The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 25.Time Alone with Shaved Fish

"A conspiracy of silence speaks louder than words."

                                                            --Dr. Winston O'Boogie

Time alone.  I'd always spent a lot of time alone.  When I was seven, we lived on a ranch in northern Utah and had no neighbors.  I had a couple of friends at school, but at home I was my own best friend.  That ranch was a great place to be your own best friend.  We had two rivers, a creek, and a small lake on the property, along with who knows how many irrigation ditches.  We lived in an apartment in a great cinder-block barn.  Lloyd and I actually slept in a bunkhouse on the first floor, and the apartment was on the second floor.  I had the entire hay loft as my play area, which included two more bunk rooms.  In the spring, the great wooden door where they used to bring the hay to the loft would be open, and I'd look out on a deep green field and the horse my sister often rode.

Alone is what I knew best and liked.  When we moved to what I'll call Sandstone, I had a couple of really good friends, and I'd often walk home from school with one of them, but I enjoyed walking home alone more.  I loved strolling along the irrigation ditches; watching a cloud hang reflected back in the slow-moving water; being dazzled by the long, green grasses growing along the bank turned upside down in the rippled reflection.

So, when we moved to Dallas, and when, at first, I didn't have any friends, it was no big deal.  I could have cared less.  The teasing I received during school was deeply damaging, but the time alone just gave me time to explore my corner of this great big, new metropolitan area in a deeper way.  There was the library almost next door.  There was an LDS (Mormon) bookstore a block to the north.  I bought my first journal there, and for the first time in my life, I began to write down my thoughts in little three to four-line poems.  There was a Half-Price used book store about two blocks to the south and a record store about a block beyond that.

For Christmas, I received a Sony Walkman from my real dad.  I loved it.  I constantly had a tape going.  I walked down to that small record store and bought The Beatles:  1967-1970.  I still remember that record store well.  Sandstone didn't have record stores.  Pioneer Market sold a few albums, as did Steven's Department Store.  Bradshaw Auto Parts sold 8-Track tapes, but there was no proper music store.  So, I loved being in that small suburban store.  The odd thing is that I don't ever remember music playing.  It was as quiet as a library.  Perhaps that is what I liked about it.  As I flipped through the albums in the silence, I could hear the music in my head.  Then, I'd go over to the tape section, and get what I wanted.  The tapes were in big, plastic, locked files, and so I'd have to find the owner to unlock them.  She was an elderly lady who spoke very little.  It seemed I was always the only customer, which explains why the store closed a couple of years later.

The other tape I bought there was Shaved Fish by John Lennon.  I'd heard "Imagine" the previous summer in a Grand Central (like a K-Mart) in Sparks, Nevada.  I'd heard the song a few times before that, but I'd never paid attention to the lyrics.  That time I did.  I just stopped.  Until then I didn't know lyrics could capture such pure and innocent desires, an unselfish yearning for humanity to be more.  I didn't necessarily like, "Imagine there's no religion," (Lennon) but I knew that the religion I believed in, if lived fully, definitely would lead to everything else imagined in that song; I was hooked.  I went down to the record store looking for that specific song.  I found it on an album called Shaved Fish (Lennon, Shaved Fish).

Even though my brother brought me up on the Beatles, Shaved Fish blew my mind.  There was a rawness to Lennon's solo work that just pulled me in.  That "Day 4," a drum beat, and then "Instant Karma's gonna get you / gonna knock you right on the head." (Lennon, Instant Karma)

Wow!  There was a deep rough steel grit to it.  Even on "Dream 9".  It had all the psychedelic otherworldly quality of "Lucy in Sky,"  "I Am the Walrus" or "Glass Onion," but it was stripped down to just the glass river and the blank blue sky.  It was a round, glass table set out in the woods left to gather dew.  The symphony stayed home, and only the string section showed up, but oh how they could play!  And the lyrics:

Took a walk down the street
Through the heat whispered trees. (Lennon, #9 Dream)

I was stunned.

And so I wandered around my little section of suburbia, headphones on, listening to Shaved Fish.  I wanted to see the movie Reds.  I wanted to dream of a world less brutal than the one I experienced at school.  I wanted to be able to name pain as precisely as Lennon did in "Cold Turkey."  I wanted to touch the realness that one only touches through art.  I wanted to explore this new city, and I wanted to explore my own mind, which was just as new to me.

People made me feel alone and unwanted.  Time alone made me feel valued by some unknown presence as I connected with myself and the world around me.

References

Lennon, John. Shaved Fish. By John Lennon. 1975.

Lennon, John. "#9 Dream." Walls and Bridges. By John Lennon. New York, 1974.

Lennon, John. "Imagine." Imagine. By John Lennon. New York, 1971.

Lennon, John. "Instant Karma." By John Lennon. London, 1970.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 24. Once Upon a Suburbia, Part 3

One hot, muggy day early in the spring, which in Texas could have been as early as February, I met Greg, who probably saved my life.  I don't know if I could have withstood the bullying I received in junior high without a real friend.  He also connected me to Phil, who along with Marsh, are like brothers to me.  I would not have met anyone in what we call the gang--Phil, Lucy, Marsh, Andrea and Jim--without Greg.  I probably would have moved back to Utah with my parents after two years, and Dallas would just be a short, agonizing memory.

I did meet Greg.  Like I said, it was a hot, muggy day.  The clouds were low, black and boiling.  I got on the bus.  There was the usual pushing, shoving, and over-the-top laughing.  Some guy grabbed one of the twins and put her on his lap.  She giggled and squealed, and said, "Stop it!"
in something that was between a playful giggle and a panicked scream.  As a teenager, I assumed that was all for show, and thought that she liked it.  Looking back as an adult, I'm not so sure.  Everything during those years is so tumultuous.  It's hard to know what's real.  Now, I doubt she knew what was going on inside herself.  Her brain was probably telling her attention--good; being grabbed, loosing control--not good.  And in the chaos--the screaming, the pushing, the shoving, the laughing uncontrollably because it hurts to much to cry, who has a chance to analyze how they actually feel inside?  I don't know how anyone makes it through puberty alive.  But most of us do.

