the day after we put it all together.
If someone had written this saga in a novel, I would have said it relied too much on coincidence. But there’s a cliché about the relative strangeness of fiction and the truth, and another about the reason clichés become clichés, so I’ll leave it at that.
It was relatively late when my fiancé and I figured out the connection to John, and an hour later on the East Coast, but I texted my family anyway. My mother replied with an exclamation point. My sister answered in all caps (“WHAT”) followed by: “That’s insane.”
My dad texted early the next morning. “He seemed like a very nice guy,” he wrote. He then typed the vanity plate story in its entirety.
Retold tales twist little by little, and we are nothing if not a state of well-told stories. It becomes illegal to pick bluebonnets, Texas gets permission to secede from the Union whenever it wants, Davy Crockett fights to the death instead of being executed upon surrender, a man with a Texas tattoo stalks my father for his vanity plate.
Lore is, by definition, a body of traditions, often passed down orally, each mouth reshaping it just slightly in the telling. But it’s less about the granular truth of a thing than it is about its crux. It’s about the meaning of the tales we tell ourselves, the things that frighten us or inspire us, the parts of ourselves we most want to reflect out into the world and those we are most afraid of acknowledging. It’s about the symbolism of Davy Crockett’s spirit, nature’s sacred beauty, a fantasy of stubborn individualism, the degree to which displaced Texans obsess over their home state.
But for all the years that have passed and all the times it’s been retold, John confirmed my father’s version of the tale — every last detail. What we thought was maybe a larger-thanlife moment was, instead, a testament to large lives set against a startlingly small world.
Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise. As our state’s favorite saying goes, everything’s bigger in Texas — even the coincidences.