The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 26. Hidden Treasures in Suburbia & Wearing Masks

Greg set me free from the school bus.  The reason I'd lived in the same apartment complex as he did for six months and didn't know him was because he usually walked.  He not only walked, but he walked creatively, avoiding the busy main streets, cutting through alleyways and finding as much of the natural world as one could find in suburbia.

As much as I liked this new freedom from the bus, as much as I liked walking with Greg, I liked walking best on the days he wasn't going to school or was running late, because just like back in Sandstone, I preferred walking alone.

I did, however, use the routes he showed me.  One of these routes took me along houses set back along a long pond.  The developers had dammed a small creek, created a small lake and set houses around it.  From the street, one had no idea the pond was there.  It was the backyards that faced the pond.  They do this a lot in Dallas.  And although it may create temporary high land values, it doesn't work.  People want public spaces.  They want culture.  The neighborhoods that ultimately gain the most value are the ones designed around public parks.  Turtle Creek and White Rock Lake are perfect examples of this.  Here the exorbitantly wealthy live around parks open to the whole city, and it works quite well.  I'm not saying there isn't racism or prejudice towards the poor.  Turtle Creek is definitely over-policed.  Later, when my brother moved into the area, he was often picked up for having long hair and walking through neighborhoods where law enforcement felt he didn't belong.  But at least in the Turtle Creek and White Rock Lake neighborhoods there are no physical barriers keeping the general public out.  And the wealthy, to their credit, must enjoy some diversity, because it is the open park neighborhoods, not the gated communities, that are the most sought after real-estate areas in Dallas.  What good is a pond that nobody else can see?

Yet, the first thing the newly financially-arrived want to do is establish their own private paradise, and so, in the suburbs, there are creeks, and ponds, and small lakes that nobody but the homeowners see--unless, of course, you're a crafty teenager, like me, seeking out nature wherever it can be found.

There happened to be one particular place on a cross street where "my" pond could be viewed.  I'd stop for five or ten minutes and just watch the ducks sliding along through green water, leaving ripples behind.  Lush, neatly-trimmed lawns slanted down from brick houses to wooden docks, where long, untrimmed grass met the deep green waters.

Google Earth image of "My Pond" that I stopped at each day walking to school

And so I learned to walk the backstreets and the alleyways, looking for unseen worlds, a little oasis around a pond; an untrimmed wild of grasses behind a tall wooden fence, just off the driveway where they put out the garbage cans; a sudden view of ragged, wet woods around a creek that opens up for a moment next to a bridge.

This walk, however, always led me to Tim's house, where I would join his friends, Carl and Phil, and all together we would walk in safety to school, I no longer faced with the brutal reality of riding the bus.

I enjoyed their safety, but part of me died each morning when I arrived at Tim's.  Just as his house came into view, I'd stop (if only mentally) to step out of the real me and slip into a costume. The Steve that arrived at his house was loud, obnoxious, sarcastic, and bragged a lot, especially as my parents' income increased quickly.  We still lived in an apartment when I started referring to my friends as "poor peons".  I'm not sure why they didn't ditch me, but they didn't.  The funny thing is, if I remember right, Carl's father was nominated as a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in physics.  He mentioned it once, but he didn't make a big deal out of it.

Later, Phil would come to know the better me. However,  Carl and Tim would not.  Tim had plenty of his own character flaws anyway.  He was rather pompous for a little picked-on squirt like me; he loved Hitler and hated Jews.  But looking back, it is clear Carl had class.

Who knows, maybe Tim, like myself, had another version of himself he simply didn't let the world see.  I don't assume the Hitler-loving, Jew-hating Tim was the real Tim.  It could have been, but not necessarily.  Junior high is a time of masks.  Almost nobody is who they say they are.  Most don't even know.  I knew I wasn't the bragging, pompous son of the nouveau riche, but for some odd reason I thought that version of me was more likable than the kid who would like to spend his days feeding ducks.  How I could think that, I'm not sure, but I did.