The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 32. Dallas and a Day of Art, No. 1. Valley House Gallery

Marci and I stand next to Lloyd's painting, 54 Sky Panels from Holden
to Sevier Lake, Utah, US Highway 50 at Valley House Gallery

Travel Date:  September 11, 2018

It had rained.  We dropped down the wet black asphalt drive to Valley House Gallery tucked deep in woods rattling with the sound of cicada by the banks of a slow-moving black-water creek.  Great trees arched over the drive and the noise from the outside world of the city was all but hushed by the all-absorbing greenery alive with insect and bird song.  Only the sound of our car door slamming and the distant hum of a weed-eater broke the natural reverie.

As we crossed the wet parking lot, my eyes took in wet leaves clinging to the still damp pavement.  Although the leaves were not yet gold, and there were no puddles left, the scene reminded me of one of my brother's paintings, S & K Dairy Cup, Hoagland, Ohio, US 50, a painting of a small town drive-in on a wet fall day.  In it, low clouds hang on the horizon.  There is an electrical pole and a sign for a school by a green sports field.  There is a golden tree that has lost half of its leaves to the soggy weather and a green tree next to it that has been more determined to hang on to its summer load.  And then there is the drive-in:  classic American red, white and blue;  large plate-glass windows;  a tall, stainless steel soft-serve machine inside.  You get the picture (and if you don't--there it is below).  Then there's the obsidian-slick black pavement out front littered with wet fall leaves.  It's so real, you can almost feel the mist in the air and hear the distant swish of tires breaking water on the highway.  The image transports you.  You're now in slow, rainy-day heaven.  The type of day that makes you just want to sit in your car in an otherwise empty parking lot as you read a book and occasionally look up from the page to watch beads of water break into twisting rivulets that stretch and distort the world outside.  It's the type of day that you're there but not really there, always moments away from putting your book down in the passenger seat and sliding into a deep sleep only to be woken-up by the sound of a distant semi-truck putting on its Jake brakes.

S & K Dairy Cup, Hoagland, Ohio, US Highway 50, acrylic painting by Lloyd Brown 2018

I was not with Lloyd when he photographed the S & K Dairy Cup.  I did not go along on that epic trip across Highway 50 to the east coast.  Around 1988 our lives started to diverge.  Although we now live less than a city-block's distance away from each other, and see each other almost daily, that has not changed.  We each have our own lives now. However, that was not true back in the mid-eighties.  Family-wise, there was just us living in a metropolitan area of three million people.  Almost every journey we took, we took together, and so, although I was not in this particular wet parking lot, there are so many similar scenes I was there for, that I might as well have been.

Steamy drives east towards the big thicket were frequent, as were cold, winter drives headed north in the vein hopes of finding snow.   Once, on Christmas day, instead of finding snow, we found the Talemena Mountains of Oklahoma glazed with ice after dark.  Oh that was stunning.  And along the way, so often, there'd be a street scene of a convenient store, a drive-in, or a cafe reflected in a wet highway.  A 7-11 in Gainsville, Texas was one such place.  Roads and rainy days form entire albums in my recollections of life with Lloyd.  The swoosh.  That slow slightly depressing serenity of low clouds dragging across deep green horizons.  A cup of coffee.  A doughnut or a Dr. Pepper.  Time and distance.  Water on the windshield.

Frisch's Big Boy, Milford, Ohio, US Highway 50, acrylic painting by Lloyd Brown 2018

This particular great, gray day, however, was spent with Marci, and we were off to see art, starting with Lloyd's one-man show, Cross Country on Highway 50, at Valley House Gallery.   We walked into that quiet, sacred interior that I love so much, where your only obligation at the moment is to truly see.  Well, usually.  This time we had barely started looking around when a woman came out from the other room, "You must be Lloyd's brother."  Lloyd must have let her know we were coming.  And so began the introductions.  Thank goodness Marci was beside me.  She is SO MUCH better at that social stuff than I am.   I am never at ease around others beyond family and a few very close friends, but I'm more at ease being beside someone at ease than I am by myself facing the voice inside my head that screams Get out of here now!   Get in a car.  Go find a wet, empty parking lot on a rainy day and sit in a mild stupor watching the world bend and stretch through runs of water.  And if you can't find that, just find any place where you can be anonymous.

The woman was Cheryl Vogel, the co-owner of the gallery, and not exactly a stranger.  But it had been a long time, a very long time, and I'd only met her a half-dozen times.  Her and her husband had taken Lloyd and I out to dinner once--I remember that--but if I saw her in a mall I'd walk right on by with no clue that I'd just passed somebody I knew.  She was, however, incredibly nice, and gave us a personal tour, sharing stories about Lloyd.  Not surprising some of those stories had to do with his shyness.  Both of us once struggled greatly with it.  I still do at times.  He's either conquered it, or has created an effective mask to hide it.  I see him in public these days and think, Is that my brother?  Don't get me wrong; he's no extrovert.  But, he seems at ease with himself and the world around him.  That was definitely not the case back in the 1980s when Valley House Gallery signed him up as one of their artists.

Cheryl walked us around and took our picture next to 54 Sky Panels from Holden to Sevier Lake, Utah, US Highway 50, the largest piece in the show.  And then she left us to wander and look, as would have been our privilege at any museum.

Ultimately, the true impact of any good museum or gallery is that it allows you to forget yourself for a while as you become absorbed into the images before you--almost literally pulled into the lines, colors, and textures.

Amtrak a Passing Shadow, Granada, Colorado, US Highway 50,
acrylic painting by Lloyd Brown 2014

And so we were pulled into the work of my brother.  Lloyd plays around a lot with line, form, surface, texture and perception.  He spent some of his career creating mixed-media three-dimensional dioramas to enhance the sense of space in his work.  In the process, he discovered it wasn't the literal, physical dimensions within the diorama that created the sense of space, but rather getting light and visual weight right.  The sky has to feel lighter than the ground.  The detail on a distance mountain has to be there--our eyes pick it up in real life--but it has to feel softer than gravel at your feet.  So, he spends a lot of time not just getting the form and color of the images right, but also getting the weight and surface light right.  Because of this, in my opinion, he has surpassed Edward Hopper in capturing America.  Hopper operates on simplification, abstraction, archetype.  He gives you enough to recognize a similar scene in your own life, and your mind fills in the rest with emotional connection.  It's mighty powerful.  But Lloyd gives you surface-weight and light in such exquisite detail the picture plane all but disappears.  It feels like you can walk right into what you're viewing regardless of scale.  The picture above, Amtrak, a Passing Shadow, Granada, Colorado, US Highway 50 is a perfect example of this illusion.  The piece sits on a shelf like an open book, and so the left panel literally comes forward in space towards the viewer, while the train appears to continue back towards the horizon, in the process sucking the observer into the scene.

