The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 75: The Eternal Now in a Bar in Las Cruces, New Mexico

Although it's been twenty-seven years, I believe it was every Thursday night that I experienced something akin the to eternal now.  Moments so perfect, so right, they linger on still, every once in a while.  Nights of methodical words, things said slow and right.  We usually took the back road through the pecan orchards that trail northward along the Rio Grande.  Sometimes it was just my brother and I; sometimes it was just George and I; usually, it was all three of us.  In the winter, it would be dark.  Outside the window, where the orchards closed in tight against the road, lines of bony-armed soldiers would file in from the black void towards the bright alien light, reaching upward towards a star-studded night in Pegan prayers to powers long forgotten.  At least that's how it seemed leaving the lights of El Paso in the rear-view mirror, heading into those long orchards.  Compared to many other places, I'm sure the light pollution was still quite substantial as the city didn't so much stop as dribble off.

In the summer, the sun would be at a great slant, intense liquid orange pouring through the perfectly straight rows of orchards in molten bars flung across the road, now and then igniting a white adobe facade of a house or store blindingly bright beside the roadside. 

In the fall and spring, yellow-tinted methane gas from nearby industrial dairies would ooze through the orchards making the landscape resemble the fields of France during the Great War.  I half-expected to come across a gutted cathedral, or a trench littered with twisted, partial corpses.

Yet, even on those cold fall and spring evenings when pollution hung low and heavy as the rusted husk of an old automobile, I loved that drive.  There was enough of a rural feel to recall my rural roots.  More importantly, on the other side, was a place I could hear the rhythms and sounds of others as well as refine my own voice.  A mic is sacred space for one working with words.  A piece never fully comes into being on the page.  The print is just the score.  A reading though, well that's picking up an instrument and translating scribble into something oh so fine.

It was a small bar in a very pedestrian place, a Holiday Inn if I remember right, visually soulless, very corporate--a place for weary travelers too tired to seek out any real night life.  Yet, I loved that place.   I still remember some of the readers, even the sounds of their voices, and how they played their instruments--where and how they paused, where and how they proceeded.  Each voice different.

I even remember some of their names:  Joe Somoza, Donna Snyder, Katie McLane.  

Joe read poems slow and even, often with surprising, lightly humorous twists at the end.  He would run his finger through his gray beard and peer out into the audience with intense eyes as he carefully moved forward one line at a time with long pauses in between each carefully crafted image.

Donna was working on a novel then.  Working class.  One could use the words "white trash" except that would be a complete lie.  That bombed-out-muffler Ford Pinto and single-wide trailer reality was definitely there.  The humor one must have to survive day after day, month after month, year after year, of getting nowhere was clearly there.  But so was human dignity,  royalty leaking out into the eternal night through an open screen door of a single-wide trailer along a curbless paved road among magnolia trees as big and blooming as small-town dreams before being dashed by year after year of time-clock reality.

Then there was Katy.  Short poems.  Funny as hell.  Sometimes print didn't do them justice.  But orally, bust-a-gut sweetness poured out about a life of pushing pharmaceuticals across the drugstore counter.  The things we all think dealing with customers (or vise-versa) but never have the courage to say aloud.

In between there'd be rum and coke.  The waitress, I don't remember her name, but I remember she always made sure I got both the cherry and the lime because that's how I liked it.  I appreciated that.

Not everything was pure poetry.  At least not the verbal type.  There was a girl who liked to read in a loose summer dress and no shoes.  George liked how she crossed here feet as she read, leaning on the podium for support.  I wasn't sure about her words, but I had to agree her presentation was marvelous.

She came with a friend who was short, had short black hair and coal-black eyes intense as fire.  I thought as a writer she had great potential, but I also knew I probably had no objectivity at all.  She looked like she could be that young revolutionary spitfire I was looking for.  If a woman didn't quite fit all my dreams, I would just rewrite her until she came close.  It wasn't about discovering who they were; it was more about dreaming who I could be.

Maybe that's all right.  Youth is blinded by forward thinking--scheming, dreaming, yearning for who we might become.  In the process, there is a lot of pain, a lot of missing out on who and what we should really be seeking instead.  But who would have it any other way?

Not I.

Once we come to a standstill, and our dreams fall off, leaving us naked and alone for real, we take a look around and decide what we really need instead.

