The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 44. Lunch in Lacy Lakeview

Travel Date:  September 12, 2018

Veterans Memorial Park in Northcrest Lacy Lakeview, Texas.

Ever wonder what happened to Northcrest, Texas?  Yeah, me neither.  I wouldn't even know there was a Northcrest, Texas had Marci and I not stopped there to have lunch.  To be honest, I didn't even know there was a Northcrest, Texas once we did stop there.  In fact, I didn't know there was a Northcrest, Texas until just now, looking at Google Earth.  In fact, to be honest, there isn't a Northcrest, Texas.  Not anymore.  There also wasn't one when we showed up for lunch that day.  There once had been, but by the time we arrived, it was gone.  It vanished in 1998--well, sort of--and we didn't arrive until around 2:00 p.m. on September 12, 2018, our twenty-first wedding anniversary.  And so you can see we were far too late to experience Northcrest at all.  Well, sort of.

Besides this being the tale of our anniversary lunch date, this is also the tale of three cities:  Lacy, Lakeview and Northcrest.  It's an incredibly uneventful story, but I like those types of stories best of all.  If I could write a great novel--and I can't, for I never finish what I start--rather than having some climatic plot, I'd develop a plot similar to the topography of a good slice of Texas.  I'd start with as much excitement as a grain field outside Amarillo can conjure up, and then I'd slowly fizzle out the action unit it ended flat as a mosquito-infested salt marsh along the Gulf Coast.  Rather than killing off characters, I'd just have them doze off while reading travel books about places like Lacy, Lakeview and Northquest, and I'd just never wake them up.  They'd spend eternity slumbering on couches or love seats, heads turned sideways, snoring and spitting slobber over delicately embroidered pillows.  There'd be lots of flies buzzing on screen doors.  Perhaps there'd be a plant sitting in a window above an old ceramic sink filled with shucked corn.  There'd most definitely be an old toilet with hard water stains in an add-on bathroom that has a green ceramic-tile and pink and purple daisy-print wallpaper on the walls.  Yet, the greatest action in my great American novel would be Mother turning off the television each night for family prayer and Dad saying "Shit" as he steps in dog crap on the front lawn on his way in from working at the gas station just down the block.  I like my fiction real.  There should be thousands of uneventful hours to read about and only a few pages dedicated to exciting moments such as taking little Andrew to the emergency room after he stepped on a nail and drove it deep into the heal of his right foot.  After reading my book, people would be more than ready to face their own tedious lives with enthusiasm.  Northcrest would be the ideal setting for such a revolutionary novel.  Perhaps the opening scene would not be all that different than our own drive into town:

Under a big blue Texas sky with big blotchy, slightly scattered rain clouds, the Browns exited I-35 to enter what had once been Northcrest, Texas via E. Crest Drive, a four-lane strip of asphalt that quickly narrowed to two.  Our two protagonists, if they could be called that, were relatively hungry.  Steve, the husband, in fact felt famished, but then he usually did after hours on Texas highways, boredom gnawing the inside of his gut like a wild dog cleaning out a cow carcass and climbing out blood-faced to smile at the hot, Texas sun and that one passing farm truck.  Marci, the wife, too was hungry, but determined not to admit it.  Stopping for food would lengthen the hours between WiFi hot spots.  She could wait, she thought, until the motel in Austin.

Outside, on the left, placed at a diagonal, facing both the frontage road and E. Crest Drive, was a gas station with four regular pumps under a blue-gray metal canopy and a separate pump for diesel off to the side.  Behind that was a convenience store with dark tinted glass mirroring the acres of black asphalt out front.  There were a few scattered cars headed to or leaving the pumps and a long-nosed semi-truck with a sleeper and a flat-bed trailer parked off to the right, between the gas station and a corrugated metal Family Dollar next door.  Beyond that was Bush's Chicken, and that was the end of the business district.

The Browns were fine with that.  School teachers, they were used to being poor.  They needed no fine eating establishment.  Vacation, for them, even one celebrating twenty-one years of marriage, was having a good picnic in a park.  In fact, they were looking for a picnic table at that exact moment.  Marci had seen a sign.  It had said, Veterans Memorial Park.  Together, the Browns had deduced there just might be some picnic tables there.

And so the courageous couple ventured forth down this long, straight lane edged with a sidewalk on the right and an irrigation ditch on the left with long, bushy, uncut grass along the edges.  The houses all faced the cross streets, only their boring, windowless brick ends facing E. Crest Drive, the primary route of our pilgrims' progress.  

And so it continued, block after block, until our courageous couple happened upon a time-tormented white stucco garage of sorts with little bits of what once had been red trim clinging to rotted wood for dear life.  The company name was faded beyond recognition, but Commercial Lighting... Janitorial Supplies could clearly be made out.  Oddly enough, there appeared to be a customer, for there was a car out front.  Behind the debilitated ambitious enterprise stood a tall metal tower and Marci announced, "According to my GPS, the park should be somewhere around here."

At this point we'll break with our narrative.  Once again I have failed to follow through with a complete story.  Perhaps a travel book is better suited to the situation at hand anyway.

Behind Something, Something Commercial Lighting... Janitorial Supplies is the ugliest park dedicated to our men in uniform that I have ever seen.  Rather than hiring an architect, the city officials must have done the sensible thing and had the town's kindergarten students draw up site plans and awarded the best one with a contract, I assume paid in full prior to ground-breaking with such and such amount of lollipops as recorded in the town's minutes.

And you know, I loved it.  I truly did.  Rather than trying to unify the grounds with the elements and principles of design, they just made this sort of loop with concrete--somewhat square, somewhat diamond-shaped, a little bit oval, and then squiggled here and there, and then they just plopped things down almost randomly, but not quite.  On the north side of the park are four covered picnic tables, all rigidly perpendicular to the back chain link fence, the only geometry in the park.  Everything else is just tossed upon the green.   Sort of in the center, but not really, is a formal garden with two granite stones set upright like the twin-towers which they memorialize.  Instead of doing something insanely conventional like placing them in the center of an octagonal plaza with walkways converging on it from all sides of the park, you know, like you'd see in Rome or Washington D.C., they placed the main feature in the park in a little alcove in a waist-high wall of hedges along a curvy path that is not reached from the side of the park facing town, but rather from the side facing away from town.  Residents have to walk around the park, and by Something, Something Commercial Lighting... Janitorial Supplies and then along a highway without sidewalks to reach the main gate.  Cows, on the other hand, if they break through the fence of the field across the highway, can walk right in.  It's quite interesting.  Rather than consume volumes of paper trying to describe it, I've supplied a visual below.  The only things the picture doesn't quite capture are the bright blue benches randomly spaced along the walkways.  You'll have to fill that detail in yourself.

Veterans Memorial Park viewed via Google Earth.
Note, the main entrance faces a highway and fields (top)
while the secondary entrance (bottom) faces town.

However, here's the great thing about art:  it's all relative.  Although grandma's painting of Texas bluebonnets, a barn, a dirt road, and what is supposed to be a live-oak tree is complete garbage alongside an Edward Hopper, compared to a Thomas Kinkade, her painting is actually quite nice.  And, to be honest, even a Kinkade jigsaw puzzle is somewhat enjoyable to look at while putting it together Christmas day--although admittedly much funner to destroy after you're finished.  So too with gardens.  Although the now defunct town of Northcrest (or it's replacement town, Lacy Lakeview) did certainly manage to build one of the ugliest monuments possible in remembrance of their veterans' service, it is still a beautiful place in an odd non-artful sort of way, simply because it is, after all, a park, and all parks add some grace.  One cannot go wrong by opening up some green space and providing a few picnic tables.  Although a good architect could render earth-shaking spirituality from such a plot, even having your kindergarten class (or Thomas Kinkade) design your park cannot do too much harm because in the end, all parks are beautiful.

. . . . .

Some of the most joyous moments of writing this book occur not while writing about what I actually experienced, but rather, in the tidbits of information I've gleaned in my limited, lazy-man's Wikipedia research along the way.  For instance, if I'd never started writing this book, I'd never know there was a Twitty, Texas, even though such a fact seems obvious with all the twits there are in Texas.  Likewise, I wouldn't know about the long, uneventful legacy of the three communities, Lacy, Lakeview and Northcrest, which I'll get to in a minute.

First, however, here's a commitment to myself in writing:  if I ever do get this book published, and if I ever sell more than ten copies, I will donate 10% of my royalties to Wikipedia.  Yes, it may not be real research, and yes all historians would scoff at even attaching that word research to whatever it is one does while googling articles on Wikipedia, but that nonprofit organization opens up worlds of information to lazy armchair intellectuals like myself.  And although it may not always be 100% accurate, it's a lot more accurate than if we just sat in our armchairs and made up the facts ourselves.  So, here's a plug for the democratization of knowledge made possible by Wikipedia--the primary source of information in this book other than my own experience.  And even when their editors don't catch all the mistakes, Wikipedia articles are still far more factual than anything on Fox News.  Now to the story of Northcrest Lacy Lakeview, Texas, which if my source is correct, is all true:

If you're picturing a lake viewed through fine, lacy pine bows, or dangling Spanish moss as the source for the town's name, get that image out of you're head, because you're wrong.  The name comes from two separate towns that later merged.  Lacy, which came first, is named for "William David Lacy, who sold lots in the 1800s" (Wikipedia).  According to Wikipedia, Lakeview "named for its location near spring-fed lakes," although I personally witnessed no sign of water, not even in the park drinking fountain.  The article goes on to say that both towns were "stations along the Texas Electric Railway, also known as the Interurban which ran between Dallas and Waco" (Wikipedia).