Basically, Lloyd has become such an effective painter that the surface he paints on no longer matters.  He could paint a scene of a straight Kansas highway on a 50 gallon oil drum, and despite the obvious curvature of the the "canvas" contradicting reality, you, the viewer, would still be able to walk on down that highway towards some distant horizon. 

Steve Calls Home on the Loneliest Phone in America, US Highway 50, Nevada,
multimedia by Lloyd Brown 2014-2017

Although I think Cheryl truly tried to leave us alone so that we could just spend time with Lloyd's paintings, she couldn't resist popping in again as we viewed the painting above, one of my personal favorites, Steve Calls Home on the Loneliest Phone in America, US Highway 50, Nevada.  Lloyd and I had planned to create a book about Highway 50 from central Utah to Reno, a route we traveled often when we were younger, going back and forth between our mom's home in Utah and our dad's home in Reno.  Lloyd succeeded on his part of the project; I failed on mine, and the book was never completed.  The written part was a dialogue between our one-week trip across Nevada and my then current life as a teacher on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona.  And so when Marci and I moved, so much happened so quickly, the piece seemed to just get bogged down in long runs of exposition in a vein attempt to explain what was going on in my then current life.  In the process, the writing lost its immediacy, and with that, I lost the will to write.  Perhaps, that is why I'm so determined to finish this book.  I want to complete some written record of at least one journey that I've taken in this life before I die.  The road, thanks to both my father and Lloyd, is a big chunk of who I am today.  There is no I without the highway.

After viewing Lloyd's show and purchasing several copies of his catalog, Marci and I wandered around the lush gardens surrounding the gallery and the Vogel's home.  It's such an amazing space.  And the day was fantastic.  Cool, moist and driven by bird song.  It was hard to leave, but, of course we did, because that is part of what you do when you travel--you leave behind what drew you to that space in the first place.  Ultimately, that only intensifies the experience.  We travel so we can leave behind something that matters deeply to us so that we can pine for it years afterwards.

The grounds at Valley House Gallery, September 11, 2018

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 31. In the Car Again Shopping Memory Lane, No. 2

This was our next stop shopping memory lane.  I lived here with my parents after they had acquired their new-found wealth.  This is only half of the house.  The other side is beyond that big, green bush on the left where there is a hidden brick wall, and on the other side a courtyard that the house wraps around.  The living room, dining room, kitchen, and master bedroom all look out onto it.  Although the house had a small yard along the street, it didn't feel like it because the housing association took care of it.  One simply walked through it up that walkway to get inside.  The courtyard, however, was glorious, with red terracotta tiles, large banana plants and a Jacuzzi.  That gave me some connection to the earth, which I desperately needed, having grown up in a small town.

We lived here my tenth-grade year of high school--the one year of my life that I experienced a little of the life of the upper middle class.  The large, airy home looking out onto the courtyard was wonderful.  The living room was large, and two of the walls were covered in rich, maple-colored wood encasing built-in cabinets and book cases.  The windows facing the street had wooden shutters that let in slatted light.  The wall facing the courtyard was glass, and the leaves of banana plants gleamed under the noonday sun.

What really made the room was an 1870s Erard concert grand piano my parents acquired at Joe Small's auction for a little over a thousand dollars--a steal.  The one pictured below is either the same model, or one very close to it.  Today, that piano goes for around $75,000.  Unfortunately, when my parents moved back to Utah, they traded the piano for an early 1900s black upright because the grand was getting damaged in their new home with south-facing windows. That was dumb.  There's no other way to put it.  They could have given it to my sister.  They would have no way of knowing this, but her son turned out to be a great musician, and I'm sure he wouldn't mind having an extraordinary instrument like the one below in his living room.  Even if we didn't have a great musician in the family, the piano is unique enough that I'm sure it would have been passed down generation to generation.  I know I wouldn't mind having it, and I can't play "Mary Had a Little Lamb." Even just as furniture, it is a work of art. I hope that wherever it is, it is well looked-after and well-loved.

The piano was impressive enough that even though I was already in 10th grade, I decided I should take piano lessons.  I demonstrated no natural talent; I had troubles keeping time; I didn't practice enough.  Still, I enjoyed it, and my mother said I played with feeling.  She should know.  She's played by ear since she was a child, and I grew up in a home where I came home from school to sound of the piano or organ everyday.  I'd have to yell so that she could hear me.  It was wonderful.  So much nicer than the sound of the vacuum in the middle of reruns of Gilligan's Island.  My mom always says she could have been a concert pianist, and if you heard her play, you'd have no doubt that is true.  I didn't realize it as a kid because I didn't know what jazz was, but she is really a jazz pianist.  She hears a song, takes in the basics, plays it, and then it becomes part of her repertoire, but each time she plays it, it's different.  It's both the same song, but it's not.  She goes off on these wild, beautiful runs that bleed into other bits of song and then she returns to where she began.  It's jazz.   The odd thing is, other than Big Band, she's not a jazz fan.  I'm not sure why; she should be.

It is in this house that I first realized I was an artist.  I wasn't sure what that looked like for me--a painter, an architect or a poet--but I knew I was feeling and experiencing things in my interior world that I assumed not all persons do on a regular basis.  I knew this because they were new to me.  I hadn't always been an artist, and so I could tell the difference.  I don't know if it was a change in body chemistry or all the bullying I received in junior high, but I moved from being an extrovert to an introvert within three years, and beauty before all but completely ignored by me all of the sudden took on significance.  I listened to Elton John's Elton John album consistently.  I loved the strings, drama and depth of songs like "Sixty Years On" and "The King Must Die".  I realized what I wanted most out of life was to feel.  I went on walks.  I kept a journal.  I wrote poetry.  I spent a lot of time in our courtyard taking in the sun and watching light play on the leaves of banana plants.  I sat at that concert grand piano playing a very simplified version of "Lavender Blue" and in my head I was in concert backed by a great symphony pounding my soul into the keyboard before the world making the most extraordinary sounds.