I was shoved.  There was an empty seat next to a gangling guy looking out the window.  It was a choice between either getting up and being shoved again or asking if I could sit down.  He said yes, pointed to the clouds outside, and said, "It looks like a tornado might form."

He said that so nonchalantly.  My heightened senses--all that pushing and shoving and yelling--just skyrocketed.  Tornadoes were definitely not part of my childhood.  This was new.

"Really?"

"Yeah, see how that cloud is swirled a bit, and drops down low in the middle, like it has a protruding belly button."

I don't exactly remember if Greg described the cloud that way, or if he used the word "protruding," but he could have.  He was a smart kid, and he wasn't normal.  There is no way to be normal in junior high and act intelligently.  Intelligent people care about others, feel empathy, act carefully--in the best interest of not only themselves, but also those around them.  Intelligent people see the big picture and move with measured, reflective responses.  No, junior high is the time the normal person just shuts down all rational thought and acts on selfish, hormone-driven, ego-centered instinct.  Anyone decent is going to stick out like a protruding belly button during those years.

Greg protruded.  He was tall, he was lean, but had a curved back.  He dressed like a hick--snap-up plaid western shirts and blue jeans--but he didn't seem to like anything country.  He liked opera and theater.  He wasn't normal, and unlike me, he didn't even try to be.  He liked Neil Diamond.  He liked fast cars, but unlike those other kids who drew them all over their binders along with the Ozzy and Van Halen logos, he'd actually done his research and knew what he was talking about.  He especially liked small, European sports cars.  He dreamed of becoming rich, and he had very concrete plans.  I don't think most people's lives unfold anything close to their expectations, but my guess would be that his did.  He was smart; he knew what he wanted; and most importantly, he seemed totally untouched by the world around him.  He was teased like I was teased.  The difference was he just didn't give a damn.  In his mind, he was already running a big corporation, driving race cars, jetting around the world.  To him this whole junior high experience was just a picnic in the woods with mosquitoes.  Sure, the mosquito kids were annoying, but it wasn't the end of the world, and it wasn't like he'd stick around and get sucked dry.  He'd hop in a little Italian sports car and speed off with some jock's girlfriend to his real life in a mansion just over that hill.  Sure, he was failing all of his classes, but what did that matter?  Unlike the rest of us, he knew junior high is not real life.  He'd listen to music and dream his way through it, and when the moment was right, he'd step into the light and claim his prize.

I quickly lost contact with him during high school.  If I remember right, he moved.  Maybe back to St. Louis, his hometown. However, I did once hear from a mutual friend that somewhere around 11th or 12th grade Greg became an A student and went on to college and received some award.  It surprised my friend.  In ninth grade we all knew he constantly received C's and F's (there were no D's in our district).  But, it didn't surprise me.  It was part of his plan.  Dream through the ridiculousness and act once the game was real.  I knew nothing about Buddhism then.  I doubt he did either, but Greg was the first Buddhist I ever met, and perhaps the only truly proficient one I know.  Most Buddhists, like all truth-seekers, including myself, seem to be caught forever in that striving phase that must occur before arriving.  The Greg I knew in junior high had already arrived. He was just sitting things out, killing time.

One evening he came over to the apartment and knocked on the door, holding a kitchen chair.  My mother let him in.  "Grab a chair.  Let's go sit in the field.  That fog is amazing."  So, we did.  The fog was so thick that in the center of that five-acre field, the city lights all but disappeared.  Greg didn't say a word.  He just sat there in silence as cool mist slowly dampened our clothes.  I enjoyed it, but I started to get cold.  He could have sat there until he grew moss.  However, noticing that I was cold, he said, "That was amazing; let's go." 

I wish a little of Greg rubbed off on me, but I can't say that it did.  Still, although he was only a friend for a brief while, he was a good friend, and more importantly, he connected me to Phil.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 23. Once Upon a Suburbia, Part 2

After visiting the library, we drove by my old junior high school.  I snapped a photo, but I made no connection to the place whatsoever.  I wanted to.  I knew I wouldn't like it, but I wanted to because I love my life, and I don't want there to be any holes in it.  Perhaps Barbara Streisand was right, or almost right, when she sang, "What's too painful to remember / We simply choose to forget."  Perhaps it's not always a choice though.  Perhaps forgetting is sometimes forced upon us by the mind seeking escape.  Perhaps will is not always involved, at least not conscious will, when it comes to memory.

Here's the thing.  I can remember every kid in my second grade class, but I just can't get my mind to enter the hall of that suburban junior high school.  And I want it to.  I want to be there and feel again as I felt then, because that is part of what writing is, an act of recovery.  A recovery of the past.  A recovery of the self.  A recovery of truth.  A journalist writes not because it is easy, but because it is necessary for democracy.  A historian writes not because the past is pleasant, but because it is vital that the past doesn't get buried.  A novelist writes not because it is easy, but because it is necessary to capture our deepest desires, our deepest fears, the parts of us we can't slip easily into idle conversation.  Writers write to keep into human dialogue what the rest of humanity chooses to leave out because it's too painful to remember.  Good writing isn't escape; it's engagement with life at the highest level, which is why it was frustrating to look at my old junior high and get nothing when I absolutely know that place caused me great pain.

I teach at a residential treatment center, and one day one of my students asked me, "Mr. Steve, How do you get past something really terrible in your past?"  Without much thought, I gave him my honest answer.  "I don't really know.  I know lots of people have incredibly horrific pasts, but I don't.  I had great parents, and nothing really bad ever happened to me.  You'll have to talk to your therapist about that."