The article goes on to say that "neither town grew quickly" and that "by the 1940s the combined population of the two communities was barely 120 with four businesses" (Wikipedia).

So, in 1953, in desperation (I added that loaded word to liven up this exposition), the two communities combined.  Although this did ignite growth, the town reaching 2,000 inhabitants by the 1960's, all the growth was residential, as the town became a bedroom community of Waco.

In further desperation (again, my words), the community of Northcrest (where our fabulous park sits) merged with Lacy Lakeview, which allowed the former three communities "to qualify under Texas law for home rule status" (Wikipedia).

Now, if like me, you don't have a clue what "home rule status" is, thanks to Wikipedia, I can tell you.  "Home rule" basically means that those ruling over you now consider you significant enough to now rule yourselves.  I'm assuming, in this case, it now meant the new larger Lacy Lakeview was now significant enough to have either a town council or a mayor or both.  And what a blessing!  Without them, who would there have been to approve having the town's kindergarten class design the Veterans Memorial Park?

An uneventful story, but if it never happened, Marci and I would never had a memorable 21st anniversary lunch in a town that no longer exists.  The world may not know where Northcrest, Texas once was, but I, on the other hand will never forget, even though I just learned about the town writing this.  May the residents of this bedroom community continue their sleepy lives blissfully forever.  And if the boredom of the Texas landscape ever eats out your guts on your journey between Dallas and Austin, well drop by for an enjoyable picnic in the nation's ugliest Veterans Memorial Park.  And if you didn't pack a lunch, you can always stop by Bush's Chicken and get a bucket to go.  I'm sure they could use your business. 

Such a lovely, homely park.  Do stop by.

References

Wikipedia. Lacy Lakeview, Texas. 9 September 2019. 30 December 2019.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 43. On Friendship and Betrayal

When my youngest son Everest was in kindergarten he came home one day bursting with joy.  His friend Brandon had invited him over to play.  The problem was we didn't know where Brandon lived.  We lived in a rural area of the Navajo Nation and almost all of the students were bused into school, often down long, muddy lanes before the bus even reached pavement.  Early on in the school improvement process, when we had officials from the department of education visit, we put them on the buses so they could experience a tiny slice of the daily reality of our students.  There was simply no way to understand our school without first understanding those muddy, rutted roads.  Everest's friend could have lived down any of hundreds of such roads in a twenty-mile radius.  There was simply no way for us to get him to Brandon without knowing where to go.  He was heartbroken when I explained the situation to to him.

The next day, walking to school with him, I said, "Now get his phone number so that we can call his parents and find out where he lives."  He optimistically departed from me once we entered the school, running down the hall joyously towards class.

After school, he announced that Brandon had invited him over again.  "Okay, what's his number?"  A look of horror passed over his face.  It turned out that Brandon didn't know his own phone number.  It had not sunk in deep enough to Everest that this was a crucial detail.  I guess he thought I'd say something like, "Oh Brandon doesn't know his phone number; well, let's do this instead."  This went on for days.  It tore me apart inside.  We finally sent Everest to school with a paper with our phone number.  "Now give this to him.  Tell him not to lose it.  Have him call us."

One Saturday we came home late from Gallup.  There was a message on the answering machine.  "Everest, can you play?"  That was it.  There was no return number, and we didn't have caller ID.  And so the painful plot continued.  I don't remember how we got it resolved.  However I do remember the day I finally got my youngest son over to his friend's house to play as one of the most joyous moments I have ever experienced.  I knew just how important a friend could be, not only as a person, but as a symbol, a rite-of-passage, a sense of well-being.  Our society openly shows it is thus so for girls, through movies and television, but not for boys.  Girls go through emotional ups and downs as they navigate the world of  friends and growing up, so the media portrays.  Boys just magically walk around in gangs of five or six tossing a football back and forth between them as they walk through quiet, little towns.  They talk of sports and girls, but there is no real attachment to their friends, no highs, and no heartache.  Just tossing footballs and pranks.

However, I knew Everest's excitement personally.  Even though I was much older, I felt it the first day Jim decided to hang out with me.  I don't remember at all what we did.  I just remember the excitement I felt when I saw his brown hatchback drive up.  He was more than a friend.  He was a symbol.  In my mind, the hell I was going through in high school was over.  He got out of his car, and walked across the street wearing dark sun glasses and a Police Synchronicity concert t-shirt with the arms ripped off.  He was clearly cool.  And in a way, I was right, the inferno was over.  I had survived it.  It's not that anything would change at school, but it no longer mattered.  Jim was in college.  He was well liked.  He didn't gain popularity by putting others down.  He did it simply by being himself.  He seemed completely uninterested in being popular.  I think the reason becoming his friend was so important to me is that I knew he had nothing to gain from it.  That was important to me.  My few friends were amazing, but they were either socially ignored at school, or like me, outright tormented.  We were all good friends, but we were good friends out of necessity.  Jim was a symbol that I could just up and walk off the battlefield of high school mentally even as the war continued to wage on all around me.

And I did.  The moment I saw Jim walking across that road, sun glasses on, keys dangling in his fingers, my high school days were over.  I was leaving that stupid dumb ass world behind and becoming what I always wanted to be in the first place, an adult.  I wouldn't graduate for a few more months but the hell was over, because I refused to any longer participate in a system that put me down.  The jabs and scoffs no longer touched me; they rolled off like water from a raincoat.

Why I needed Jim as a friend to make that leap, I don't know, but I did.  I needed someone to tell me  through their actions that I was worth knowing.  My other friends couldn't do that.  We were good people, but I knew they needed me as much as I needed them.  Our friendships were forged through survival, not choice.  At least that was my perception then.  Once I was mentally free from the stupidity of high school, I realized they were just as cool as Jim.  But it took that rite-of-passage in order for me to rip off the blinders that had been forced upon me.

For being so important to me, I discarded Jim's friendship rather easily.  I guess I wasn't yet the adult I thought I'd become.  Jim and Andrea moved in with each other.  They had a cute, little loft apartment.  For whatever reason, things did not go well.  When it became clear there was conflict in their relationship, I convinced myself that since I was friends with both of them, there was no reason to choose sides.  I could hang out with Jim, and I could hang out with Andrea.  There was no reason for us all to be together.  Of course, I was lying to myself.  What I was really trying to do was move in on my friend's girlfriend.  Andrea was a good friend too, and even though my tactics were slimy, we got to know each other better in the process.

But I got it wrong.  Andrea never did love me, but even if she had, it wouldn't have changed things.  The world has it wrong also.  I know that when people say, "All is fair in love and war" they are being ironic.  They aren't saying that things are really fair in love and war.  They are saying that rules are thrown out when it comes to matters of the heart--love and hate--those two polar passions.  But, as they say it, they are also implying that it is justified.  They're excusing it, saying "everyone is human" or "it's only natural."

The world has it wrong.  We are not born to become human.  We become human to be born again as something divine.  Mortality, if experienced correctly, is schooling for perfection.  The people we all admire in this life--Gandhi, Mother Theresa, the Buddha, the Dali Lama--that's what they get that the rest of us don't.  They understand that the natural man isn't natural at all.  It's an illusion. The ways of the world don't lead to happiness.  Overcoming the ways of the world does.  Disciplining the mind, the heart and the soul leads to freedom.  Giving into natural lusts--whether they be food, flesh, or drink--leads to addiction, to captivity.  Freedom is a reward of discipline.  Bondage is a result of succumbing to desire.  What people like Gandhi get that the rest of us don't is that the illusion is both real and unreal, simultaneously.  What I desire now is indeed real, and the fact that I am experiencing that emotion doesn't make me evil.  However, there is a super-reality beyond it that is more real, that provides a greater reward.  If one is tired of being overweight, that brownie-fudge, chocolate-smothered sundae is most definitely still real, but the enjoyment of being free from the burden of the extra weight becomes more real.  Putting others before your own desires becomes the ultimate reward for those losing the weight of the world.  The reward is not necessarily anything tangible that arises out of not giving into desire, although that does often happen.  Rather, it is freedom from the constant need of the ego screaming "feed me" that is the ultimate reward.  That is why Christ said he was the bread of life.  Spiritual transformation diminishes the constant craving of the natural man, which left unchecked, devours not only everything around it, but ultimately the self.  There is no way to constantly give into desires and remain happy. 

Sin is real.  So is repentance.  I might as well do that here.

Jim, I'm sorry.  I definitely exploited the tensions between you and Andrea for personal gain.  That is not what good friends do.  For a while, I definitely was not your friend.  Furthermore, not only was I exploiting you, I was also exploiting Andrea.  I was not her friend either, although I did get to know her better.  One should not manipulate people to make them part of one's life.  Those who truly understand happiness realize that not all is fair in love and war.  The minute love is not fair, it is no longer love.  Desire, sure.  But desire is not always love.  And war.  Well, war is war.  Those who truly know love, don't believe in war--not that war is not real; they just know that it's the scum on the lens of the telescope that blots out the ultimate reality from being perceived.  That's why Gandhi and his troops knelt down before their enemies.  They refused to engage in anything less than who they were born to be--not only for themselves, but for their enemies too because divine potential is no respecter of persons.  They didn't want their enemies defiling themselves either.