I didn't know then what a Romantic was, but that's indeed what I was experiencing: a yearning for the sublime.  And in all those years, nothing has changed. No matter how pedestrian my day job, my home, my routine--my life's quest has been to touch fingers intimately with the divine, if only for seconds at a time.  To truly feel and see sunlight glazing oak leaves--the super-real right out my window--I decided in that home pictured above that was in fact the reason I was here.  Everything else was of little consequence.  I no longer lived to exist.  I existed to live.  I didn't always remember that, but the times when I did were the times when I was truly happy.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 30. In the Car Again Shopping Memory Lane, No. 1

Perhaps the hardest part of writing is getting pacing down.  I'm having trouble with that here.  There's so much life to cover, I simply don't know how to proceed, and there's clearly no purpose covering it all.  Odd though it be, this is still a travel blog.  The focus is on the experience of place.  My life just happens to be wrapped up in this part of the journey.  It's hard to know what to leave in, and what to leave out.  It's hard to know whether to proceed through the past chronologically, or to proceed spatially along the journey, or some combination of both.

What has come clear to me though, which this narrative simply reinforces, is that aging sucks.  Life takes on more meaning as you age.  You enjoy the small things more.  You're less worked up.  Happier.  Yet there's a deep realization under the surface that more of your life is behind you than ahead of you.  With each passing year, there is less time to make up for lost time.  Once you hit fifty, you realize what you've achieved so far is more or less the life you will have from here on out.  Even if you're in a good place, there is a sadness  as you realize the dichotomy between your dreams and your reality.

So much of youth is wasted on worrying about what others think.  For most of us, it takes us well beyond the lifespan of our natural lives to step into our real selves.  I lived way too much of my life afraid, especially around others, to simply be myself, to be the person God created and loves deeply.  As good as my parents were at parenting, somehow that message was not received.  Perhaps it simply can't be conveyed.  I haven't done any better with my kids.  But we matter.  Immensely.  Beyond measure.  Because we refuse to believe it, we live far below our potential, and so we dream one life and live another.  For some that gap is so big and scary, they have to lie about who they are.  They boast, and they tell stories, none of which are true.  They live life in fear that the world will find out they are less than they say they are.  The character Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore Show was a perfect example of this.  That's the sad lie Satan seeds so successfully:  that we have no worth.  And others, mostly unintentionally, reinforce it, because they, themselves, deep down don't believe in themselves either.  And Satan seeds one more lie, to fuel this: scarcity.  He teaches us that there is not enough to go around--not enough love, not enough recognition, not enough money, not enough resources--and this belief pits us competitively against each other.  And so we compete for narrow desires rather than living grandly with arms wide open to all that God would have us receive individually and collectively if we'd only accept it.  The current fear of illegal immigration is a perfect example of this.  We fear our jobs are being taken, that somehow our wages aren't fair because of illegal immigrants, although there is no factual basis for this, as most Americans don't want those type of jobs in the first place, when, instead, we could be focusing on the enriched culture fueled by immigration--legal or not: better food, greater variety of rhythms to our music, and more interesting neighborhoods, not to mention groceries that we can actually afford because of other people's desperation forces them accept unfair wages.

Perhaps that is what this book is ultimately about: to reconcile the life I lived with who I now know I am; to forgive those who hurt me; and to thank those who got me through it, so that I can continue my journey more fully engaged with the life around me.

Ultimately, one cannot experience gratitude without honesty.  That's what draws me to the blues.  The music is honest.  It's ultimate purpose is to express, This is what this feels like.  If slavery doesn't damage your divine soul, something's wrong.  If being beat, abused, told you're nothing doesn't hurt, something's wrong.  That's also what drew me to John Lennon.  He was man enough to admit he was crippled inside.  Too much of religion, like too much of the self-help industry, glosses over the gap between who we think we are and the love we need to accept from God to become whole.  Gratitude must sometimes include, Damn this sucks, and no matter how flawed I am, I simply don't deserve it, in order to be real.  No one can get to heaven, in this life or the next, believing they are too flawed for God's grace.  Yet that is exactly what we believe anytime we mentally or verbally begin a sentence, "I'm too fat, I'm too old, I'm too (fill in the blank)."

Loss of now.  That's what we experience when buy into Satan's two lies--that we don't matter and that we live in a world of scarcity rather than abundance.  The moment you are caught up in, "I'm too fat," you are not really living.  You are locked in your own internal dialog that puts yourself down.  Jealously obsessing over the good fortune of another does the same thing--removes you from the moment and locks you up in hypothetical walls.  Living in the now, however, does not mean ignoring reality.  Perhaps you really could lose a few pounds.  Perhaps you really do need to take some action to improve your lot in life.  But when we know we matter, and we know God based life on a model of abundance, we can move forward, enjoying now without fear.  We take a stroll down to the deli for a salad anticipating that new night class we will take.  Knowing our worth motivates us to action.  Ignorance of our worth leaves us either seeking escape or accepting the dull numbness of living the labels and situation life handed us, or worse of all, it causes some to find a scapegoat.

I lost a lot of the now back in the 1980s because I didn't believe in myself and because I believed in a world of scarcity rather than abundance.  I had a great life living with my brother.  True, we were the working poor, and true, I was very shy, which made being around girls that I was attracted to unbearably painful, but we lived the life of artists, taking in and condensing the world around us.  What can be more meaningful than being up after midnight listening to music while painting or writing?  Everyday was an act of creation, and I didn't even begin to glimpse how glorious that is because there was a part of me that didn't believe I was worthy of joy.

As Marci and I drove past a couple of my old homes, it is that underappreciated life I sought to reclaim.  I wasn't imagining a different outcome, but rather a different income.  I wanted to view the life I would have lived if I'd viewed it then through the lenses of openness and gratitude.

Below is second home that had meaning to me that Marci and I drove by on September 11, 2019.  After years of living in apartment complexes, Lloyd worked hard to get us here.  We only rented, and it is only a duplex, but compared to apartment living, it felt like we'd grasped that American dream.

Yet, something kept me back from fully enjoying it.  We had a yard.  I hadn't had a yard since eighth grade.  I could have bought lawn chairs and planted flowers, even if the flowers were only in pots on the small back porch.  I could have had a round table with an umbrella.  A grill!   But I didn't, and I would have loved that.