We're trained to say "You'll have to talk to your therapist about that."  Our youth will avoid the hard work of therapy by going through unofficial channels to receive "help".  But, I was being honest too.  I haven't had to deal with any of the big issues so much of humanity has to deal with: no violence, no rape, no sexual abuse.  I've been lucky.  Divorced parents is as bad as it got for me, and that happened when I was two, and so I have no memory of it.

School was my only hell.  Yet, it was hell, and I want to get back there because there are some things one can only learn by reentering what hurt the most.  There is a writing exercise by Natalie Goldberg called, "I don't remember."  To do it, you just write down, "I don't remember" and write whatever comes to mind.  Supposedly, the act of admitting that you don't remember eases up the pressure and allows thoughts hiding out in the deep caverns to venture towards the day light.  We'll see:

I don't remember my first day of school at that suburban junior high.  I don't remember pulling up in the bus.  I don't remember the blue hall and long line of lockers.  I don't remember the fear I had of forgetting which hall contained my locker as all the halls seemed to look alike.  I don't remember the frequent dreams I had of not being able to find my locker, of wandering around the school endlessly, looking for it. I don't remember that kid Scott who reminded me of a friend I had way back in kindergarten--how he looked so cool with shaggy, long blond hair that curled around his ears.  I don't remember being shocked by his Texas accent, or the fact that he was actually a dumb, cruel shithead who had a dumb, cruel shithead friend, named Steve.  I don't remember shop class, or Miss Moore, who was young and slender with red hair and freckles and a heavy Texas accent.  I don't remember how she flirted with Scott and Steve and ignored their cruelty to me.  I don't remember listening to the Eagles "Hotel California" on the radio in shop, hearing the lyrics, really understanding them, and feeling I was really there--locked in the Hotel California, egos consuming each other with steely knives to avoid being eaten alive themselves.

I don't remember sitting alone at lunch, or Mr. Gray--the gray haired black vice-principal that came in and yelled "Quiet" at the lunchroom every day, walking past me in his gray suit and protruding belly, never seeming to notice that everyday I sat alone, not knowing how I felt so claustrophobic with the loneliness closing in tight around me like a thick darkness.  I don't remember opening up my Tupperware sandwich container and hating that my mother packed my lunch in it because I was teased terribly for having it.

However, I do remember refusing to tell my mother that I got teased for the container because I knew exactly how low and stupid it was to isolate someone just because their lunch came to school with them in a Tupperware container, and I knew my mother was proud of the lunch she made me, and I knew that I'd rather live with sitting alone with my Tupperware container than to adopt a paper sack because the wolves wanted it that way.  I remember knowing if I ditched the Tupperware container, it would just be something else anyway.  I remember opening that Tupperware container as if I were claiming my seat on a bus in some horrible place like Montgomery, Alabama, and thinking to myself, "Okay, shitheads of the world, take this."

I remember not always being so honorable.  I remember rolling a penny down the hall with another long haired kid who always wore Pink Floyd shirts.  I remember him saying,  "This is how I identify Jews;  they'll pick it up every time."  I remember how sick I felt inside as I laughed--how I was terrified he'd find out I was Mormon.  I remember thinking how he was cool, and that I hated that I was selling out my soul to be with a cool kid, but that I did it anyway.

I remember how in class a beautiful girl with long, glossy brown hair, and deep, chocolate eyes sat in front of us.  I don't remember his name at all, but I remember her name was Brandy.  I remember how he'd play with her hair, and she would let him.  I remember being amazed at that.  I remember how she would turn around and talk to us, laugh and smile, and how it felt so amazing to not be isolated.  I don't remember thinking, "It might not be right to roll a penny down the hall and yell 'Jew!' at the person that stopped to pick it up, but boy this moment makes it all worth it."   But part of me must have had that exact thought, or I wouldn't have done it.

I remember one day a big, overweight kid with acne troubles targeted me as a friend at lunch.  For a couple days, I accepted.  He drew pictures.  I drew pictures.  The difference was, I drew landscapes--lakes and trees, old barns, and tilting outhouses.  He drew tanks, and bombs, and guns--lots and lots of guns.  People blowing apart.  He knew their names.  Not of the people blowing apart--at least, I hope not.  But of the guns.  He knew them intimately.  I don't remember thinking, "We're in danger here at school,"  but I should have.

I do remember feeling sorry for him, but knowing there was no way I could ever provide him the friendship he needed, I avoided him.  As lonely as I was, our worlds were just too far apart.  I could roll a penny down a hall and yell "Jew" to fit in, especially if it was to sit next to someone who was deemed cool enough for a girl like Brandy to turn around and smile in our direction, but I could never spend my days drawing tanks, and bombs, and guns.  I had too much fun drawing aerodynamic people.  I saw other kids designing aerodynamic sports cars, and I thought to myself, to heck with that.  Why not design aerodynamic people?  Short; squat; big, aerodynamic noses on jelly-bean shaped heads; spoilers on their butts.  You could stand them up in a hurricane, and they would not move.

I was in a hurricane.  I wanted to be able to stand and not move.  I hated myself when I'd roll that penny down the hall.  However, I was proud that I never asked my mom to pack my lunch in a paper bag.  I was also proud that I never drew a tank or gun.  I was proud that although sometimes I would fantasize about taking the head of one of my tormentors and smashing it against the locker, most of the time I realized each of us was just doing his best to survive.

I wrote my first poem that ninth grade year.  I don't remember all of it.  Part of it went like this:

Whose beast are these, who kill to cry
Who drink the blood of their brother's sigh?
These, these--are His to keep,
which he loves, forgives, and hopes to keep.