When I exploited the tensions between you and Andrea, I was definitely engaging far below my divine potential.  I betrayed both of you, and to both of you, I am truly sorry.  That you still consider me your friend just exemplifies the incredible person you are.

Thank you.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 42. Braum's Ice Cream is the Best

My friend Marsh has attributed his life's happiness to Braum's Ice Cream.  That is because his wife Andrea and their two kids are all products of Braum's Ice Cream.  Not literally, of course.  I once found a piece of glass in a carton of Braum's Ice Cream.  Scary.  Not the norm.  Finding a person in a carton of Braum's Ice Cream--especially a whole, unharmed person--would be something completely different.  That would involve physics as incomprehensible to logic as the trickle-down-theory is to economics.  How do you get a person to occupy a space obviously too small for them and retain molecular connectivity?  How does a cat tossing his hard-earned mouse up in the air to an eagle passing-by better his lot in life, other than, perhaps, keeping the damn bird from devouring him too?  These questions astound me.

Not really.  Well, maybe the one about the cat and the eagle does.  But after the first sentence, that paragraph up there is pretty much all gobbledygook--the type of rambling garbage my friends and I would spend hours videotaping each other saying as we laughed hysterically late into the night.  All this, mind you, occurred without pot or booze.  "Braum's Ice Cream is the best" was the refrain we threw in to hold those low-quality Monty-Pythonesque rip-offs together.

Yet, in a sense, Marsh is right, the story of us as a group began at Braum's Ice Cream.  He, sentimentalist that he is, took it a step further, and formed a family out of the deal, but without a doubt, there would be no us as a gang without Braum's.

What I remember most about working at Braum's is dried ice cream stuck to the arms.  What I remember second most is the sound of Jim belching out Bruce Springsteen songs in the cooler.  It would be a low, somewhat off key dinner music--where you think you recognize the tune but just can't quite hear it well enough over the clanking of dishes and conversation to name it--and then someone would open the glass door to grab a carton of milk, and out it would come, Jim singing Springsteen in all his working class passionate glory--

The screen door slams, Mary's dress waves
Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely (Springsteen)

I don't remember Jim singing "Thunder Road" or any other particular song.  I just remember Jim behind the glass doors of the cooler belching Springsteen at the top of his lungs.  And for a kid whose days in school were pure hell, there was magic in the night, flipping burgers at an ice cream shop on Main Street of a bedroom community of that giant spiraling wheel of light and glory erupting out of the cicada-heavy, heat-rattled plains of central Texas called Dallas.

There was Jim.  There was Andrea.  There was Phil.  Phil once asked Andrea who she'd invite over for Thanksgiving dinner if she could invite over anyone in the world.  She looked up, light brown eyes beaming under dark brown bangs, under that regulation chocolate-brown Braum's cap, dimples denting both sides of her mouth:  "Sid Vicious."  Phil thought that was hilarious. I don't think I knew who Sid Vicious was at the time.  I'd just learned who Springsteen was.  I'd just learned who U2 were.  Peter Gabriel was just a name.  I had no clue who the Sex Pistols were.  This was all new to me.  But, when Phil told his story, I got it immediately.  Even with her punked-out hair, which could be any color or style on any given day, Andrea had a small town, quiet sweetness about her.  Sid Vicious--it was clear just by his name--didn't possess those same qualities.  So, in my mind, I saw this demure proper girl gleefully answering the question affirmatively with "Sid Vicious."

There were more than just my good friends at Braum's.  Hazel, the assistant manager, was an older woman, probably in her mid-sixties.  Most of the employees didn't like her.  She got after them when they didn't do their jobs.   She could sometimes be grumpy, but I got that.  Working fast food is hard work.  Nobody in their sixties should have to do such a job.  It made sense to me that by the time 11:00 p.m. rolled around, she'd start barking at people to hurry up.  I was beginning to really internalize that there are two Americas.  My parents worked very hard for the fortune they later lost, but that hard work paid very well in life-dividends--a beautiful home in a nice neighborhood, a nice car, and most importantly, the prestige that automatically comes with "arriving".  But Hazel worked just as hard, perhaps harder, and all that she had to show for it at the end of the day were tired feet and a worn out ego.  It just didn't seem fair.

Then there was Sheri, the manager.  She must have been more patient, for everyone liked her.  She was younger, perhaps in her late twenties, early thirties.  She had a memorable smile because she had one blackened tooth.  She probably hated it, but it gave her a distinctive look.  I think she probably had a not-so-secret-crush on Jim, but was older than him.  Whether she was married or dating, who knows?  Work creates these little worlds where you spend hours and hours with people you hardly know anything about, and yet, in some ways, you know them very well because the many hours of proximity.  You know their hand movements, their laughter, the tone of their voice, their smiles.  You know what music they like, what food they eat, if they pick their teeth, or burp, or fart, and yet, often you don't know anything about where they go after the last light is shut off, the glass door is locked, and everyone either walks to their cars or out into the night.

Phil didn't work at the Main Street Braum's long, which is good, because if he had, Marsh probably would not have become part of the gang.  It can't be ruled out completely.  He lived just two houses away from Phil, but typical of the suburbs, Phil didn't know Marsh even though they were neighbors.  Marsh also went to the same high school as Andrea, but typical of high schools with two or three thousands students, you don't know everyone at school.  It was a different world than the small town in which I grew up.  Phil transferred to a store closer to where he lived, and Marsh worked there too, and that's how we all met.

I wish I had something grand to say about Braum's, but like so many significant things in life, I don't, other than to say that outside my home, it is the first place I ever really felt accepted.  Jim was clearly cool.  That was very important to me then.  All my previous friends had been social outcasts like myself.  We turned to each other out of desperation.  I'm not sure what Jim saw in us.  He was in college.  We were in high school.  He had lots of friends and a steady girlfriend, and we did not.  So, I'm not sure what was in it for him, but I'm grateful for his friendship.  He made me realize a world did exist outside the ridicule I received at school.

Mostly, though, I remember Braum's the way you remember home or a favorite vacation spot.  I remember the sensory details.  The stainless steel counter gleaming under the fluorescent lights, six or eight hamburger patties on the grill sputtering little droplets of grease, the hissing sound of a wire basket of frozen fries dropping in the deep fryer, and the cloud of steam that would rise afterward.  There were also the not-so-pleasant details:  taking the grease trap out when it was overflowing, sliding around on a greasy floor, dumping a third of the grease down one paint leg; fronting the freezer in the summer, when you have no coat and are used to ninety degree temperatures outside; scrubbing grease between floor tiles.  Mainly, however, I just remember feeling at home, especially cleaning after hours: the music , the friendly ribbing, the determination to be done by 11:00 and not finishing until after midnight.  Everyone worn-out, saying goodbye as the last light was shut off and the doors were locked.  I remember walking home dead tired, somehow strangely satisfied.  I'm glad I still don't do that type of work, but I'm glad I experienced it.

Although I prefer Blue Bell, as an experience, Marsh has it right:  Braum's Ice Cream is the best.  And their commercials from the 80's, where Ernest got his start, weren't bad either.

References

Springsteen, Bruce. "Thunder Road." Born to Run. 1975.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 41. One Mouse Screams and All Others Vanish

I lived 3.1 miles from school, and on most days I walked.  That is because I officially lived out of my high school's zone, but in an area that still accepted students.  They just didn't provide busing.  The walk was long, but on most days I rather enjoyed it, especially in the afternoons when it was warmer.  After I got home, I'd change my clothes and walk another .9 miles to work.  Some mornings Lloyd gave me a ride to school, and on some days, I took the car, so it wasn't always like this, but frequently I walked a total of 8 miles during the day not counting the normal amount of steps one takes living.

My walks were my reprieve from the world, a time when I could just vanish in daydreams and notice shade and sunlight.  On the way home, I always passed one particular small apartment complex that had an enormous tree out front--so large, and so full that grass refused to grow underneath.  In the fall, the leaves fell and covered the moist dirt with layers of gold.  The low, winter sun left the place in blue shadow.  I thought to myself, If one has to live in an apartment, this is the place.  The complex was on a backstreet in an older part of town.  With some imagination, one could pretend one was in a small town, and by then, I was feeling nostalgia towards my former rural life.  One day, I saw a For Rent sign and told Lloyd about it.  Our complex had been purchased by a developer who bought up old rentals, painted the outside, planted a few flowers, and then raised the rent without making any improvements inside.  This was our chance to move out of the mold hole we inhabited, and we took it.

We moved into a second story apartment that had a sliding glass door that opened up onto a balcony that looked into that wonderful tree.  The place also had an open living room and dining room, and lots of light, even in the two bedrooms.  However, it also had mice, mice droppings, and that oh so strong smell that comes with lots of mice.  Had we been different people, we probably would have complained and made our landlord shampoo the carpets.  We weren't.  We didn't.  We were just happy to get out of the mold hole, and so we vacuumed up piles of poop out of the gold shag carpeting, set up traps, and moved in.