Yet all that dreaming and all that scheming comes back like gentle wind in the eternal now.

Take me back.

    

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 74: The Village Idiot, Part II

1.

For some reason, I don't remember the night that I decided to save Robert from homelessness.  It seems reasonable that I should remember the moment of  that simultaneously egotistical and generous act.  I remember so many vignettes from my life in El Paso in extraordinary detail, including rather mundane scenes, like eating breakfast at the lunch counter in the old Kress department store.  For instance, I hated that they didn't have bottles of catsup for your eggs.  Only in El Paso would such a standard of American cuisine be left out.  Instead, they had salsa, lots and lots of choices of salsa.  Although I loved then, and still love now, Mexican food, it seemed then, as it does now, that the only patriotic way to eat the standard American breakfast of two slices of bacon, two eggs, hash-browns and toast is to smother the eggs and potatoes with catsup, Heinz Ketchup, that is, if at all possible.  I wanted my Mexican food spicy and my American food as bland as a drive through Kansas.  There was no place in El Paso where I could eat as if I lived in the upper 48, and although I loved the sound of clanking dishes and random conversations I overheard while I sat at that counter, watching steam rise out of big pots of caldo tlalpeno (a chicken soup with fresh green beans, big chunks of potato and whole cobs of corn floating around in it), breakfast without catsup made me homesick and lonely.

Thousands of such details combine to create the movie El Paso running in my head.  So, it is strange that I don't remember the night I decided to rescue Robert.  I assume it was cold and rainy.  I identify with the scene in The Blind Side when they first pick up Big Mike.  Get rid of the suburbs, the wealth and the large house, and it was probably pretty much the same.

Robert didn't talk though.  That must have created some difficulty at first.  He did, however, understand English.  Quite well, I would later learn when I gave him my Alice Cooper Goes to Hell cassette to go in the Walkman I bought for him.  I could tell he enjoyed the lyrics when he put on the headphones and started laughing a big, giant, missing-tooth grin.  That was the next day, which I remember better.

I know I told him to shower first thing.  I would have had to.  There would have been no choice.  He slept on the living room floor.  I always used the walk-in closet of my studio apartment as my bedroom anyway.  I know I didn't sleep well.  Letting a homeless man spend the night is not the safest choice one can make, which is why I assume it was cold and rainy.  Something pulled my heartstrings more than usual.  Vagrants were part of my neighborhood, part of my life.  I didn't go around trying to rescue everyone that I saw.  I was as numbed to their humanity by the abundance of human suffering as anyone else.  I tried to keep change in my pants to help out, but other than that, I walked on by.

But Robert was different.  I'm not sure why.

2.  The next day, I took him to go shopping.  We went to the mall, Sunland Park Mall, on the west side.  I remember that.  I also remember I wasn't sure how I could cover everything.  It turns out, I couldn't.  Later, I had to call my parents and ask them to cover a few checks, but at the time I didn't worry about that.  I just took him shopping.  We bought two pairs of pants, two shirts, underwear, a coat, and something akin to a Sony Walkman.  

That evening I took him to the homeless shelter.  I remember it was someplace down by the river, right along the border.  I don't remember what it looked like.  I remember the people were not overly friendly.  I thought they should be.  When I was in high school I volunteered for a few weeks at a shelter in Dallas.  They weren't overly friendly either.  They didn't want me working while I was there.  They said the homeless people needed to learn to take care of themselves.  I got chastised for picking up a broom.  I wasn't allowed to volunteer to do things at a place I was a volunteer.  They treated the discarded as if they were discarded.  I felt sick to find out this place was no different.  I'm no sociologist but it doesn't seem like the best way to bring a broken person up is to constantly really remind them that they are really down.  It's bullshit.  

I left Robert there anyway.  What else could I do?  I liked my privacy too much to give it up for another human being, and a stranger at that.

3.  A couple of days later, Robert was out on the street again.  At first, clean and in the new clothes I bought him.  I was angry at the shelter; I was angry at myself; I was angry at Robert.  I asked him why he left the shelter.  He didn't tell me.  He showed me that he still had his Walkman; he opened it up, showed me the tape, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell, and smiled that toothless grin and then walked off.

Each day I saw him, his clothes were a little less clean.  One day, his Walkman was gone.  Any music, other than what was in his head, had come to a stop.  Outwardly, my actions had been futile.  I hadn't changed a thing.