I was proud of that poem.  I still am.  However, I also know I rolled a penny down the hall and yelled "Jew" at the small kid who stooped down to pick it up.  I hope in his mind he told me to go to hell and now proudly displays that penny as a trophy for having overcome, if only for that moment, the stupidity of the world.  I wish I had my Tupperware sandwich container.  I'd mount it on the wall in a gold frame to remind me of my better self--how at least a part of me was willing to fling a righteous middle finger at the world--to proudly hold up a cross, a poem, an act of forgiveness, instead of just conforming to cruelty.

That test never ends. It's what fuels the anti-immigrant movement, and it's what got Christ nailed to the cross.  It's ultimately what we are here for:  How will we stand when the winds of humanity are blowing in the wrong direction?  We are here to learn to fling that metaphorical finger rather than roll the penny and yell "Jew" in order to fit in.  Our soul and our God demand to know ultimately where on that question we stand.

I hope I prove to be as aerodynamic as those squat, little figures I drew because we definitely live in a time when the winds of humanity are blowing in the wrong direction.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 22. A Trip to the Library

Marci wanted to go to a library.  I thought we should maybe go to the big library in downtown Dallas, but I was a bit worried about time, and there just happened to be a library next to the apartments where I used to live.  So, we went there instead.  It was fun going through it again.  I found the architecture books on the second floor, near where they'd always been when I was a teenager.  I was even able to find a couple of books that I used to check out regularly.  One was on Frank Lloyd Wright, who until I found that book, I'd never heard of, but upon opening it I realized, yes, this is what a house should be:  wood, stone, and very intentional light.

Later, I would go through one of Frank Lloyd Wright's prefab homes, one of a series of affordable designs he called American System-Built Homes.  It was temporarily assembled in front of the Dallas Museum of Art.  Walking into that tiny space was like walking into an old growth forest:  sacred, quiet, shafts of light filtering down and illuminating hardwoods and stone.  It was a spiritual experience, even in an exhibition setting, with me trailing in a line of people, inching forward as if waiting for a movie.  Even in that unnatural setting, everyone was awed to low whispers.  It was amazing to witness live the effect of good architecture on the soul.  Environment is real.  Light matters.  We intrinsically connect with things that are well connected to earth.  Art connects us to the fundamentals of life.  It is not an excess of civilization, but rather a vital, spiritual reminder that we are connected to something greater than ourselves, either as individuals or as a society.   What all artists essentially desire is a connection with the unseen fabric that holds life together.  The artists who succeed are able to provide just a glimpse of that to the public.

That library in the suburbs opened the world of art to me.  I grew up in a house without books.  We had one bookshelf of church books, but it was in my parents' bedroom, out of sight, where the books wouldn't clutter up the public spaces.  My dad read Newsweek, and a copy would be sitting on the couch or table now and then, but there were no books.  That is a terrible thing to do to a child.  Or so I think.  Marci and I have made sure our home is filled with books.  They're in every room, even the bathrooms, and our kids care less.  No, that's not true.  They do care.  They are always telling us to get rid of our books.  So maybe books do not fill a universal hole, but they are important to me.  I don't read as much as a lot of people, but I want the right words to be found when I hunger for something said right.  I want to be able to go to the shelf and pull out a book and say, "Ah, yes, that's how she put it.  Amazing, simply amazing.  I too enjoyed the small canyon more than the big one.  And she said it perfectly."

Marci and I have spent twenty-one years enjoying books together.  When we lived on the Navajo Nation for eight years, we had no TV, and I remember laying in bed, fall and spring evenings, the window open, together, each lost in our own world, reading.  It was wonderful.  We also loved to go to Flagstaff now and then for the weekend.  Bookman's was a wonderfully large bookstore there.  It's still there, but one year, the roof collapsed during a massive snow storm.  And when they rebuilt it, it was never quite the same.  Many of their books were lost, and they seemed to be targeting a more general audience.  Less books, more multimedia.  Less literature, history, religion, and more popular books.  It became more like Barnes and Noble.  What's worse, and I don't know what would account for this as they still sell primarily used books, but much of the old book smell was gone.  Oh, I love that smell.  Mixed with the smell of coffee, there is nothing in the world like it.  It says, pull up a chair, open a book, you're home!

Recently, I decided to live seven weeks in the 1970's.  I was sick of living in a divided country.  I wanted to disconnect with current reality.  Except for seven minutes on Saturday, I'd give up Facebook.  I wouldn't listen to the news.  I'd only watch TV shows from the 70's.  I'd only listen to music from the 70's.  I'd only read things in print in the 70's.  I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull and wanted to love it because the movie had a big impact on me when I was seven or eight, and I loved the soundtrack by Neil Diamond, but it just didn't do much for me.  Then, I picked up Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.  It's a sad thing to admit, being an English teacher for 19 years, but I had never read it.

The first sentence grabbed me.  The first paragraph made it known that I'd stay:

It was a pleasure to burn.

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.  With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.  With his helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black.  He strode in a swarm of fireflies.  He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house.  While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.  (Bradbury)

Wow.  That is style.  That is intense.  In an earlier post, I said, "If pushed, I'd probably have to say, I'm for style over substance".  Bradbury is a perfect example of what I mean.  That paragraph isn't powerful because of what it says.  It is powerful because of how it says it.  It's because of the images, the sounds, the pushed pacing and alliteration forcing the reader forward.  Sight and sound is its substance.  Jonathan Livingston Seagull has a lot of good things to say, and the story is wonderful, but the words, ironically, never take flight.  Fahrenheit 451 blazes substance without even trying to; words burn a hole through the center of you whether you want them to or not.