The mice didn't instantly move out.  We'd hear them in the walls, find little trails of poop now and then along the baseboards, and occasionally catch one in a trap.  But the smell was gone, life was good, and it seemed like as long as we could keep the mice under control, we could coexist with them.

Then, early one morning we woke up to the most horrible cry imaginable.  It was loud; it was shrill; but worst of all, it was filled with human-like agony.  We rushed to the living room, plugged our ears, looked towards the trap in shame.  We wanted to go rescue the animal, but neither one of us had the guts.  After what seemed like eternal damnation as punishment for our cruelty, the sound finally stopped.  We walked over the the trap.  That was one big mouse.  Not a rat, but almost.  The Goliath of its kind.

We were so disgusted with ourselves that we threw away the whole trap and buried it with other garbage to hide the evidence before the sun came up, at which time, we'd get rid of that bag as fast as possible.

We never set another trap.  We collected the other two and threw them in the garbage as well.  I'm not sure what we thought we'd do.  I guess we'd resigned to coexistence with them even if they started to slowly devour us.  We seldom spoke of it, for it was too real.

In the end, we were okay.  After about a week, we realized all of the mice moved out.  Where they went, I don't know.  I assume into the apartments around us, but from that long, blood-curdling screech forward, we were mouse free.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 40. Isolated in a Grocery Store

I have so many great memories of Texas, and yet those memories presented isolated aren't authentic.  It's not that they aren't real.  I had great times with my brother and my friends.  However, those memories are sharp points of light in an immense night.

Between sixth and seventh grade shyness moved in and stole away enormous chunks of life out of my future.  I now realize it made me a better person for I was really quite shallow and self-centered before it happened, but it also removed me, almost over night, from the comfortable ease I had felt living in the world.

As far as I can tell, there were no external causes of this--no traumatic family event, no move, and no change of schools.  No, rather one day I was blissfully unaware of myself--bragging, exaggerating, out-right lying, unaware of my relationship to the world around me; assuming, quite naturally, that I was the reason the cosmos was created; priding myself on my sarcasm and wit, unconcerned with how it might impact the recipients.  And then all of the sudden, I was acutely aware of the enormous space between myself and others.  It was as if some shadow had moved in over night that would never completely leave.

In fifth grade I fell in love with Kelly, a beautiful, blue-eyed girl from southern California.  In my hometown, which I'll call Sandstone, a small community in central Utah, kids were in the same cohort of students from kindergarten to twelfth grade.  There were very few move-ins and very few move-outs.  In Elementary, there were only two classrooms per grade-level, and in sixth grade there was just one large combined class. A new student from the outside world was always a big thing.  Unlike most places, being new to the school was a prestige, and instead of being isolated, you were embraced with open arms.  I had been the lucky recipient of that phenomenon myself when I moved into town in second grade.  So, we always noted the new kid with awe.  However, Kelly was different.  Awe simply wasn't a strong enough word, at least not for me.   The moment I saw her she was absolutely everything.

In sixth grade I had the good fortune of being placed next to her on the seating chart.  We got along great.  I was incredibly proud of the fact that we were always getting in trouble for talking.  I had this Peanuts book I had checked out from the Book Mobile (a library on wheels), and I was an incredibly slow reader; she used to love to harass me about the fact that I was always reading the same book, and a comic book at that!  I loved it.  For Christmas, I got two pens, a lime green one and a bright yellow one.  I took them to school.  She saw them and said, "You know yellow is my favorite color."  I said, okay.  I knew she wanted it, but I really liked those pens.  She kept it up for a couple of days, and my treasured yellow pen became hers.  I was so damn proud of my loss.

Eventually, our continual talking led to us being separated.  She remained where she was, and I was moved to the back of the room.  It should not have been a big deal.  We were still in the same class.  We still had recess.  She was immensely  popular, so it's not like I was her guy anyway, and I still hung out with her almost daily.  But over the summer, something happened.  I remember being out in the yard, and for some reason her parents came by, and she was with them.  I was in the front yard; I saw their car pull up; this terror came over me; I ran to the side of the house, watching her from a distance, yearning to leap out, run towards her, enfold her in my arms and give her a great big kiss.  But I couldn't do it.  I was frozen.  An enormous trench opened between us.  A black cloud formed overhead, and I was isolated forever after, not just from her, but most of the world around me.  I was this new creature that I had never experienced before.  I was shy.

It wasn't quite that dramatic.  I'd slip in and out of it--although I was never comfortable around Kelly again.  Sometimes I'd forget I was shy and blissfully slip into ease even with those who were not my friends.  However, sometimes I even felt a strange sense of separateness creep in even when I was with my friends--usually when I felt they were doing something wrong.  It wasn't that I didn't do things that were wrong.  I just became acutely aware of immorality, especially cruelty.  Before this strange occurrence, I could vandalize with the best of them and think nothing of it.  In sixth grade, I got in trouble for breaking a bunch of cinder blocks behind the school with a bunch of other boys.  I prided myself on my sarcasm and sharp tongue, and frequently put people down to entertain others.  I was by no means the most popular kid in the school.  I didn't like sports, so that hurt me, but I definitely wasn't an outcast either.  But after that day of hiding from Kelly, I sort of was an outcast.  Not completely, of course.  I lived in a small town.  We all knew each other.  I was still sarcastic and still put others down. But something had definitely happened.  By ninth grade, I was ready to get out of town.  When my parents announced we were moving to Dallas, they thought I'd be heartbroken; what they didn't know is that I no longer felt that I belonged in Sandstone anyway.

I innocently thought the move would end the terrible feeling of isolation.  It didn't.  Unlike in Sandstone, my new school in Texas did not welcome move-ins.  I was not some strange, new exotic creature.  I was just strange.  And rather than going away, the shyness climbed right in and basically occupied every corner of my being except the still small part of me that could cry out to God.  It was as if isolation had been forced upon me so that I could feel the pains of the world.  But it hurt, oh how it hurt.
   
My first job in Dallas was as a bag boy at a Tom Thumb grocery store.  I felt isolated at school, and I felt isolated at work.  When it was slow, the other bag boys hung out up front to talk to the checkers, who were generally a couple years older and female.  But not me.  I'd head as quickly as I could to front the soda aisle, where I'd stay until I heard "I need bagging assistance on aisle nine" over the intercom.  I loved that soda aisle.  It was a refuge.  When I was done, those six packs and two liters would be snug against the front of the shelves, forming this beautiful shiny solid wall of varying colors.  Often, as I worked, the manager would walk by, "Looking good, looking good."  What he didn't know was that not only was I dreading the call for bag boys over the intercom, but that I was also dreading his walking by and saying, "Looking good, looking good."  I dreaded any social interaction whatsoever.  What I really wanted to do was disappear; fronting the soda aisle was as close as I could get to nonexistence and keep my job.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 38. And So He Worked, As All Great Artists Do, Regardless of Circumstance

Much of this panel from Lloyd's 5-panel composition
Uptown Splash, Dallas, Texas is re-purposed abstract art
painted in the field across the railroad tracks from our first apartment.

As Marci and I headed west, we drove through neighborhoods I once knew well.  At one point, I could see that the first apartment complex Lloyd and I lived in was gone, but most everything around it was still intact, and so in a moment of passing, I was able to slip over a line and see myself as I once was through an old film-reel flicking granular pictures against the corroding stucco walls of my mind.

Things did not go well when Lloyd and I moved to Dallas.  Much of Texas enforced sodomy laws that did not allow two single men to live together.  The fact that we had the same last name and clearly resembled each other as brothers didn't make a difference.  Most places simply would not rent to us. 

So, rather than select an apartment in our price range that was desirable, we accepted the only place that would accept us, and it was very undesirable.  The manager was this nice, old lady.  The owner, whoever he was, at least wasn't sitting around in his underwear thinking about all the kinky things that could possibly go on behind the closed doors of his rentals.  However, the apartment was small, damp, and had rank, rotting carpet and deteriorating furniture that I assume was purchased from a motel that rents rooms by the hour.  It also had very low light--not exactly the artist studio my brother dreamed about when he decided to move to Texas.

We started our new lives out very differently than the ones we experienced when my parents were living in a nice townhouse complex with a pool, a sauna, a rec-room, and a BMW or Mercedes parked out in front of each house on the block.  This clearly was a different side to Dallas, though only a few miles away.

Still, we were excited.  Despite the reality before us, we were optimistic the way only the young can be.  The great thing about youth is that you have so much life before you, it isn't that irrational to dream big.  There simply is such a vast horizon of time ahead even the most self-doubting soul knows a lot can happen.  You can dream regardless of the current situation.

So, we unpacked the Mustang and hung up Lloyd's paintings in an apartment so dark, they were never really seen except under the tint of dull yellow bulbs.

And we put the stereo on the dresser in the bedroom and put in one of the only two 8-tracks that still played--Meatloaf and John Denver--and life was good.  At least life was good until a fitted sheet came off my bed in the night and once again I was faced with what I was actually sleeping on.  That happened often, and frankly, it was horrifying, as was the smell left after the carpet was vacuumed.