What held me back?  I'm not sure.  We had neighbors out back, but they seldom used their yard.  You could see into the backyard from the street, but it was a quiet street.  Our landlord made me nervous.  Perhaps that was it.  I spilled paint on the back porch once, working on another lousy painting, and was frantically cleaning it up, hoping he wouldn't come by.  I looked up, and sure enough, he was standing over me with a dry smile.  I don't think he was a bad guy.  He was actually a very good landlord, and took real good care of his property.  It just didn't take much for me to feel uncomfortable.  Junior high students had told me I was scum, and there was a part of me that accepted the lie.

And so I never fully enjoyed a home I still find pretty today.

What I remember most about living in that house is typing a novel that wasn't really a novel at all on an electric typewriter my mother gave to me.  I'd liked a girl named Shideh, a beautiful Iranian, and to my surprise, she liked me.  Though in college now, I wasn't used to that.  In my head I was still that ninth grade kid girls ignored and boys tortured.  Part of me knew she liked me.  We worked at a store in the mall.  One night she ran her fingers through my hair as I was squatting down to put the money bag in the safe.  Another time she hid the price gun behind her back and said, "I bet you can't get this away from me."  When I didn't even try--Oh how I wanted to!--frustrated, she asked, "How come you don't know how to play?"

If I had the courage to be the person God created, I would have said, "There's a part of me that simply can't believe someone as beautiful as you could possibly see anything of worth while in me."  That is truly how I felt, and looking back, I realize, that just may have worked!  But I didn't.  I couldn't.  I was simply too damaged from all the bullying I received in junior high and high school.  But in the privacy of my room, in the house pictured above, I could write.  And so I did.  I wrote as if my life depended on it.  And it probably did.  Living an alternative reality in my head probably kept me from taking my own life.  I don't know if I would have made it through without art.  I had damn good parents, and I knew I was intelligent.  But my shyness was so hard to overcome, I may have chose to  opt out if I didn't have the avenues of escape that art provides.

Art is a fantastic tool for dealing with yourself.  It allows you to both fantasize and deal with reality simultaneously.  Writing a novel can be both a form of escape and intense therapy simultaneously.  As creator of that world, you get to choose what details to include--enough fantasy to take the edge off of the pain and enough reality to begin to analyze your place in the world.

And so I was drawn to that typewriter and to this imaginary world where Shideh and I were lovers living in a small, white concrete and glass Le Corbusier-like home on the red sandstone shores of Lake Powell in Utah, isolated from the world except for a Navajo trading post down a long, gravel road.

I realize now, I was seeking safety.  In Utah, I had been treated well as a kid.  The imagined setting for the home was as isolated as could be from the life I was living in Dallas.  The trading post provided a connection back to my life in the city--but one that I could control.  In that setting, Shideh was held captive.  There was no competition from others guys.  In the real world, she got lots of male attention.  I felt completely incapable of competing.  For I'd been taught well in junior high that girls are attracted to the jerks--the asshole jock who spends his time torturing me.  There was simply no way her attraction to me could be more than a passing fancy.

Of course, I had no idea about the psychology behind my impulse.  I was simply writing away a pain too deep to deal with.  I wish I still had some of the novel, but I don't.  I'm not sure what happened to it, but I do have some poems I'd written during the same time period.  After what I'd been through, love (other than as a feeling) was simply too big of a leap for me.  It's not that I was afraid to take it.  I just had zero skills on how to proceed.  For some reason though, I could always write, even though nobody taught me how.  That one, I guess, was granted by God, a tool to deal with world around me and to keep me safe.

Here are a few of the poems I wrote:

Shideh's Land

Grain crops and hay
Light blue skies, early morning haze
The grass is so green even the people wish to graze

Swarms of fruit trees
Crops of honey bees
And if the queen was to leave
This rich running land
Would become a sea of desert blowing sand.


Shideh-High

Shideh-high
Shideh-smile
Shideh, can you stay for just a while?
Shideh-low
Shideh, please go
I don't know what I'm falling in love for

Shideh-style
Shideh-smile
Shideh, can you stay for just a while?
Shideh-games
Shideh-tease
Shideh, please!

Shideh, do you fondle my name?
Shideh, you scramble my brain.

Glass

Glass sky
Connecting eyes
Laughing with a smile

White cloud
Music soft, playing loud

And I can't help
Falling in love with you.
No, I can't help
Falling in love with you.

Obviously the last stanza of that last poem was stolen material.  I'm okay with that.  We learn through imitation.  As a poet, what I was doing was learning to hear.  Sure, I stole the last stanza from Elvis, but in the process, those same soft sounds and gentle rhythms grace the whole poem, most of which was my own creation.

In life, I was not able to pick up on those same gentle rhythms.  Things between Shideh and I quickly turned sour.  It wasn't her fault.  I simply could not be myself around her.  I was locked in fear.  It was impossible for me to believe I could be loved.  I had all those voices from junior high and high school screaming in my head that I was a pile of shit, and although I tried, I couldn't drown them out.  So, subconsciously I quickly sabotaged everything.  Had I grasped one thing, and one thing only--transparency--we probably would have had a relationship.  I think all it would have taken was for me to say, "Hey, I'm trying; I really am, but I've been hurt, deeply hurt, and I just don't know how to do this. Show me, and I will learn."

But I couldn't.  I didn't.  And that's alright.  That's what life is all about.  Flopping  our way grandly to becoming something more.  And what hurts deeply in the moment often becomes a fond memory with time.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 29. Two Brothers, a Camera, a Tripod, The Fixx, and Red Skies at Night

Dusk and Construction, Lloyd Brown
charcoal, acrylic, collage, plaster and canvas
33 x 47 1/4 inches
1985

It's amazing how clear it still seems: standing in a vacant lot between the Dallas Museum of Art and Woodall Rogers Freeway, camera aimed towards a jagged horizon of cranes and telephone poles against a hot-white, red sky.

My photo was alright.  The painting my brother Lloyd created from it was the sounds of The Fixx frozen live on canvas:  intense, coarse, urban, rock'n, unwinding--a cassette tape unraveled while still playing; images and sound pushed to the limit.  Soot, concrete, neon.

It's impossible to state the impact Lloyd has had on me.  He opened the world of art to me--not just the visual arts, but also music, and through music, literature.

Words.  Texture.  Motion.