Yet, on cold nights, when it rained, he no longer sat in the parking lot outside my work, drawing circles on the pavement with a stick.  Instead, he stood under the awning, and when the wind was blowing rain against the window, he would even come in.  I took some flack for that.  From customers.  From my boss, even though she was about as kind as anyone could be.  But I wouldn't budge.  I'd made a friend.  He seldom talked, and when he did, it was three word sentences spoken very softly.  He seldom requested anything.  He just came in to get out of the cold now and then.  Most nights he would just stand outside and wave through the window, the image of him walking around in a long trench coat, thick shaggy black hair blowing in the wind, bleeding in with the reflection of the neat copy machines inside and the passing lights of the traffic and the night.  Occasionally, I'd buy him a Subway sandwich from next door or a burger from up the block.

Then, one day, he was gone.  A hole was left.  The music had stopped.  I don't know how much I changed his life.  I do know how much he changed mine.  Alice Cooper Goes to Hell became a hymnbook of sorts to the man who said so little and yet said so much.

Break a heart of stone, open it up, don't you leave it alone.

 

  

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 73: After Hours

The Blue Door Bar, our family hangout here at Dry Creek

It was late when we left Bobby and Lee's place.  Marci and I were tired.  I wanted to avoid I-10, so we took Piedras down under the interstate and over the railroad tracks to Texas Ave.  The city had that eerie late-night vacant look that I've always loved.  Recently, I painted a forgery of Night Hawks on my shed, and many years ago, when the boys were young, I turned the shed into the family bar with neon lights inside.  We'd go out on warm, summer nights, make milkshakes and watch movies in our own little hole-in-the wall establishment.  When we have company, I still turn on those lights, and when I'm out and about the property, I see a blue glow emitted from the large plate glass window through slatted metallic blinds.  Even here, at Dry Creek, the shed not much more than a stone's throw from the dark wooded creek-bottoms, coyotes yapping from ridges on the other side, the Milky Way spiraling overhead, town a couple city blocks west, I couldn't quite leave those empty urban streets behind.  I had to recreate such a scene in my own very rural yard.  

My love affair with late-night diners and bars on empty avenues half-lit on lonely nights began when I was in college.  I'd drive the old highway between Arlington and Dallas, Texas 180, which was dotted with scattered independent diners that had been built before the Dallas-Ft. Worth Turnpike was completed in 1957.  How those establishments hung on all those years, I'm not sure, and some didn't, but there were still more than a few open late into the evening.  They all served the same food, indistinguishable but descent, and within my budget.  Chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes was the norm.  I'd sit in one particular diner on Division late at night on a regular basis, reading books and writing poems, imagining words would get me somewhere in life.  On Friday nights, I'd take Texas180 into Dallas and stop at a different diner each time.  Same food.  Same drip of the coffee maker.  Same smell of burnt coffee.  Same fluorescent lights.  Same window looking out on the night, bleeding reflections of the inside world with the outside city lights.  It was my peace, my stillness, and also my loneliness.  In such places I touched the abyss.  I found that somehow reassuring, like looking up and seeing a moon hardly-ever-walked-on, stone white and steady in the night.

In El Paso I'd walk down Mesa Street at 5:00 a.m. after working graveyards at All Night Rapid Fire Copies.  The street would be almost empty, parallel lines of street lights descending down the hill past the lit-up red brick cathedral to the skyline of downtown, Juarez blinking magnificently in the background.  There'd be the occasional passing car, and a couple of drag-queen prostitutes hanging out on the corner by my apartment building.  They'd say "Hi" in their shockingly deep, smoker voices as I passed them to enter an old brick building right out of a film-noir movie, complete with lobby of stained casino carpet and a brass-doored elevator (which didn't work).  I'd climb up five flights of stairs to an apartment that looked out on that same city, only from above.  The sky would be turning pink above the Franklin mountains, the waking birds beginning to rattle the morning with their chaotic song, when I'd climb into bed just as the freeway and Mesa street began their daily drone.

Urban nights have always enchanted me.  So much so, in my imagination, I have lived them across the centuries.  

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.