Outside was better.  The apartment complex was U-shaped and there was some lawn between the wings.  On the other side of the lawn was a Pepsi machine outside the office that emitted a crisp light that shined in the night.  I liked to look out the living room window--one of the only two windows in the apartment--and see the clean glow.  I put many quarters in that machine.  The Pepsi was good; the short journey was better.  If only for a few moments, it got us outside, and in a sense, away from poverty.  Perhaps that is why people who live in motels hang outside at night on lawn chairs resting in parking lots of gravel and shattered glass.  Poverty is less present with the smell of magnolia trees heavy on the wind.  Florescent light, and the moths flickering around them, provide a clarity not found under the dull yellow light inside.

Oh how I loved sticking two quarters in that machine and hearing the thud of a cold Pepsi.  It would have been much cheaper, of course, to just buy a six pack, but a lot less therapeutic.  We then used the empty Pepsi cans to solve a problem.  We only had one real window in the place.  It didn't let in much light due to the small courtyard and the balcony walkway above us.  Yet, the sidewalk to the complex ran right by our window.  We were basically living in a Motel 6.  If we left the drapes open, anyone walking by could stop and watch us like two fish in a tank.  If we closed the heavy, yellowed cloth drapes, all natural light vanished.  So, Lloyd decided we should build a screen of evenly spaced Pepsi cans.  We laid out a row of cans stacked three high, one-can width between each column, placed a 1" X 4" board across that, and started the process all over again until the window was filled.  It worked and looked cool.  Of course, it blocked out some light, but not near as much as closed drapes.  Of course, it didn't block out all possibility of seeing in, but at least we weren't living in a department store display window anymore.  It was a good compromise between light and privacy.

Still, outside was better.  Behind the apartment complex was a half-asphalt/half-gravel, pot-hole pocked parking lot with little bits of broken glass.  Behind that, was a story-high cinder and gravel covered berm topped with railroad tracks and an occasional passing train, and on the other side of that, there was a big open field of weeds.  That field became my brother's art studio.  There was space, and there was natural light.  Of course, some days there was also wind and flying shit, but he made the best of it.  Besides a few twigs and leaves stuck on your canvas can sometimes create momentum, some sort of active dialog between artist, nature and the canvas.  And so he worked, as all great artists do, regardless of circumstance.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 37. Entangled in Suburban Sprawl and Philosophical Ramblings

After White Rock Lake, Marci and I started to head north along a series of parks that should have taken us north to Richland College, but something went wrong, and we ended up on Skillman, and then Forest, and then N. Jupiter Road.  If you  know anything about the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex, you know that puts you in Garland, and once in Garland, you might as well be on Jupiter.  There simply is nothing substantial--other than size--about that town.  It's a giant spiraling mess of mostly lower-middle-class suburban sprawl.  The only aim in life once one gets into Garland is to get out, which isn't always easy, but LeAnn Rimes somehow did it.  Driving through Garland that day, I hoped Marci and I would do the same.

We eventually did escape.  We came out near a mall where I once worked at a Pier I-Imports-like store that I'll call Araby.  I did a lot of living in that small shop filled with the aroma of incense and candles.  I remember sitting on top of a high ladder, taking a break from hanging palm fans on those long metal hangers you hook into the holes of pegboard walls, and seeing Susie down below talking to whoever was cashier then.  Oh, she was stunning.  She wasn't working.   She'd just dropped by, as she put it, "on her way to go clubbing."  I had absolutely no interest in her.  She was too young to be "out clubbing," maybe seventeen at the time, but I don't think that was it, though I generally wasn't interested in the partying crowd.  She was immensely popular with guys, and that should have been it, for she probably had no interest in me either.  But, that wasn't it, either.  I'm not sure what my lack of interest in her was.  That's what made the moment so memorable.  I was just up there sitting; I heard talking; I looked down; and there she was, a beautiful Mexican-American woman--she looked to be at least twenty-one, all dressed up--wearing striking red slacks, a shiny black blouse, a red suit jacket, bright red lipstick and these giant red, circular earrings.  She looked up at me, smiled, and the light caught her big, brown eyes, and I thought Damn she's beautiful.   But nothing changed, and I knew nothing changed.  That's when I first became aware that whatever romantic attraction is, it is not simply a result of recognizing someone is beautiful.  It's not that generic.  There is some deeper pull.  Even if it is tied to the physical, it isn't simply the physical--at least not only the surface.  There is an undercurrent to love, a song below the song, a deep unstated knowing.  I don't think it's necessarily either there or it isn't there, although I did think that at the time.  No, romantic love, like all love, can be grown or diminished with the right action.  But, none-the-less, romantic love is a non-verbal connection that is more than simple attraction.  It is knowing a part of someone without any good earthly reason to have that information.  Sometimes it pulls both ways; sometimes it doesn't.

Sitting up on that ladder though, looking at Susie through an unmoved-awe, was an important realization for me.  I'd fallen in love with a good friend of mine, Andrea, and it was clear, except as a friend, that she didn't love me back.  I had an incredibly low self image and had assumed that her inability to love me was because of the way I looked.  In my mind, it had to be that.  Nothing else could explain it.  We spent hours together, almost every single day.  She clearly liked being around me.  The only explanation was that I was simply too ugly to love.  Sitting up on that ladder, looking down on someone who was clearly gorgeous and feeling nothing made me realize for the first time there might be more to it.  I didn't rule out being ugly; it just brought in other possibilities.  After all, I knew without a doubt Shideh had been attracted to me, and she was clearly beautiful; I had just sabotaged everything with my insecurities.

Writing this is somewhat of a lie, because up on that ladder, I could not have delineated a thought process anything close to the one I just wrote.  It was simply an instant of awareness: Oh you can realize someone is beautiful and feel nothing.  I had always assumed if you were beautiful everyone was attracted to you, and if someone wasn't attracted to you, you were ugly.  I assumed there had to be some flaw in me to create the hell I went through in junior high and high school.

Later, when I moved back to Utah, and was working at an indoor mushroom farm, I had the same thing happen to me in reverse.  In many ways, I was at the lowest point in my life.  I'd given up on becoming a writer, moved back home to a town of 2,000 people, and I was working as a janitor.  Each day I'd walk down this long, wet concrete hall, a distant light coming in from open-doors at the far end, usually a forklift coming up the hall, headlights reflecting in the puddles of water, and I'd desperately look for this one girl walking all alone, down the one side of the hall, or perhaps with her one and only friend.  She wasn't much to look at.  Long, stringy, dirty-blond hair, freckles, crooked teeth, not much of a figure--pretty much a body that just went straight down from the shoulder, no hips and insignificant breasts.  Yet, each day I looked for her.  I had to.  It got me through the drudgery of working another day at a job that I knew to my very core had nothing to do with why I was living.  I also knew that at least one person who the world found ugly, I found beautiful.

And yet, I never talked to her.  Part of me wanted to.  She, without a doubt, would have liked it.  It was clear that no other guy gave her any attention.  But, I also knew the world would find her ugly, and thought--no, that's not the correct word, because there was no reflection involved; wanted is a better fit--I wanted a beautiful woman to validate my existence, and she clearly could not do that.

Although my boys are much more socially skilled than I was and don't seem to have any issues attracting beautiful women, I observe in my children the same flawed thinking--way too much concern for what the world wants to ever experience complete joy.  Perhaps, like me, they will learn the skill of ignoring what doesn't matter as they age.  Still, in hopes to assist both them and my future grandchildren, I will insert here what should be obvious, but isn't:  at least ninety percent of all the people you encounter in your life will form temporary relationships with you, from a few seconds to perhaps a few years.  Do not live your life to please those who are insignificant to you--which is almost everyone.  Live your life for your God and yourself, and live by courageously giving yourself to the moment you are encountering now.  Had I not worried about what the world thought about me asking the droopy girl out, my days in that dismal mushroom farm would have been far less dreary.  Instead of looking back on days I could almost tangibly feel sucking my soul out, I'd be looking back and smiling at some small, fond memory.  I don't know why I thought that girl was beautiful, but I did.  I should have allowed myself to know her.  I needed a friend and she did too.  The opinions of people who don't matter--what a stupid commodity for which to trade away even one second of your life.  Yet, for most of us, learning not to give our lives away to mammon takes practice.  Exercise well; it will be worth it.  Life starts the moment you stop trying to be what others want and become instead who God intended you to be.  Only you can know who that is, and only you will know when life has truly begun for you, but until you find that defining moment (or series of moments) when the world around you largely dissolves, you are not truly living.   Life simply is one-on-one communication with the creator.  It simply takes on different forms, all connected to love.  We each have our own unique language with the divine, and it is that we are each here to discover. Satan's big job is to keeps us distracted from that moment (or moments) of discovery through all that doesn't matter.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 36. Marsh Had a Camera and I Had One Too

Marsh (left), me (middle) and Phil trying to look like U2 in Big Bend National Park
Probably 1988

Marsh had a camera and I had one too.  It was really that simple.  He was already part of the gang.  We were already friends, but it is the times together alone at White Rock Lake, or down on Swiss Avenue, or downtown Dallas trying grab that right spark of early morning sunlight that I remember as cementing our friendship.  I don't recall much of anything we had to say.  I just remember being in my maroon colored Plymouth Reliant, stopping the car and getting out to catch the sun's first rays.

