By Marge Crumbaker

This is Houston. Our hometown. She can be snooty and aloof or warm and compassionate. She can give you a gentle embrace or let you down hard. Some can’t take her moments of crankiness and move on.  They are never bestowed with that lanky title, “Houstonian.”  For each one who leaves, many others move in.  This is a city where you can get the best bowl of chili you ever crumbled a cracker into, where you can pop a cork on the world’s best bottle of champagne. We’re air conditioned to the hilt and Julys get so hot and sticky it drives old timers to declare: “I’ll never spend another summer in this place.”  But they do, and wouldn’t leave for all the rest of the world’s beauty.  Houston has never taken expansion in stride. Nothing suits us. We want it bigger and better and newer.  Contentment, thank goodness isn’t a part of a Houstonian’s vocabulary. We’re a glitter gulch, a maverick riding hell-bent into a future which promises to be even more golden than our present. A newcomer to Houston gets in on something important: A front-row seat on a fast moving hunk of real estate we call “downtown,” where the streets are so crowded with Saturday shoppers it causes some visitors to call us “country.” For a snow white Christmas we take to the glistening sands of Galveston or Padre Islands.  Our ingredients: A little mischief, a whacky theory or two, the literate, and those who can’t write their names but can make a “x” mark on the bottom of a check that will hold good for a small fortune.  We’re old fashioned, thoroughly romantic and sometimes we’re tent-show theatrical.  We have a lot of good points.  There’s one thing we don’t have: Boredom. Not hint of it. Not a tinge.