It was good to be driving down an empty Texas Ave late at night to our hotel.  It was good to enter a marble-floored entry and stand before a brass-doored elevator and rise to a room that looked out on that same lonely urban night from above.  I sat there for a few moments just looking out on the streets I once roamed late into the night, after hours.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 72: The Village Idiot, Part I

Although I'm not proud of many of the daily choices that I made in El Paso, I'm deeply proud of one.  I reached out to a homeless man, Robert.  I'm reluctant to use the title "The Village Idiot" for this post because of idiot's current meaning, "stupid."  However, originally idiot meant a "private person".  I use it that way here, as does Van Morrison, in his song "The Village Idiot".  The song honors someone like Robert, which is my intension here, and so, despite its common meaning, it is the perfect title.

I first saw Robert sitting on the curb outside the copying service I worked at on north Mesa Street, which I'll call All Night Rapid Fire Copies.  I left work, and there he was sitting on the curb, bent over, long black hair, dangling over his face, almost touching the wet pavement at his feet.  He had a stick and was drawing an invisible something on the ground.  He wore a dark green trench coat and reeked something awful.  It was winter; there was a cold mist that gathered around him, the pavement wet enough to reflect back the city lights in streaks of color and for the passing traffic to make soft, swooshing sounds.  I wondered why he sat there getting soggy instead of finding shelter under the awning.  And then I walked past and got in my car.

I was headed to Burger King just up Mesa Street to get my dinner.  I must have been tired because I went through the drive-through, which was not my thing.  At the last moment, I decided to get two meals instead of one.  On the way home, I stopped back at the store, parked, got out, and walked a meal over to the man I would later learn called himself Robert.  He glanced up, parting his thick black hair from his eyes and smiled a missing-tooth smile as I handed him his dinner.

Then I drove home, ate mine, and sat at my kitchen table before my old Apple IIC computer, writing and watching the green text move across the monitor as the faucet dripped.  

I don't remember what I wrote.  I don't think it had anything to do with Robert.  Yet, I know he was there.  Not because he was homeless.   Vagrants were common to my neighborhood.  I'd pass them walking all of the time.  Sometimes I stood with them and watched the sun set behind the Juarez mountains from the gravel lot across the street and up the steps of a hill to a foundation where once a house sat.  I-10 would be roaring below, a stream of white in one direction, a stream of red in the other.  The transients would offer me drink from the community bottle, which I would politely decline, and they'd tell me about the train route between El Paso and California.  I wouldn't judge them, and they wouldn't judge me.  Neither did we care about each other's fate.  

Robert, however, was different.  Something about him drew me in, made me care.  I'm not sure what it was, but he would remain a small but significant part of my life over the next four years.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 71: Sin and Addiction

 Ah, I knew that title would get your attention.  I was going to simply title this "Addiction".  That too would have had its pull.  Even the clinical label for losing control of one's choices pulls eyes in like a smoking tangle of steel along the interstate accompanied by flashing lights, ambulances and stretchers.  Add to that the Biblical label, sin, and you've got people.  We don't readily avert our eyes from the sordid details of life.

Sorry to disappoint you.  You won't get much of that here.  The best way to leave sin and addiction behind is to do just that--leave it behind.  There has to be some understanding about the personal pull, what the repetition of destructive behavior provided the addicted, and an awareness that those connections which were forged in the brain through repeated stimulation are still there, yearning to be reconnected whatever the cost to you and those around you.  And that's about it.  After making amends if need be (when and where possible), walking away from the wreckage is simply the best course.  Crawling through the steel shards, glass gravel, and hot coals on your hands and knees, or fanning the flames of the inferno just to keep the scene alive so that you can analyze how everything came unhinged, will not set you free.  Standing up, noticing that the sun is still there in the sky, and that there is a road to walk down, away from the heat, one step at a time, may. 

I walked that road, and I'm not turning back.  But I think honesty here requires saying, Yes, my life in El Paso included long, wonderful walks through the magic of borderland.  Images, sounds and smells I will never forget.  Late afternoon sunlight on a stark white storefront along a back street of Juarez, dogs barking, three kids playing in a vacant lot of garbage and rubble, laughing as sunlight glistens the girl's long black hair amber, and they all squint into the intense light towards some gringo with a camera. 