Grainy, granular film.  An image glimpsed and then gone.

Something almost seen.

While other high school students were looking forward to vomiting at the next kegger while so and so's parents were out of town, thanks to Lloyd, I and my friends were out taking in the horizon or standing stunned before a Kandinsky down at the DMA wondering How in the hell does someone get that much color out of pigment?  Don't get me wrong, I would have loved to have been at the kegger; I was simply never invited.  But, because of my brother, the energy of that isolation was channeled into something meaningful, and so I was never drawn to the druggies--freaks, as they were called in my school.  Nor did I become that strange kid drawing tanks and blown up stick-figure men, the loaner dreaming of the day he could take out revenge on society.

Instead, I got high on life.  The Fixx was a big part of the non-narcotic psychedelic trip.  Many of my early poems are not-so-subtle rip-offs of Cy Curnin's lyrics.  It's not that I intentionally plagiarized his work;  it's that I felt so connected to what he expressed both through the music and lyrics, that it was natural for me to borrow.  That is probably alright.  Imitation is the first step towards originality.  Here's one example, inspired by the song "Camphor":

Enchanting

Well, it's after midnight
I'm awake like many nights
with my eyes watching the time
My pen playing word games with my mind
Late at night.

Well, I'm neither joyful nor depressed
And though my eyes are tired, my mind won't rest
Because things are so enchanting
High on life.

Well, I really can see the clover,
Turn the rusted leaves over and over.
In my mind, through my eyes
I can see beyond those deep blue skies.
And it's so enchanting
Late at night
And it's so enchanting
High on life.

I'd come home from work late from Braum's Ice Cream.  Sometimes Lloyd would be up painting.  Sometimes he wouldn't.  I'd be wound up, and so I'd go to my drafting table that sat in the corner of the living room.  Sometimes I'd work on an architectural drawing.  I still believed that's what I wanted to be.  Sometimes I'd work on a painting or collage--not a very good one (they never were), and often involving nudes ripped from a Playboy magazine.  Most often though, I wrote.  Poetry chose me before I chose it.  Although I had absolutely no training and had only opened one poetry book (Boris Pasternak, thanks to my ninth grade English teacher, Mrs. Becker), those early poems of mine still had some sort of magic.  That spark came from the lyrics and music of bands like the Fixx.  The Fixx, like all of the great art I was exposed to early on, came into my life because of Lloyd.  I couldn't have had any greater exposure to creativity had my brother been Pablo Picasso or Paul McCartney.  The world may not know it yet, but I do.  I am the brother of one of the greatest creative geniuses the world has ever seen, or will ever see again.  Like Theo van Gogh, I get the privilege of being that interesting footnote. And it is indeed a privilege.  Creativity is infectious.  It spreads.  Being around one who fully takes in the world around him and then goes about the mundane but rewarding task of shaping that into a intense spark reflected back to the universe.  Well, there simply is no greater joy.

Thanks Lloyd.

For the Fixx.
For the paintings.
For the drives.
For red skies
at night.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 28. The Only Taxi Driver in New York City and a Fixx of Wet, Dead Trees in the Ozark Mountains of Oklahoma

1. Phil

Phil.  What to say?   He liked Neil Young--a lot.  He liked The Kinks--a lot.  He drove a 1972 gold Dodge Dart with a black vinyl roof.  The speedometer was broken.  The needle raced back and fourth between 0 and 100.  As he sped up over 60, the speedometer sped up also--overshooting its finish lines, making a loud clanking sound as it crossed over the 100 MPH mark and slammed into the wall of the speedometer casing.  The same would happen as the needle crossed over the 0 MPH mark on the way back.  For such a tiny object, it could make quite the racket.  Phil would simply crank up Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl" or "Cowgirl in the Sand" to an even higher volume and proceed on down the road, slightly hunched over the steering wheel, fingers occasionally tapping to the beat, but not very consistently.  It wasn't necessarily a lack of rhythm--just a lack of follow-through.  Being a rock'n'roller simply consumed too much energy.  Phil wasn't lazy; he just lacked the restless, I'm-bored-out-of-my-mind, someone-please-save-me-from-myself energy that animates most teenagers.  He was steady, sure, slightly cynical.  He was, in short, Judd Hirsch's character Alex Rieger on Taxi.  There is an episode where everyone driving taxi is "really" either an actor or a movie star waiting for his or her big break.  When someone asks Alex about his ambitions in life, Alex says, "I'm the only taxi driver in New York City."   That was Phil.  Honest.  Real. Not caught up in dreams--just grounded in living, although somewhat reluctantly.

I don't think the entire time I knew him he ever called me up to do something.  But, when I called, bored-out-of-my-mind because I was always bored-out-of-my-mind, he'd say, "Yeah, sure, I guess so."  And off we'd go.

Well, not always.  We did a little bit of going.  More so once I had my car.  I liked to go downtown Dallas or to White Rock Lake.  I liked the Dallas Museum of Art and Swiss Avenue.  Phil liked seeing Conan the Barbarian or Mad Max at the dollar theater a couple blocks from his house.  I was restless; I wanted to create; I wanted to be somebody.  Phil just wanted to be in his room listening to Neil Young on his stereo.

Phil and our friend Andrea at the spillway at White Rock Lake in Dallas,
probably 1986, perhaps 1987.  We each had our music icons:  Phil, Neil Young;
 Marsh, U2; Jim, Bruce Springsteen; Andrea, Peter Gabriel; and I, the Fixx.

Occasionally I got him to take a road trip.  There were several: a couple to the Guadalupe Mountains, one to Big Bend National Park, one to New Mexico, and one to Utah.  However, perhaps our first trip was the most meaningful because it was so damn cold and dreary.  Hard vacations are memorable.  I wrote about it six years later, about halfway through my ten-year undergraduate plan.  In fact, I missed the assignment deadline because I went on a walk-about through Juarez, Mexico, a few miles from my apartment in El Paso, instead of facing the daunting task of writing.  I came home frantic, got to work, and then rushed it over to my professor's office after-hours on the last day of the term.  Luckily, she was still there.  Later, she called me into her office and proceeded to yell at me because she thought I deserved a C in the class based on my participation, but "based on this essay, your writing deserves an A".  "What should I do?" she wanted to know.  I said a C would be fine.  She insisted, "No, the work--not you!--deserves an A."  She probably overvalued me.  Good teachers do that.  They value potential.  I had plenty of that because whatever I had, it was all in reserve.

