i was thinking about texas , there in my home , up on the second floor in my study as i sifted through the pages and pictures from milos box and put them in neat little piles on my library table-top ; texas like it was when i was a kid , watching the wagons circle beneath a larger than life texas flag and too-bright lights at the livestock show and rodeo inside the astrodome , clapping and cheering with what seemed like a million other texans ; texas the way i had always imagined it to be from the nineteenth century etchings in my seventh grade history book , where brave men faced down innumerable military odds and challenging landscape and somehow carved out a nation .