Here's what I think is the difference.  Richard Bach had a message to tell, and so he wrote a book to tell it.  It was a message people wanted to hear, and so they bought it.  Good.  Nothing wrong with that.  We need good messages told adequately.  Bradbury just needed to write.  He'd write anything, just to get words on the page.  And he'd drive himself mad until he wrote something that stylistically mattered; he'd write until each paragraph glowed.  Meaning, rather than being predetermined, was discovered in the process.  Great books are not conceived.  They are born.  They are the products of the author making love to the uncertainty of the sentence before him, hoping, praying, yearning to get it right--to make that mystical connection with something more than I.  It's the words that matter, not the message.  The message grows out of a love of language, and because the author is not attached to the message, it grows wings, and takes flight, free to go and say and do as it pleases.  The writer just follows along, filling in the landscape to the best of his ability as fast as he can.  That is the birth of great books, not ideas.

Now, writing this, rain beats hard on the house.  Thunder rumbles.  The fields are soggy, deep with grass, and oh so green.  I sit in a room alone and stare out at the darkening day sky.  There is the sound of clothes in the dryer, tumbling.  Marci is a presence in the other room, reading.

If the sky were to lower hard and heavy and squash us under a weight of water too burdensome to bear, I would still know that God lives, that my love for Marci is eternal, and that books matter.  Not just because of what they say, but how they go about it.

References

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. 1951.  New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 21. Once Upon a Suburbia, Part I

After we left Mark and Molly's, we drove down a road that I was very familiar with when I lived in that area.  I won't name it here.  I'll just call it Field Street because when I lived there, the road was a narrow two-lane road that quickly took you out of suburbia and into the fields and sunflowers.  There is now an expressway where some of those fields were, so at first it didn't feel familiar at all.   However, headed south for a while, the road narrowed and became its old self, winding its way narrowly along subtle Texas prairie contours,lined with big leafy trees.

If one never had to leave these quiet, tree-lined suburban backstreets, there would be no reason to ever wish for anything more.  But, the reality is, all those streets either end at wide, ugly commerce-edged suburban atrocities, or they widen and become them themselves.  I once lived on Field Street, but where I lived it was not so beautiful.  It was near a busy intersection and the freeway.

It was the first place I lived in Dallas.  At the time, it was everything I dreamed of.  The last conversation I had with a friend back in what we'll call Sandstone, Utah, went something like this:

"Yeah, in Dallas we're going to live in an apartment.  It will have a pool, I bet.  And I bet there will be a beautiful blond living next door.  There are two of them, maybe three.  They sort of look like Kelly.  (Notice, in my mind, they'd multiplied) Not quite as pretty.  How could anybody be that amazing?  But they wear bikinis and hang out at the pool and drink cold sodas all day from Coca-Cola glasses beaded with condensation."

I always had a hard time staying in the same verb tense when I told stories.  As I entered the hypothetical situation I was telling about, it became so real to me that I'd always switch to present tense.  My stepfather, Joe, was also my eighth grade science teacher back in Sandstone.  That year we had a science fair, and we had a couple of months where we were supposed to be working on our projects, and each week we had to report to the class on our progress.  I had decided to create two model houses--one with passive solar with earth berms strategically placed around it, and one conventional design without regard to the environment, and then I'd compare the energy use of each home.  I would use a heat lamp and fan, and place a thermometer in each model home.  My dad said each week, when I'd report out, the students would be taken through this gorgeous, energy-efficient, light-filled modern masterpiece, their mouths open in awe at the stunning beauty and completeness of my project.  The only problem was that as my father he knew all I did each day after school was go home and watch reruns of Gilligan's Island.  I hadn't so much as cut up a cardboard box.  It was all a figment of my imagination.  I did, however, at the last minute get to work, and I guess all that daydreaming paid off, because mine was one of a dozen selected to go to state, and it earned an honorable mention there.  Not bad for a C student, who, other than daydreaming, started the project a couple of days before it was due.

For whatever reason, for much of my life, what at the time seemed like small day-dream fantasies later became true.  When I was kid, living on the avenues of Salt Lake, my mother would walk me down a couple of blocks to the babysitter's.  On the way, we'd pass this beautiful white house with the most amazing flower gardens.  I was four at the time.  My mother was divorced and we were on church welfare.  Perhaps that is why the fantasy went this way, but I remember thinking, "Oh, how I'd love to live next door to that house!"  I guess I never dreamed we could actually live in a house that nice, so instead, I dreamed we could live next door.  But, here's the thing.  The next year, when I was five, we actually moved next door.  It was a small wish, but it came true.  Those flowers, in a way, became mine, and I loved them very much indeed.

Later, living in Sandstone, my parents watched Dallas each week.  I'd watch it with them.  I cared less about the actual show, but oh how I loved the beginning.  Those slick, glass buildings reflecting back only sky.  I studied it oh so carefully.  I noticed the downtown blocks were small, some being nothing but parking.  I noticed many of the streets were one-way.  I noticed two gorgeous gold buildings that seemed to rise out of the plains.  I noticed a sleek blue-black glass one by the railroad tracks with a high glass ball in the sky.  Amazing.  Oh, how I wanted to live in a city like that.  In a place like that one could get the knowledge one needed to become a world-class architect, which is exactly what I wanted to be.

Not  more than a year later, we were pulling out of the driveway in our 1972 Lincoln Mercury Cougar, U-Haul trailer behind us, headed for Dallas.

What is amazing is that although some of my small dreams have come true in this life almost exactly as I dreamed them, my life itself has turned out nothing like I imagined.  I clearly failed to follow some grand plan--at least not a grand plan of my own making.  Yet, I feel I'm almost exactly where I need to be now.  So, I don't think it is so much that God stepped in and granted me my every wish.  Rather, I have this crazy idea that I knew much of my life's mission in the preexistence, and that in this life, I was drawn to that part of life my soul already knew I would be experiencing.  The reason I dreamed I would be living next to that pretty, white house with the amazing flower gardens is because there was a part of my four-year-old self that already knew it would happen.  The reason I was drawn to  Dallas as an eighth-grader watching a prime-time soap opera I cared absolutely nothing about was that there was a part of me that already knew we would move to Dallas.