But, here's the thing:  I honestly don't know if the essay I wrote that day could have existed if I were a better student.  Although I eventually found discipline, eventually found peace, and even--for better or worse--eventually found happiness, the essay she admired so much was the product of a different incarnation of me, one who was restless, bored and driven to experience life to its fullest, headphones on, the Fixx cranked up.  I was manic, desperately seeking to experience something vital.  That incarnation wasn't necessarily always enjoyable to be around, especially for Phil, who at the time was completely satisfied with staying in his room and listening to music.

2.  Outside

(Written in 1991)

I grew up camping.  From my fifth to sixteenth year, I spent every summer with my dad in Reno, Nevada.  Each weekend the family left the city behind and drove northwest into the vast ponderosa forests cradled between the Sierras and the Cascades.  My mind's eye sees the sun pouring down through the needles overhead, striping the roads with fantastic patterns.  My mind's ear hears the slow lapping of cool water against the shores of Eagle Lake.  And though I cherish these images and know they must someday be given space to bubble up full-bodied and ripe, they are not what I choose to write about today.  Rather, I recall them because I find it hard to separate scenes in my life.  I can't take you on a trip to Oklahoma without first taking you to California.  For what I have experienced at one time determines what I will do at another.

My dad sitting on a lawn chair outside his trailer, camping.

I am back in the eleventh grade, living in Dallas with my older brother, Lloyd.  Spring Break is approaching and warm winds have been stirring me.  For days I have had to make myself do algebra with the sun pouring down through a mental forest canopy.  I have had to diagram sentences through the smoky, blue haze that rises from the blue, humpback hills surrounding glorious, white Mount Lassen.  My mind has been an eagle chained down.  Waves of light have battered my soul, and I have wanted to go outside.  I have seen long highways and have imagined the diagrammed world thrown out the rear-view mirror.  No grids, no numbered streets, no schools, no numbered thoughts--just free-roaming thoughts that you don't have to justify with thesis statements.

And now Spring Break is here.  Phil (my best friend) and I head up I-30 in his old '72 Dodge Dart.  His speedometer is broken and the little red needle races back and forth between zero and a hundred, bashing itself against the walls of the gauge case, making a terrible racket.  But we have music to drown out the noise.  Phil has brought along Buffalo Springfield, CSNY and Neil Young for my conversion.  I have brought along the Fixx for his.  We'll just see who converts who!

The towns of northeast Texas zip by as we head up towards the Ozarks that spill over into Oklahoma from Arkansas.  It isn't northern California, but it's about as close as I can come to that feeling within a day's drive from Dallas.  I have been in the Ozarks before, and I know there are some places where the smoky, blue ridges can fool you into thinking you're in northern California.  The only difference is that the high, icy dome of Mount Lassen never peaks its head above them.

We head up I-30 towards Texarkana, passing Cumby as Neil Young asks us, "Are You Ready for the Country?"  and we yell back, "Hell yeah!"  We pass Mount Vernon and Mount Pleasant.  The trees along the boggy creeks are Sprite green with purple blossoms mixed in.  We get caught up in the repeated pounding of the piano in "Southern Man" and break into singing, "I saw cotton and I saw black / [something] white mansions and little shacks / Southern Man when will you pay them back?" (Young)  We sing with all the hatred and zeal our hippie hearts can muster.  We get so caught up in mental revolutions and scenes of spitting into Bull Connor's face that we almost miss our exit.

"Shit, that's it!" I yell as I see the U.S. 259 exit sign.

Phil spins the steering wheel, and we slide onto the access road just after missing the signpost.  The car rocks, looking for balance and the road.

"Jesus, Phil!"  I say.  And we break into laughter, more as a means to release terror than joy.

Clouds have been racing over the horizon and breaking up the blue dome.  The cold surge continues and whole plates of blue shatter into white.  Soon the blue is gone and the white thickens to black.

We cross the Red River under a cloud burst.  The river is swollen, the color of chocolate milk.  The windows steam up and then feel cold to touch.

Few know this, but green is brighter on cloudy days.  The lowlands below Idabel are covered in lime-sherbet grass and wildflowers.  And the dark weather doesn't dull the scene.

However, as we move north past Idabel, the trees appear to die.  It is still winter here.  The world looks haunting and cold, which I love, but Phil gripes, "The trees look dead".  I try to make him see that bare trees are beautiful and that the cold that seeps into the bone and settles like larvae is something to be cherished.  Mood is mood, and it is to be permitted, even savored.

Now we are deep in wood--thick, wet, rotting wood.  Steaming black pine choked with undergrowth.  The hills rise up out of the wetlands and lose their heads in clouds of mist.  We pass Octavia and Oklahoma 63.  Winding Stair and Rich Mountain are before us.  We go between them and turn up Talimena Skyline Drive.  The road winds and rises and then follows the ridge top.  Even Phil is a little impressed.

We rise and drop, rise and drop, in and out of the clouds that are breaking up.  It is sunset and the fire ball below the cloud line washes the miles of wet, dark green expanse with gold, making the world a color I can't describe.

The road is pink, even hot orange in places, quartz chips in the pavement on fire.  My heart is on fire.  

This is life!  Diagramming sentences has nothing to do with living.  Diagramming sentences doesn't even have anything to do with language.  Words are, or at least should be, lines written across the sky.  Education should evoke freedom and make one want to soar.  But school, for me, is sitting in a corner by the window, peeking out the blinds when the teacher isn't looking.  I want to tell Phil this.  But he won't understand.  He'll think I'm trying to justify my lack of interest.  He prefers the more direct, "School's a crock, work's a crock, life's a crock" approach.  But, I can't see things that way.  For at times like this, I feel throbbing, wrenching beauty.  It's not life, but the diagrammed world that is a crock.  It is the paradigms we lay across what is natural to extrapolate artificial meaning.  We diagram the forest looking for places to lay down pipes and cables, missing the beauty of the trees.  We chop up literature looking for structure and miss the beauty of the words.  We cage and control legend, myth and fear with strict religious doctrine.  Man can't see anything without a grid, a paradigm, a frame, a box.

