Our last night in Texas, sipping tea outside Jo’s on South Congress Ave. in Austin, we got talking to the young woman sitting with her smartphone next to us. She was a junior in high school, she told us, down from Fort Worth to have a look at the University of Texas. She was considering some other schools – the University of Georgia, the University of the South, Georgetown – but figured she’d probably end up, as her brother and her parents did, at UT. Her interest was in the classics; she studied Latin and was going on a summer trip to Italy and Greece – her first visit to Europe.
After about ten minutes of conversation she looked down at her phone and said, “I think my Uber driver is here.” She asked our names, put out her hand, and introduced herself as Katherine. This impressed us as much as anything we’d seen in our ten-day visit to Texas.