These thoughts, of course, are totally unscientific, and there is no way to prove them.  But they could explain why what seems to be little, inconsequential, yet remarkable dreams do come true, and yet the big, overarching concrete plan elude us.  Perhaps we dream enough to support what is already planned out for us.  Perhaps we are drawn to where we need to be so that we'll be in the right place at the right time to meet all the people we were sent here to meet.  Perhaps what feels random in the moment is planned out in the eternities.  I don't know.

Anyway, we did end up in an apartment by a pool.  That is not so remarkable.  It is the most likely outcome for the family of a small-town school teacher moving to the city.  However, that I'd be so drawn to that white house with the flower garden or Dallas just from the beginning of a prime time soap opera, still amazes me.  Especially when both came true about a year after that initial utterance of the wish.  And those weren't a couple of random thoughts.  Each involved a deep yearning, a magnetic pull, daydreaming that was intense.

I have two minds--a logical, scientific one.  I want facts.  I want things proven.  I don't want to be misled.  But there is also part of me that knows there must be more to life than meets the eye.  That part of me is open to allow things to unfold, to actively engage on some mystical journey with the firm faith it all leads to some deep understanding.  That is, after all, the very act of writing.  The next word could never be put down if ultimately the writer didn't intuitively know it would eventually lead to something worthwhile.

My dad liked to tell the story of my first day of school in Dallas.  He had asked if I wanted him to walk me out to the bus stop.  I didn't, but I said yes because I thought he wanted to.  He was my dad, he had been my teacher, and I had helped him work on houses he fixed up to flip.  I was very close to him.  Years later, he liked to tell the story because when he walked me out to the bus stop, there were three girls who were excited about the new boy on the block and were giving me lots of attention, but I would have nothing to with them.  "They were cute," Dad would say in his animated way, "Oh, they were good looking, and all you did was turn your head, and stare the other direction."  I liked most his stories, but I hated that one.  Shyness is an incredibly painful thing.  It's self awareness on steroids.  I didn't even like him telling that story after I was a married with children of my own.  So, I'd try to defuse the story with the truth.

"Dad, you best be glad I was too shy to talk to those three girls.  They were very naughty.  Especially the two twins."

That they were.  All three smoked.  That's not what made them bad though.  Outside Utah, back then almost all teens smoked.  My high school had a smoking lounge for the students.  It was outside, but students were allowed to smoke on campus.  It was as much a part of youth culture accepted by adults as soda.  No, what made the twins naughty was that they were very promiscuous.  We had an ex-con living in our apartment complex who they especially liked.  He must have been in his early thirties.  The twins were in ninth grade.  They were pretty proud of their conquest.

The other girl was their friend.  She was quieter, very pretty, with piercing blue eyes and wavy blond hair.  She was probably a nice kid, but as I was too shy to ever talk to her, I don't really know.  I just stood at a distance on those few, rare frosty mornings and watched her cooly drag on her cigarette and blow out clouds golden smoke into the brisk morning air.

I never did see any of them in bikinis hanging out at the pool, although I'd see one of the twins occasionally just inside the laundry room, making out with some boy, and never the same boy.  I have no idea if it was the same twin or not.  I couldn't tell them apart.  Both had strawberry blond hair, very womanly figures for ninth-graders, and mouths that spewed the English of a truck driver.  I don't know how you fit the f-word that many times into a sentence and still have it hang together well enough grammatically to retain some meaning, but somehow they did it.  Their descriptions of their sexual exploits were vivid enough to catch everyone's attention; they were very popular.  I was both repulsed and drawn to them.  And I never said a word.  Shyness slithered over me like a python whenever they were around.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 20. A Quiet Breakfast at Mark and Molly's House

Mark and Molly's beautiful home

Travel Date:  September 11, 2018

Sometimes writing scares the hell out of me.  It's so hard to know where to begin.  Even the most mundane scene in the most anti-climatic part of a narrative can begin a thousand different ways.  Yet, it matters how one starts.  Openings set the mood.  

It was a warm, muggy morning, the sky low and gray, the song of cicadas heavy in the trees, droplets of rain on our car.  I noticed the beautiful brick suburban homes.  Across the street was a orange brick one with bay windows, the type I used to call a "North Dallas three-story attic house" because of the high-pitched hipped roofs on one-story homes.  I loved those houses when I first moved to Dallas as a teenager.  Looking across the street, I realized I loved them still.  Homes in Texas just look so much more substantial than homes out west, both their exteriors and interiors.  For one thing, they're usually clad in brick rather than cheap siding.  

A typical suburban Dallas home-type
that I dubbed "The North Dallas Three-story Attic House" 

Turning around, I noticed how beautiful Mark and Molly's home is, and I took a picture.  In college, living in apartment complexes, and feeling that I was going nowhere, I longed to live in something substantial.  When Marci and I arrived the previous night and I commented on how beautiful Mark and Molly's home was, Molly said, "Remember when you said you thought you'd never have a home, and now we both have one."

I'd forgotten that, but when she said it, I remembered.  I'm not sure Marci and I would have one now if not for my parents.  Ours, along with the property, is basically a present from my stepfather.  We have a wonderful home on 90 acres of family land with an oak and maple filled canyon with a creek, and so envy wasn't logical.  Still, looking back at their smart 1960s modern home set back on a lush green lot under big, leafy green trees, I was a little jealous.  

What was clear was just how beautiful suburban Dallas is.  Sure, the main roads with shopping centers on each corner are kind of ugly.  But those quiet, narrow suburban streets themselves are quite wonderful--neat, tidy brick houses set back from the street on immaculate green lawns; big, leaf-heavy trees casting deep shadows on hot summer days.  Those houses beat the hell out of the two story pressed-siding atrocities sitting on lots with parched, yellow lawn that inhabit every city west of the Rockies.