The rest of the trip was cold and dreary.  We spent whole days feeding single flames of fire.  The wood was wet and steamed up ashes that filled our cold creamed corn with gray mud.  It rained and the fire steamed some more.  We lived huddled around a small volcano, our bodies reeking from the steam and gasses.  But I loved that trip, even the cold sogginess of it.  There is beauty in mud and slime.  Let the cold creep in on my bones and settle like larvae.  I might bitch and complain, but I will stir inside.  Only in a walled room does my mind die.  I need to get outside to get inside.  I haven't been inside lately because I've been cooped up doing homework.

The homework has improved since the eleventh grade.  I finished up college algebra and calculus a couple years ago and will never have to justify my math with theorems again.  I still have to chop up literature and explicate symbols that are meant to be read with the natural, unconscious mind, but at least college teachers can comprehend an interpretation not already written two decades ago.  And I have my writing classes, where occasionally I'm allowed to write lines across the sky.

Yet, inside is not outside.  I just need to travel, even if it's only by memory.  It's not the same as it is live.  It's a little less cold, but also a little less intense.  Still, it's a form of going outside.  All I want to do is go outside.  So long, bye-bye!

3.  Postscript

It is late Sunday afternoon.  A lot has changed since 1992.  With the world.  With Phil.  With me.  I went to church this morning, for one thing, as I do almost every Sunday morning--something I definitely would not have done in 1992.  Phil also has taken up religion and is a lot less cynical than he used to be.  I became an English teacher, and I love teaching sentence diagramming.  However, although definitely essential to my life now, none of these things seem pertinent here.

No, the only thing that seems to matter at this moment is that outside my window a hard summer light glistens off slightly stirring leaves on an oak tree.  Behind the tree is a sandstone gravel ridge with dark globs of green juniper splotched all over it.   Each tree-blob glistens on one side and casts a great shadow on the other.  The entire ridge glows warmly polka-dotted against a blatant blue sky.

I need to water the garden.  More importantly, I simply need to be outside.  It is the only practical thing to do on so many levels.  As much as things have changed, I am still much the same, and the lyrics of Cy Curnin and the music of the Fixx move me as much as they ever did, maybe more so, for they are now layered over with my own stories of outside.

Outside, I stretch the mind that hides within

New pride, I lose four walls that keep me tied

Outside, I breathe new air that reaches me

Fresh tide, does all the cleansing life can give

Tongue-tied, no words will match this point of view. (Fixx)

References

Fixx, The. "Outside." Reach the Beach. By Cy Curnin. Prod. Rupert Hine. MCA, 1983. vinyl.

Young, Neil. "Southern Man." After the Gold Rush. By Neil Young. Prod. David Briggs. Reprise, 1970. vinyl.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 27. Upwardly Mobile Parents, Late Night's at Joe Small's Auction, and Wine Running Between Cobblestone

Upwardly mobile parents--for three years, that's what I had.  Not that it did me much good.  I was personally poor as a son of a divorced mother on church welfare.  I was personally poor as the son of a school teacher and a stay-at-home mom.  And I was personally poor as the son of suddenly rich parents who earned $180,000 in a single month--and that was back in the 80's!

Now I'm grateful my parents didn't spoil me with their new found wealth, and that they lived pretty modestly themselves.  It was good for them too, because they soon lost all that new prosperity in a bad investment.  If they'd let money change them drastically, the adjustment back to lower middle class would have been excruciatingly difficult. And perhaps, because of how I was raised, I'm just not that much into things, which is good, as I'm a school teacher like my stepfather.  I hate being poor, which I've been a couple times in my adult life, but as long as the bills are paid, and I have enough change to stop and buy a soda, I'm happy.

Back then, though, I wanted wealth to stand for something--mainly my missing self-esteem.  Because of all the teasing I received at school, I would have really liked some symbol that I mattered.  I had one specific symbol in mind--a black, Mercedes 380 SL convertible.  I was sure that if I asked my dad to buy me one of those, and he did, my life would be completely different.  Instead of having tobacco spit in my my face by a bully, I'd be cruising around town with his girlfriend.  The only problem is that I didn't know how to ask my father to buy me one, and so I'd just dream.  Odd thing is I never dreamed of the girls at my school anyway.  I only dreamed of one girl, and she was back in Sandstone.  I'd fallen in love with Kelly in the fifth grade, and in five years, with 1200 miles between us, nothing had changed.  The only problem was that just like I couldn't tell my dad I needed a black Mercedes 380 SL convertible, I couldn't tell Kelly that I needed her gorgeous blue eyes, little upturned nose, soft freckled face, and oh so cool southern California attitude in my life.  So, I just dreamed--of the girl, of the car, and of the Ventura Highway in the sun.

* * * * *

My parents first big check from the multi-marketing diet program they sold was $15,000.  Until then, they'd been living on prayers after moving to Dallas.  My stepdad, after all, was a school teacher.  There was no big rainy-day fund if things didn't work out.  The only furniture we brought with us from Utah was mom's organ and the mattresses that we slept on, and mine was placed directly on the floor.  We bought a cheap couch and love seat for the living room, and that's all the furniture we had.  I remember I used one of the boxes I'd packed my clothes in as a nightstand in my room.

Then the check came.  With that money my parents hired a secretary, bought her a desk, and the rest of us went shopping for antiques at Joe Small's Auction House.

If you knew where to go, antiques in Texas were cheap in the 80's.  They'd bring shiploads of them into Houston from England.  Apparently, in Europe everything was considered old junk unless it was at least a couple hundred years old.  Why that would be so, who knows, because furniture from the 1800's and early 1900's is still very solid furniture with elaborate woodwork compared to the particle-board crap made today.  And oh the smell of hundred-year-old wood!  There's nothing like it.

Anyway, we had an apartment with no furniture, my parents came into some money, and my dad learned about Joe Small's Auction House.  The first time that we went it was to buy necessities--dressers, bedstead's, night stands, etc., but it quickly just became a fun night out together as a family.  It was every Thursday, and it often went until midnight.  One night my dad gave me $40 to buy whatever I wanted, and that began my short but joyful career as an antique's dealer.

Oh I loved the auction.  We'd show up early and walk around, letting the old dark woods and oxidized mirrors on buffets, sideboards, and wardrobes speak to us.  We'd feel the curls on intricately carved leafs and scrolls that decorated the tops and edges of massive edifices of wood.  I especially liked high furniture, like highboys and wardrobes.  They reminded me of early skyscrapers, like the work of Louis Sullivan.