I think that at first I was perhaps the better photographer.  I had the advantage of growing up with an artist.  But, it didn't stay that way for long.  Marsh had the natural talent that I lacked, and once given fertile ground to see, he took over--especially after he went off to college to major in photography.

Marsh was younger than Phil and I, and he was still in high school when we were well into college.  Phil and I had already partially found our adult selves.  I'm guessing Phil found his adult-self sometime around Age 12 as he seemed like an old soul when I met him in ninth grade.  Mash hadn't.  Therefore I don't know one Marsh; rather I know several evolutionary stages of Marsh becoming a man.

The first time I met Marsh, I didn't know what to think.  He talked a lot about squirrels and dropping acid.  I could kind of get the squirrels--they are cute--but I didn't think they were cute enough to photograph.  He showed us picture after picture of the fuzzy beady-eyed creatures sitting on stumps holding nuts, which all looked the same to me--the stumps, the nuts, and the squirrels.  And I wasn't interested in dropping acid.  Life was scary enough for me without reality being more distorted than my mind naturally made it. I didn't need substance to whack out my life more than it already was.  So, like I said, I didn't know what to think. Now I realize that Marsh was no more into drugs than I was into hating Jews when in ninth grade I rolled pennies down the hall and yelled "Jew!" at anyone who stopped to pick them up.  He was just giving us a face he thought we wanted to see.  That is what middle school and high school are all about--acting out who you think the world might like until you find the version of yourself comfortable enough to wear permanently.

The second Marsh I knew was lonely and always miserable because of some girl who he liked who did not like him back with the same intensity.  That Marsh I could fully relate to because that was my life too.  We spent many hours walking around town moaning about how bleak life is, and about the exquisitely sweet pain of dejection.  Based on the details of his stories, he at least had some relationship with the girls before the inevitable "break-up" would occur.  I just skipped the whole relationship thing and went strait for the pain.  It was quicker, easier, and I didn't have to deal with my shyness.

The third Marsh I knew was Lucy's boyfriend and Andrea's good friend.  He was relaxed and simply himself.  That is the Marsh I took photographs with, and the one I became best friends with.  I didn't get as much time with him then because he was also hanging around Lucy and Andrea, but the time I did get was real.  Behind the camera, the lens pointed towards a perfect reflection or just the right spec of light, and life was good.  Then there'd be the walk or drive to the next location.  I don't remember a thing we talked about, and so there are no good stories to relate here.  I just remember it meant something.  Those were good times indeed--the realness that we are here on earth to experience.  Not necessarily deep or dramatic, but grounded in the simple movement from moment to moment naturally and without pretense.

I was deeply jealous of the fourth Marsh I knew, and that is the one I want to focus on here.  Often the best writing comes from hard places.  Unsatisfied, the mind absorbs images at difficult moments intensely, perhaps trying to make sense of a world perceived at the time as falling apart.  Bright days go by unnoticed.  The hurricane gets etched into the gray matter of the brain, grain by grain.

Anyway, I had moved to El Paso.  Marsh had moved to Commerce.  Life had broken up that old gang of ours, sending us all in different directions.  He was pursuing his dreams as a photographer.  I was pursuing my dreams as a writer, some 700 miles between us.  Somehow an opportunity had opened for me to make a trip back to to visit him and I took it.

The drive east was amazing.  The Texas sky was big and blue, the road open, the hill country wild and green with growth, flowers galore growing over water-saturated prickly pear cacti,  morning glory climbing up leaning barbed-wire fences, the low hills alive with the riot of cicada.  I stopped the car frequently, snapping away--click, click, click.  This was the life, and I was on my way to see a good friend and brag about the life I was living and the writer I was becoming.

And then I arrived.  I walked into his apartment and reality hit hard.  When he opened up the door to his apartment, there was a beautiful girl, the girlfriend of his roommate.  I don't remember her name.  I remember her as looking like Jill Gibson of the Mamas and Papas: long, slightly stringy blond hair; loose, casual, almost limp body movement, projecting a complete ease; a slight pout projecting a jaded outlook on life, broken now and then by these amazing smiles that projected a willingness to take life all in,  no matter how difficult it might be.  Rob--if that was his name--wasn't there at the time, but I immediately sensed Marsh had found the bohemian lifestyle I so wanted.

We didn't stay.  We went out to his car, cameras in hand, and headed for the country.  He had this long, black behemoth of steel with a red velvet interior.  Malibu comes to mind, but it could have been any long two-door sedan from the 70's.  How they got so little room into cars as long as buses back then baffles my mind.  Some Nazi with a ruler must have walked around the design room slamming the drafting boards--Whack!  "Damn it, Jim, you could easily fit a couple of adults comfortably in that back seat.   Tighten that space up back there, tighten it up.  I want their knees up in their chins.  Just add another couple of feet under that hood, why don't you, and while you're at it, make sure you can comfortably toss a couple of dead people in the trunk.  You've got way too much interior space, I tell you, way too much."  It's not that old cars aren't roomy; it's just that it takes a football field to get enough space for a comfy love seat.  It's like a tardis in reverse.  You walk into Walmart only to find out you're in a phone booth.

So off we went down the highway in sleek black and red velvet luxury, headed towards some verdant thicket by a deep black-water creek.  I remember we parked on some moist dirt road with thin wet blades of grass growing up the center.  We got out, and there was a spider web strung between trees jeweled with silvery drops of dew.  It was hot; it was steamy; it was lush.  The creek sat still beneath a deep red-earth bank, growing algae quicker than a teenager produces zits, snakes slithering across the slick obsidian surface.  But camera out, I just couldn't get my heart into it.  So, instead, I probably bragged a lot about a life I wasn't living.  I did that a lot back then.  It was easier to live the life in my head than the real one I was experiencing.

El Paso was an ideal place for a young writer--visually spectacular and culturally rich--and I was even getting some recognition for my craft, which I'd never received before.  I only had a couple of creative writing classes, but it was clear my professors and peers liked what I wrote.  During the hours I was in class, I had what I wanted.  But then there was always an empty apartment to return to and an immense city strung out across two nations where nobody knew my name.  I missed my brother and I missed my friends.  It was good to be becoming the writer I knew I was meant to be, but it was frightening to be doing it all alone.  When I moved to El Paso, I dreamed of finding some sort of avant-garde writing community where I'd fit in.  Instead, I found myself walking the calles of Juarez all alone .  When I showed up in Commerce and saw Marsh's life, I was jealous.  I didn't like Rob.  He was too artsy, too cool--in my mind, not the "real" thing.  In fact, I think I hated him.  He was simply too at ease, almost flippant.  But, I would have liked to have been more like him.  After all he had the cool, bohemian girlfriend.  Feeling uncomfortable, I wanted a drink.  I tried to talk Marsh into taking me somewhere to buy alcohol.  He was no more interested in that than I was in dropping acid when I first met him.  The roles had reversed.  He was becoming who he wanted to be, and I was losing my sense of self in a desperate search of some version of me that wasn't shy.

Later that night, we decided to go on a drive with Rob and his girlfriend.  The way I remember it, we were in her black convertible--perhaps a Chrysler LeBaron--and we stopped halfway out on a bridge high over a deep, almost-still black river.  Halfway out, the wood planks of the bridge were missing, and we just sat there in the car, headlights shining forward onto the rusted metal truss and casting dramatic shadows on the thicket of tangled trees beyond.  The stereo was blasting CCR's "Green River" as Rob told very cool stories, and the heavy heat and dense night closed in on me like cancer.

I wanted to be on the road again, on my own, headed back to a life that although not perfect, at least was somewhat comfortably mine.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 35. Slate Gray Rain at White Rock Lake

We stood on the bridges by the restored boathouses and watched the rain pelt the lake, the drops punching temporary craters into the surface and ejecting little silvery moons.  It was cool, wet and wonderful, and the park was also surprisingly alive with people for such a dark day.  White Rock Lake once was primarily mine.  In the 80's the south end was all but abandoned.  The Art Deco boat houses constructed by the city of Dallas in 1930 were by then empty shells of graffiti-covered concrete.  I used to walk through them early in the morning and watch the gold-lit black-tagged white walls ripple inverted as reflections in the boat bays, everything gleaming with light dancing.  I spent many days and evenings here.  If the DMA was my second home, then living most of my Dallas years in apartments, White Rock Lake became my backyard.

This day Marci and I entered the park at northwest edge, prior to the start of the heavy rain, and there we found lily pads jeweled with water drops floating just off a shoreline daggered with sharp, bent grasses inverted black against a heavy sky.  Mirrored life is sometimes intensified by the distortion of the medium: colors darkened, details sharpened, unneeded clutter cut ruthlessly away.  The mind, too, can be a mirror that way.

Other times, memory softens things--blurs everything out in smudges, which makes writing about ones past so unpredictable.  How do I get my mind where it needs to be to really see what it needs to see on this morning when my head is stuffy, my ears are clogged, my eyes are gooped-over, and my brain feels like it is wrapped in cold spaghetti?

Look into the mirror, look into the mirror.  What do you see?  