It truly surprised me to find Mark and Molly living in such a respectable place.  I would not have guessed that from our college years.

Molly, along with my friend Phil, were my roommates in college.  We shared a two bedroom apartment.  Phil and I shared a room, and Molly had her own--until Mark moved in.  There is no polite way to put this, so I'll use a metaphor.  Molly was to cleanliness then, what Trump is to environmentalism now.  As she has always been a good friend, I'll just leave it at that, and note that her home now is spotless.  Furthermore, because my own home is constantly a mess, and Marci and I perform agonizing two-day rush scrub and tidy extravaganzas before company comes, I could tell with absolutely certainty that Mark and Molly's clean house was not the product of that same type of frantic fronting because it was all too orderly.  You can quickly vacuum carpets and sweep floors before guests arrive, but when there's not a lot of extra papers, pens, bills and crap on the book shelves and end tables, you know it's clean for real.

What changed between when she was my roommate and the present time, I'm not sure.  It just goes to prove, despite what adults tell their children, high school and college years do not determine who we ultimately become.  Probably, parents do.  Most of us are just so damn determined in our youth to prove otherwise that for a while we succeed at being everything that makes our parents stay up late and worry themselves gray.  Usually, however, their influence wins in the end.

Molly, the college drop-out, is now a well-loved science teacher living the suburban dream with Mark, her college-years sweetheart and continual love.  Amazing and beautiful.  

In college, I would have predicted that future Molly would live under a bridge, a needle stuck in her arm, as she stared up at a bit of light coming through a small hole in her cardboard box bungalow.  "Wow!" she'd say, amazed by the light, "That looks just like a rose, a beautiful yellow and purple rose, all vibrating, with little orange army men sticking out like the peddles of a sunflower rose  Yes, not a rose-rose, but a sunflower rose!"

That, of course, is distorted and unfair.  All predictions of people's futures are.  Molly was always brilliant.  She ate books like Doritos, one book after another.  At the time I was the literature major, but it would take me a couple of weeks to read a book she could finish in a single day.  But, at the time, she definitely was not interested in education, nor was she interested in cleaning house.

I remember one night Phil, she, and I decided to get drunk.  The two of them had had some experience at it.  I hadn't, and I didn't like the taste of beer.  So, she and Phil opened a couple of beers, and I opened a bottle of NyQuil.  She thought it was hilarious.  But, she also thought it just wasn't right.  She started off laughing, then started whining (as the beer took effect, of course), and then finally filled with righteous indignation:  "Nobody get's drunk off NyQuil!  There's a right and wrong way to do things.  It is as simple as that.  See?" (swig).

Phil, always the moderator, tried to see things from both sides.  "I don't know, Molly, if your aim is to get drunk, then I don't see that it matters how you approach it.  Drunk is drunk."

"It does matter.  It does.  I'm telling you, it matters.  Nobody, I mean nobody, takes NyQuil shots to get drunk."

And so it went on.  I personally don't remember getting drunk that night.  I probably just fell asleep and slobbered all over the table, the side of my head resting on a dirty plate of half-dried spaghetti that Molly failed to clean up.  

Thinking back with a smile, I shut the trunk and walked back to Mark and Molly's most respectable home, and opened the door and entered the quiet, dimly lit interior of dark wood floors.  Marci and I ate some cereal Molly had set out for us.   We enjoyed the quiet, spacious house, and the cat, who ran around doing acrobatics off the furniture.   Water dripped off the back roof, hit the concrete step, and splashed against the sliding glass door.  It was wonderful.

There was a time I made fun of the suburbs.  In college, I felt obliged.  The poets I liked, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, aimed so much of their sharp wit against middle-class suburbia.  I remember Marsh's mom, a journalist, a suburbanite herself, and a republican, tried to give me other mentors, and once shared an article about a Dallas poet who loved the suburbia, hoping I'd come back home (and not influence her son with all my crazy downtown liberal ideas).

No change on my part with regards to my politics.  But the suburbs--well, they're not so bad.  Besides, as the Beto (O'Rourk) sign outside Mark and Molly's home indicates, you can be a suburbanite and democrat also.  

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 19. Rain and Traffic from Denton to Dallas

The traffic from Denton to Dallas was always horrendous, even back in the 80s, when there were still blotches of country between the two.  I always hated that drive, especially at night when it was raining, and it always seemed to be night and raining when I returned from Denton.  It probably wasn't always late, just winter, and in Texas, winter means rain, as does spring, and even good chunks of summer and fall.  Anyway, when I think of I-35 from Denton to Dallas, I think of a wide, slick freeway glazed with rain, traffic moving oh so fast for being almost bumper to bumper.  The population of Denton is 136,268.  The population of Corinth is 21,152.  The population of Lake Dallas is 7,958.  The population of Lewisville is 106,021.   The population of Carrollton 135,710.  The population of Plano is 286,143.  The population of Dallas is 1.341 million.  These are just a few of the folks getting on and off the freeway between Denton and Dallas--and they hate it.  All they want to do is get home to their quiet suburban neighborhood, pull down a narrow little alley to their rear-entrance garage, get out of their car, go into the kitchen through their back door, and then into the family room, where they can plop down on a large sectional couch before a TV and forget there is anything remotely like the office or I-35.  But until then, it's hell, and they're hell-mad, and they drive like they're hell-mad, even when it's raining, which except for a couple months in the summer, that is likely.  They'd drive like that on all Dallas area freeways except for the fact that all of the others are so clogged up with accidents, everyone just sits there almost forever staring at a static line of red taillights reflecting in the rain, the Police's "Synchronicity II" raging in his or her head:

Another working day has ended
Only the rush hour hell to face
Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes
Contestants in a suicidal race
Daddy grips the wheel and stares alone into the distance
He knows that something somewhere has to break.