After the look-around, came the action: the auctioneer rattling off numbers hypnotically; the colored cards going up--some discretely, some with great finesse and power; there'd be the bidding wars, which were usually friendly, but occasionally not.  There'd be the gasps of wonder when somebody got a steal, and the laughter when someone overpaid.  Most in the crowd were dealers and came every Thursday night.  They were competitors but also colleagues.  They knew and appreciated each other's business.  It was like being around a great big dinner table and fighting over the bowl of mashed potatoes.

My parents had a family friend, Jim, who lived in the same apartment complex as us, and he had a booth at Vikon Village Flea Market in Garland, Texas.  There he sold great oak dining tables that he bought factory-direct in Alabama and transported to Dallas.  I don't remember what piece of furniture I first bought from the auction with my $40, but I do remember Jim allowed me to sell it at his booth.  I remember that I sold it for $80, doubling my investment.

I wasn't in business long, and I didn't always do well, but I had fun.  However, this is not where I tell you that from this youthful adventure I learned the hard knocks of capitalism and went on to become a successful entrepreneur.  No, instead, this where I first encountered books.  They were not particularly good books, and as reader, I had absolutely no idea what I was looking for, but I was drawn to them just the same.

Now, we lived next to a library, and my parents had church books back in Sandstone, so it's not like I'd never seen a book before.  But the church books just sat on the shelf, unread.  And at the library, I only checked out art and architectural books.  I'd read parts of them for the information, but mainly I was interested in the pictures.  It never occurred to me that words were something worth encountering in any other form than song lyrics.  Up until recently, I'd never been captured by a story.

But I had an exceptionally good ninth grade English teacher, Mrs. Becker, and she had us read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.  I loved that book.  I equated Estella with Kelly back in Sandstone.  Why I did that I'm not sure.  Kelly was beautiful, and she was a sophisticated girl, from southern California, which from the vantage point of small town Utah, seemed pretty worldly.  However, she was never haughty nor mean to me.  Still, as my shyness kicked in around seventh grade, her mere presence became an intimidation because in my mind she was just so much more of a creation than I was.  She was perfection and I wasn't.  The way Dickens described Pip feeling around Estella was how I felt:

Though she called me "boy" so often, and with a carelessness that was far from complimentary, she was bout my own age.  She seemed so much older than I, of course, being a girl, and beautiful and self-possessed, and she was as scornful of me at if she had been one-and-twenty, and a queen. (Dickens)

It wasn't that Kelly was haughty; it was that to me her mere presence was scornful because of her perfection. It was like placing Manet's painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergere next to a black velvet Elvis painting sold in a market stall in Tijuana. 

I was all too aware at an early age of just how beautiful women really are, and for some reason, I never saw any beauty in myself.  As far as I was concerned God simply goofed on half the population, and as a male, I was bound to grovel before their majesties.  Ridiculous, I know, and it set me up for a great deal of pain, for if a woman is unapproachable simply because of her mere existence, how is she ever going to become a best friend, or even something more?  Knightly love is such a damn foolish thing, but I had a bad, bad case of it.

But, longing for Kelly connected me to Dickens' Pip and Estella, which connected me to books.  One day, wandering around Vikon Village Flea Market, I found a bookstore tucked back in the back corner.  I say store because it was more than a stall.  It actually had walls and windows, though if I remember right, no roof other than the massive metal one set on steel beams that spanned the entire city of peg-board stalls.  This seller was permanent enough to erect walls and bring in tall bookcases that were crammed full of dusty, aged books.  I have no idea if any of them had any value because I had no knowledge of books or literature what-so-ever.  Something immediately pulled me towards the books.  I thought I might find another one by Charles Dickens.  I wanted again to enter a world like Pip's, to feel the cold fog settled out on the marshes by the sea, to sit by the fire with Joe, and most of all, to feel again the awe of seeing a beautiful girl again for the first time.  I never knew words could do that.  I'd been deeply moved when I read Joseph Smith's account of the first vision, but I had never experienced the tactile nature of words until I read Dickens.

It was new, and I wanted more.  I entered.  The books looked so amazing, row after row in shelves, stacked on tables and chairs in jumbled piles.  And the aroma!  Old, dusty books are amazing.  New ones can't compare.  I'm not sure how I found Dickens.  I had no knowledge of how to navigate a bookstore.  But I did.  It was a hardbound book with a worn, dark blue, linen cover with his portrait embossed in it.  If I remember right, it contained three novels. I still have it somewhere, but I can't locate it just now.  But, I think they are A Christmas Carol, A Cricket on the Hearth, and A Tale of Two Cities.  I read a Christmas Carol and worked my way very slowly through A Tale of Two Cities.  Though I never completed the latter I was astounded by the language, dazzled by the description of the wine running down the cobblestone street:

 A large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street.  The accident had happened in getting it out of the a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of the wine shop, shattered like a walnut shell.

All the people with in reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine.  The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size.  Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infant' mouths; others made small mud embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish... (Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)

Wow!  The imagery, the sound--together how they did implant an experience in my head.  Years later, the scene would bubble up again mixed with marshes from Great Expectations and Picasso's Blue Guitarist to create a poem:

Blue in a Baroque World

Through some worm hole
there is a cobblestone lane
lined with oil lamps
and pocked with rain.

Galaxies of light unfold
in ripples spreading out
in gathered darkness
puddled at the bottom
of a high hill.

The ragged man
with the blue glow
hears a violin in his soul
cut a coarse chord
that says I'm so damn tired

of this.  It isn't his loneliness though
he knows as well
as high halls
and crystal chandeliers.

He'd like to pound a harpsichord
until it squeals like a pig.  For
some reason he can't explain
he knows traces of God
puddle in the mire

at the bottom of the high hill
where a long tide pushes in

to fill the mud flats
obsidian pocked 
by cold hard rain.

Dickens gave me God in low places, Christ as he historically was, among the people who needed him most.  Wine; stone; torn, tired feet in need of washing, of healing, of transcendence.

Moonlight on water that slowly fills the bay with absolutely everything.  I wanted--no, I needed God that way. 


References

Dickens, Charles. Tale of Two Cities. Dickens, Charles. Charles Dickens: Five Novels. New York: Barnes & Nobel, 2006. 954-955. Compilation.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Dickens, Charles. Charles Dickens: Five Novels. New York: Barnes & Nobel, 2006. 1214. Compilation.

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.