Gold.  I see liquid gold gently slapping the sunlit edge of the dock post.  It is sunset.  My friends and I are on the east side, near the sailing club.  It is sunset and the water blazes.  Who's there?  Phil, for sure.  I think I see Lucy, wearing shorts, gold glazing her skin, her head tilted down, her denim cap shadowing her glasses, the sunlight picking up strands of her long dark hair and coloring them bronze.  Marsh is there now, wearing a frayed, faded blue denim vest over a white U2 Joshua Tree t-shirt.  He stands straight and angular against the sun.  Phil sits on one of dock posts, slightly slouched over, long shaggy bangs in his eyes.  He's smiling.  What about, I'm not sure.  I can't quite get where I need to be.  Where am I?  Was Jim there?  Andrea?  All I see is the intense sunlight.  Ripples and waves of yellow, orange and red.  Dancing, sparking light--a flick, a fleck, a flake.

Across the road is a couple of pick-up trucks, loud music, people drinking.  The northeast side was like that then.  The south-side was abandoned, the graffiti covered vacant pump station rising dirty and industrial-looking above the long, earthen dam, a deep-wooded swamp below.  The northwest side had preppy joggers, people on bikes, below extravagant homes that sat way back on the hillside.  And the northeast side had the rednecks.  We usually avoided that side.  I preferred the abandoned boathouses and dam, felt mildly comfortable among the rich, but totally out of place among the pick-ups, sweaty guys without shirts wearing dark sun glasses, and giggling girls wearing daisy-dukes, Lynyrd Skynyrd on the truck stereo screaming anthems to Alabama and wishing Neil Young would die.

Still, there we are on a dock over a lake of fire, as close as one can be visually to heaven and still be alive, while across the street, no doubt, someone is bent over, vomiting into the bushes.  Each one of us, I guess, seeks transcendence in their own way.  Later, I would try the alcohol route too.  But on that dock, on that day, it was simply enough to be witness to the glory of the world around me.

Glory has many colors.  Sometimes it is colored steely gray.  The day with Marci was visually just as marvelous--long stretches of granite water stretched out before us.  And although that golden day long ago made me smile, I knew it couldn't compare with what I was experiencing with my spouse of twenty-one years.  When you live with someone that long there is a quiet comfort of just standing next to each other in the pouring rain, an ease--no need to be anything other than yourself.  I'm not quite sure what keeps us together, but whatever it is, it is grand.  No lake of fire--no matter how spectacular--can replace even a simple evening of watching TV together.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 34. Dallas and a Day of Art, No. 3. The Dallas Museum of Art

Composition with Large Blue Plane, Red, Black
Yellow and Gray by Piet Mondrian, 1921

The fist time I ever visited the Dallas Museum of Art, it was still housed over in Fair Park.  It wasn't much of a museum then, but it was more than I had ever seen.  I was astounded when I walked in and saw a huge Franz Kline painting, Slate Cross, where big black strokes of paint interrupted the white plain of canvas in the most shocking way.  It was as bold as a silhouetted elm against a field of blue-gray snow on an evening cold enough to stop the heart.  I was in ninth grade; I'd ventured down to the museum alone, and at least internally, my life would never be the same.

It's not as if I'd never seen a piece of abstract art before.  My brother was an artist, and while in college moved from realism to abstract expressionism.  I saw abstract art all of the time.  But, Lloyd had seemed like an oddity.  I liked how his small room at Dad's house in Reno was crowded with books and paintings, but upon seeing that Kline painting at the DMA, I realized, There's a whole world out there dedicated to this stuff.  Life was not limited to The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island after all.  There was more to life than E.T.  There were big, bold beautiful acts out there, people flinging their soul towards the open space of a canvas in the same way Elton John pounded his soul into the keyboard of a grand piano.

After the shock of Kline, what impacted me even more was Mondrian's painting,  Composition with Large Blue Plane, Red, Black, Yellow, and Gray (above).  That was only natural, I guess, as drawn to architecture as I was.  There was something just so right about the red rectangle down towards the lower left, and the way it was balanced by the yellow one on the right.  Color and placement were everything.  Where this attraction came from, I have no idea.  I grew up without any connection to the world of art whatsoever beyond watching my brother paint.  He always demonstrated talent, but he grew up in the same household as me, and for most of that time, he had no more education in art than I did.  But whatever it was, as soon as I saw modernism, I knew it was something to be reckoned with.  Something simple, pure and profound.  A new way of seeing, of really seeing and experiencing the world around you.  Of course, it wasn't new to most of the world.  Just me.  But I when I saw it, I felt alive.

And so it was to remain that way through my high school and college years.  Once the new DMA building downtown opened in 1984, while I was a junior in high school, it became a second home.  I went with Lloyd.  I went with friends.  I went by myself.  Back then it was free, and it was great place to be, no matter how little money you had in your pocket.  However, much of the collection I simply ignored.  I was focused on Modernism, and I definitely had my favorites, and supreme among them was a marvelous little painting by Wassily Kandinsky, Murnau, Burggrabenstrasse 1, an incredibly loose rendition of a town in the alps, that although done in oil, looks as if it were created with saltwater taffy and then set upright in a bright window on a hot, sunny day.  The colors are vibrant.  The world is oozing and unstable.  The perspective draws you into the picture while the sloping, unstable oozing of the street causes you to lose your balance and stagger drunkenly towards the lower right hand corner where you run into what appears to be a tree, which holds you visually in the picture plane until you are rested enough to climb back up that caramelized road towards the bright sunlit shops.  Viewing that painting is truly an amazing experience. 

Murnau, Burggrabenstrasse 1 by Wassily Kandinsky, 1908

However, this time through the museum, I was drawn to many of the pre-modernist works that I'd previously largely ignored, especially examples of romanticism.  There are these dark curls of paint, little gloomy globs of detail that combine to make up these grand, expansive scenes.

Mountain Landscape with an Approaching Storm by Claude-Joseph Vernet, 1774-1775

A great example of this is Mountain Landscape with an Approaching Storm by 18th Century French Artist, Claude-Joseph Vernet, which admittedly had always caught my eye even back when my heart belonged solely to modernism, mainly because of it's scale.  At 64 1/2 inches by 103 1/4 inches, it doesn't go unnoticed.  At a distance, though dramatic, the painting is too removed from reality by romantic exaggeration to fully grab my senses.  However, up close, and with this painting's scale the viewer doesn't have to take too many steps forward, the painting comes alive with movement that is so real you can almost hear the thundering of the waterfall, and feel the mist as a significant wind carries a cold spray towards you.  The swirling, exquisitely detailed landscape captures the power of the divine.

Detail of Mountain Landscape with an Approaching Storm 

As much as I was captivated by Vernet's imaginative encounter with the sublime, I was even more taken with the quieter, yet still dark and moody, Frederiksborg Castle by the Norwegian artist Johan Christian Dahl.  The painting claims the same dark pallet and romantic preoccupation with stone structures and the small scale of the individual human in the broader landscape as does the Vernet painting, but does so more naturally.  Plus Dahl got the evening light--both in the sky and the mote-- so right it simply transports us there.  Whereas Vernet forces the sublime on the viewer through exaggeration, Dahl simply invites the viewer into the sublime through realistic representation of an actual place on an actual evening.  The painting is profoundly beautiful in its simple adherence to reality.

Frederiksborg Castle by Johan Christian Dahl, 1817 

And so we spent the day winding our way through the collections of the DMA until we were quite tired.  I thought I had no more to give until I rounded a corner and was confronted with Edward Hopper's Lighthouse Hill blazing in afternoon glory on its own separate wall.  I had always liked the picture.  In fact I have a poster of it hanging in my classroom, but this time I found it to be the single most powerful piece in the collection.  To be honest my favorite little Kandinsky didn't have a chance.  Nor did the Mondrian.  Placement, I guess, is important, because simply moving this painting upgraded it from notable to breathtaking.  After seeing it, I was filled.  I needed nothing more.  We could leave.

Lighthouse Hill by Edward Hopper, 1927

And we soon did.  Hungry and exhausted we exited one of the finest museums in the country, my old second home, the Dallas Museum of Art, where I spent many hours as a teenager wandering around, sitting, contemplating, just idly being.  What could be better?

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 33. Dallas and a Day of Art, No. 2. Salvador Dali at The Meadows Museum

Phantom Cart by Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali, 1933

Our plan had been to been to visit the Dallas World Aquarium next; Cheryl Vogel at Valley House Gallery convinced us that our time would be better spent viewing the exhibit that just opened at SMU's Meadows Museum:  Dali:  Poetics of the Small, 1929-1936.  As she put it, "The aquarium will always be there, but this--this is a once in a lifetime opportunity".  I had my heart set on the aquarium.  I love any place that lets me laser-focus in on nature, even if it is in an artificially constructed environment.  When my dad came to visit us when I was a child, he often took us to Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City, and I've loved zoos ever since.  My small band of friends in Dallas and I spent many hours at the Dallas Zoo and the Fort Worth Zoo, as well as the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens.  Marci and I took our honeymoon to Monterrey, California because I wanted to see Cannery Row, the setting of my favorite Steinbeck novel, but I was actually more captivated by the Monterrey Bay Aquarium.  There is something so serene seeing the world from under that thin glassy lip that separates the aquatic world from the world of air.  As a child, my father took us to a small pond in the Sierras called Sand Pond, and I'd spend as much time as I could under that clear cold water watching ripples of light drift languidly across the sandy bottom.  It was glorious.  In short, that day in Dallas I had my heart set on the aquarium, and my mind was trying to justify skipping the Dali exhibit.