The stretch of I-35 between Denton and Dallas is where it breaks.  There's just enough space between you and the next car to gun it without instantly getting glass and metal in your face.  And gun it they do.  Yee-haw!  I'm going over Lake Lewisville on a bridge!  There's no on-ramps!  I don't have to brake for any merging traffic for maybe four miles.  Woo-hoo!  Six lanes of traffic (each way) going 70 miles an hour with two car-lengths between, racing in the rain on a bridge over a lake in the rain.  Insane Texas fun.

I didn't love it even when I was a Texan.  But I sure put myself through it a lot.  There was one year when my typical day looked like this:  Wake up,  commute 54 miles from Richardson to Arlington to go to school.  Commute 54 miles from Arlington back to Richardson to go to work.  Commute 38 miles to Denton to see Andrea.  Commute 38 miles back to home to go to bed.  That's 184 miles a day, two or three times a week--

Wait.  Something's wrong.  I know I didn't drive 184 miles a day, two or three times a week, on top of work.  I couldn't have.  Let's see.  Oh yeah, I only drove to Denton on my days off.  Let's redo the math.  Wake up, commute 54 miles from Richardson to Arlington.  Commute 46 miles from Arlington to Denton.  Drive unknown miles of farm road with Andrea looking for grain elevators, tarantulas, and happiness--the last nowhere on the visible horizon for either of us.  Commute 38 miles back home to go to bed.  That's still a minimum of 138 miles on those days, and counting the country roads, we probably did sometimes put on 184 miles in a day.

What's interesting here, though, is that one little incorrect memory added almost an hour of driving a day, and a schedule, that with work, clearly did not fit reality.

That is how memory is, and yet most people trust it so.  I don't.  I believe there is a solid reality; I just don't trust my mind to be the retainer historical accuracy.   I don't trust anyone's account of the past as far as historical accuracy goes.  All accounts through human eyes, by nature, are flawed.  However, I trust those who recognize that fact more than I trust those who claim otherwise.  That does not mean all narratives are equal, and that everything is just perception.  There are facts.  In this day and age more than any other, we need to recognize that and cling to it.  But we also need to recognize that we each see the world through our own lens, and even that lens isn't stable, but shifts with our moods, thoughts and changing beliefs.

Reality is a difficult thing to grapple with.

Back then I didn't even try.  Rational thought arrives sometime around when you hit thirty.  Before that, you're just experiencing--taking in the lights, the movement, the loneliness, the pain, the adrenaline, the boredom, the restlessness, the heat, the rain--ticking, ticking, ticking.

That's when I lived my life wound-up.  I see my son Rio doing the same thing.  It may be alright.  It just may be alright.  One couldn't keep it up for a lifetime, but it may be alright.  It sure crams the head full of material to draw on later for artistic purposes or to just sit in a white rocker on the porch, and go, "You know, when I was a kid..."

Oh, how I pity my future grandchildren.  I need to tell stories so much that I even try to fling them out there to an unknown audience through the web.  With grand kids, I'll have those little suckers right where I want them.  "Yes, we can go to the pond to skip rocks, but not until I absolutely know you've experienced the terror of driving I-35 between Denton and Dallas at night, on a bridge, in the rain!"

Luckily, on the night of which we speak, Marci was driving.  She seemed in control.  She seemed poised.  It almost seemed as if it was no big deal to her.

Perhaps it is no big deal.  I have really adapted to living in my county of 6,828 square miles with a population density of two people per square mile, and only one stop light in that entire great expanse.  Even driving in Provo scares me.

This is why point of view matters.  The only story I promise to tell accurately here is the one I'm experiencing now, sitting in this green recliner on a dark and drizzly day in central Utah in April, clouds heavy as a Texas sky hanging over White Rock Lake.

Memory, like life, is a reel-to-reel movie--that splits, breaks, and is reattached a thousand times over in different ways.  Each time a writer writes, he sits down, looks through the loose strands of footage and tries to assemble them together into something meaningful.

That is memory's limitation, but is also its magic.  This trip to Texas that I'm sharing now--I will never pass this way again.  Another reflection will be distorted by whatever happens between now and then.  Writing it down freezes the record--at least one version of it--to go back and visit again.

Today, I came across an article in the New York Times about how in the 1930s New York City sent photographers out to photograph every building on every block.  It wasn't for art's sake, but for tax purposes.  What clearly shines through though is how important documentation is, even of the mundane captured mundanely.

I sometimes want to stop writing.  I have doubt.  I worry that I'm no good.  Even more, I worry I may do someone else injustice.  All that may be true, but ultimately a writer's only job is to write, and even if we don't always get it right, any written record is better than no record at all.  Each memory captured in print freezes something for someone that otherwise would have been lost.

That is, and should be, enough for anyone and everyone to want to write. I may not always believe in myself, but I always believe in the power of the process.   To stop the film now and then and stand amazed at the color and movement going by, for me, that is ultimately what it is all about.

To be in that car, with Marci, over a lake, in the rain, going way too fast, on a freeway way too congested, in a city way too big, on a planet spinning at 1000 miles per hour, orbiting the sun at 67,000 miles per hour, the entire solar system orbiting the Milky Way Galaxy at 1.3 million miles per hour--Well, even for one living the most mundane life comprehensible--that is one hell of a trip, and somebody somewhere should be trying to get that down.  I have a willing hand, and so I push on.

References

Barron, James. Every Building on Every Block: A Time Capsule of 1930s New York. 28 December 2018. Document. 7 April 2019. 

Police. "Synchronicity II." Synchronicity. By Sting. Montserrat Island, 1983. Vinyl.