However, looking at Marci, it was clear she preferred to go to the Meadows Museum.  As the trip was already tilted in my favor enjoyment-wise--this was my memory lane, not hers--I decided I should fold up my selfish self, put him in my pocket, and do the right thing.  So, with all the courage I had, I did.  Sometimes the ego is such an incredible foe to overcome.

Razzle-dazzle, rip, roar, funk!  I just thought of that as I got up from typing this page and went to get three sugar-free wafer cookies and a glass of milk.  Writing can be such a tedious process.  Reading can be too.  Especially the expository parts, like this.  Perhaps, like me, you need a break.  So, here are some details to ground you in the moment:

Just after crossing Lovers Lane, while headed south on Hillcrest Avenue, you enter a commercial area of low, one- and two-story 1950s glass-front street shops that are on the right-hand side of the road.  All have there own parking right off the street, all are individually built, and most have cloth awnings of various colors, making the neighborhood bright and festive.  There are some very mundane establishments like Nu-Care Cleaners and Sarkis Oriental Rug Repair and Cleaning (We buy and sell!), but there are also zippy places like Burger House Hamburgers with its flashy pink neon sign, bright yellow early-modernist canopy covering a couple benches and single trash can.

On the corner of Hillcrest and Ashby, we found a place to park in front of Digg's Taco Shop.  This shopping center was clearly newer, but designed to fit in.  Besides the sign at Digg's looked cool, and the place had big windows facing the street, so I thought, Why not get something to eat before heading over to the museum?  They weren't the best street tacos I've ever had, but they weren't bad.  Most importantly, it was crowded, alive with college students, and it had high bar stools along a lunch counter that looked out towards the street.  We had cool drinks, ate our tacos, and life was good--as it so often is when your only obligation is to be.  We had no demands other than the agenda we set together, which we could quickly scrap anytime we decided we didn't give a damn.

We did give a damn though, so we ate quickly and headed across the street to the thick greenery and oppressively coordinated old-style university buildings of SMU, where every edifice screams We are oh so rich and educated here.  I wanted to grab a bat and smash out all of the windows of the BMW's, but of course I didn't because that would disappoint my mother, and Marci would give me such a glare that I'd be seeking to slither into some storm drain into the sewer, which, of course, because we were in the Park Cities, would be as clean as a polished granite fountain and smell like roses because everyone knows the uppity people only poop out fragrant flower petals.

Alright, Steve.  Don't veer off into a left-wing diatribe against the rich here.  How many vagrants do you observe buying books?  Think of your audience, think of your audience.

I actually have always had a fascination and respect for the upper-middle class.  I was even briefly one of them.  However, I was never drawn to them as much as when I was poor.  I'd drive down from Lloyd's and my apartment in north Dallas to Turtle Creek, park, and spend hours walking shaded lanes, looking at the great stone and brick houses.  At night, I'd dream I was dating one of those wealthy man's daughters.  It often went like this:  she'd be in her pink sweater and gray plaid skirt, outside a gorgeous home, ready to hop into a sleek, black convertible to head off to a SMU sorority gig.  Then, I'd pull up in the old 74 Mustang, as was so often the case, and convince her to hop in  with me instead. 

What's not to respect?  Nice homes, nice cars, good education, people interested in and supportive of the arts.  Usually very nice people.  But I was also keenly aware of how unfair the system is.  There is a myth in America that prosperity is based on ambition and work ethic.  It's not.  Working minimum wage jobs, I saw grandmothers put in 10 hour shifts at fast food joints, not because they liked being on their feet all day at the age of sixty-five, but because they had no other choice.  They had worked hard all their lives and had nothing but experience to show for it.  No, most wealth in America is not a result of hard work--although that may clearly be involved.  Rather, it is a result of having wealth, education, and connections to begin with.  That is what fraternities and sororities are really about.  College drinking buddies become business associates.  It's a closed world by design, where the rich associate with the rich and the poor associate with the poor, and the two worlds are kept safely separate by design.  So, part of me dreamed of entering that world of refined tastes and beautiful things, and part of me wanted to blow the whole damn system apart.  I'd be lying if I said it wasn't partly because of personal jealousy.  It was.  But it had much more to do with seeing that grandmother working behind the fast-food counter.  What a way to be rewarded for a lifetime of ambition

Much later, after becoming a teacher, and feeling I'd achieved some sort of success in this life, I found myself in a situation that brought back all the anger and shame of being stuck in minimum wage jobs:

Oh that Rococo Life

Slowly breaking apart
a cranberry muffin,
sucking down the sweet morsels
with over-creamed coffee.

Palm trees sway beyond
the marble-floored lobby
and empty sunken bar
through great Venetian windows,
beyond a great red-tiled patio
and heavy white balustrade.

I read Pictures of the Gone World
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Says here, poem 25 (quote)
The world is a beautiful place
                                    To be born into
If you don't mind happiness
                                    Not always being
                                                            So much fun.

What the hell, I'll try it.
The kids are with Grandma.
Marci's in class.
The room is paid for
with one week's salary.

Nothing to do
but hang out at the pool
and read Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
look at beautiful
lotion-glowing bodies
from ages 5 to 70,
weighing between 40
and 250 pounds.

Yes, this world is a beautiful place
to be born into.

Though yesterday
when we got lost
in that neighborhood
of duplexes
and run-down apartment complexes
that didn't quite qualify for a slum
but was part of the working poor world
that I knew for so long,
and I went in that 7-11
to find some way out
of the hell-mood
I'd sank into
but instead saw myself behind the counter
in a stupid dehumanizing uniform
with a damn name tag on it,
smiling back at me,
knowing I'd always be here,
behind some convenience store counter
working eight hours a day
to get nowhere,
I got to tell you
I thought again
the world
is nothing
but a great big shit ball
with all of us swarming over it,
pushing and shoving
for the chance
to bite right in.

Today there are palms outside the window.
rich girls in bikinis,
rich daddies in loafers,
and it's true--
                      The world is a beautiful place
To be born into
                       If you don't mind happiness
Not always being
                       So much fun.

As Marci and I walked across Hilcrest to SMU and the Meadows Museum, I was conflicted as I always am around the good things in life--Oh so drawn to the refinement while simultaneously ready to pull out the picket signs and go to battle.  I have love-hate emotions towards the well-to-do.  I know they are responsible for so many good things we enjoy as a general public--museums, symphony halls, the opera houses, zoos, not to mention colleges and universities.  I also know most wealthy people are really good people--not just some uppity people looking down on the rest of us with disdain as we so often like to think they are doing.  That is generally as inaccurate a perception as is the "welfare queen" stereotype.   However, I also know they do quietly accept the system that has tilted everything in their favor.  I don't blame them.  I would probably do the same.  Yet, I lived in and worked in the minimum wage world long enough to know what it does to people, and so there is a part of me that is Oh so ready for revolution.

Being lost and having no clue where the Meadows Museum was while the day started to heat up and make the walk uncomfortable helped get me out of my power-to-the-people funk, and it really is a funk if you're not prepared to do something about it.   So, we searched desperately among the many red-brick and stone (or concrete) columned buildings looking for the Meadows Museum.  With the aid of Google maps on Marci's phone, we eventually found it, and entered again that the cool, sacred space called museum where one's only obligation is to truly see what is before you.  I love that feeling.

I'd always liked the work of Salvador Dali, although I'd only known it from books.  Still, Dali would not have been among my first pick of exhibits.  That is, until I saw this show.  You see, I'd always assumed the great sense of space and atmosphere in his dream-like landscapes came with scale--which, when a painting is big enough, is not that hard of a thing to accomplish.  However, works that I had assumed from reproductions in books to be quite large, are in fact, very small.  And the amazing thing is they hold up at great distances away from the museum wall despite their tiny size.  That he can get such a sense of space on such a tiny picture plane is pure magic.  I think most people are drawn to Dali for his surreal imagery.  I was drawn to his work because he was also a fine landscape painter.  His technique and success are undeniable.  Take Phantom Cart (pictured above), which is 7.4 inches by 9.4 inches, smaller than a sheet of notebook paper.  And yet the sense of space, distance, and blurred detail on the sun-drenched city in the background, is astoundingly accurate to this world.

Perhaps even more shockingly accurate is Geological Justice (pictured below), which is only 4 inches by 7 inches.  Here an entire ocean scene, complete with moisture heavy coastal clouds, bight sunny cliff and a couple sail boats are interrupted by what appears to be a giant tire track flattening what once was an artificial sea wall.  At least that's my read on it.  What's important is not the actual image but the sense of space created on such a minuscule scale.  Utterly amazing.

Geological Justice by Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali, 1936 

And so we spent the mid-afternoon wandering around the Meadows Museum lost in the expansive spaces of Dali' little-bitty paintings.  And then, as you always do on vacation--we left that magic world behind for the next experience, heaping loss upon loss.