 And Yes, there were the best of people--sitting on George's living room floor, listening to his great stories, and his constant wondering about how it's all got to add up to something, doesn't it?  Or is there nothing at all?   Maybe this is just it, maybe we sit leaning against a sofa, trying to figure it all out, forever, and then we just die, and they put us in a hole, and worms devour us...  But I don't know, there's a lot of space out there, and galaxies, and supernovas, things exploding, and there was the time my friend and I put a pipe bomb under a palm tree on base and blew it all to smithereens.  Talk about cool.  Hey you want another drink?  

And there was Bobby and Lee.  Bobby's great big, life-loving politics.  His anger against unrighteously-poweful men doing dirt to the powerless poor.  His love of life and pomegranates.  Lee's quiet appreciation of sunsets, neighbors and children.

Yet, with all this, there was also me at the topless bar, the strip club, the XXX-rated video store, or up in my apartment all alone, feeding my addiction.  There was also me sitting by myself at the hole-in-wall club on whatever given corner trying to drink myself into oblivion.

Those do not need to be a detailed part of this narrative.  All that I love about El Paso is something other than that.  I'm not running from who I was.  But I'm not going to stand around the wreckage either, trying to sort through the unsortable.  Redemption is redemption.  The atonement is a get-out-of-jail-free card requiring only humility to obtain it.  I've learned happiness comes from a willingness to use those gifts.  I will only bring up my choice-stained past when it serves the purpose of this narrative: to show gratitude towards all those who made Texas memorable for me.  Sometimes the sin and good get entangled, as do the joy and the pain.   When that happens, I'll feel free to bring up what I need to.  It's a matter of focus--not running, hiding, or burying the past.  

Yet there needs to be some accountability.  Otherwise, the memoir isn't an honest one.  This post is to get that out there.  Texas wasn't all heat and blue skies and roads that go forever.  Dallas wasn't all shiny glass skyscrapers, parks, museums, and tree-lined suburbs.  Juarez wasn't all quaint little eateries with chickens spinning on rotisseries in open windows, happy mariachi music playing in the background.  There was pornography and pain, bleary nights, and hangovers.  Some of that pain was handed to me by brutes in high school who victimized me to fill their own black-holes, pain they did not know how to handle, so they pushed it forward.  But most of it, I chose, a willing participant in the dinging and denting of my own soul.  Now on, with what matters:

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 70: An Evening with Bobby and Lee

Travel Date:  September 16, 2018

A cool but not unpleasant breeze stirs while Marci and I sit on Bobby and Lee's front porch and eat gourmet pizza with them, watching the fireworks in Juarez. A shimmer of city lights rolls out below a crackling sky.  For a minute, all of us wonder what the festivities are for.  Then Bobby says, "Ah, Independence Day," and I remember also.  

Sidewalks lined with tables outside the small eateries.   Wonderfully, chaotic symphony of sound.  Competing mariachi bands serenade each and every little eating establishment.   Aroma of competing foods.  People weaving in and out of tables, making their way up and down Av. Benito Juarez, stopping, eating, and drinking, and talking to friends all along the way. A chaos of conversations.  A unity of joy.

 I used to go to Juarez on Mexico's Independence Day. 

For a brief minute, I think Marci and I should be over there.  I should have known the date.  I should have planned this trip better.  I should have gotten passports--something that was never needed before 911.

It's not that I don't want to be here on the porch with Bobby and Lee.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  It's just that I want to show Marci as much of my life here as possible, and there part of it is, right now, across the river, going on, and I'd totally forgotten about it.  A mariachi band is very different live than on the radio.  On the radio, I turn the station.  Live though, it's very hard to walk on by, no matter how much of Juarez you want to taste and see.  On September 16th, though, one doesn't have to make that decision.  The mariachi bands are everywhere.  One band just bleeds into the other as you move down the street of brass sounds and copper-colored lights, whole chickens spinning on rotisseries in restaurant windows reflecting back the city lights.  And, oh those smells!  It's like we're here in New Orleans, sitting on a porch in some back neighborhood, having totally forgotten Mardi Gras is going on, the lights and music shut out by a cloak of dark, sweating trees.

My moment of regret is brief though.  It's too peaceful here on this porch with windchimes tinkling, and the distance sounds of fireworks popping, for me to hold on to any We should have...  The moment softly demands our presence.  Lee and Marci do most the talking.  Bobby and I join in now and then.  As always, I don't have much to say.  There is a difference though from years back.  I'm at peace with who I am.  I am no longer running from something I don't understand.  This is not the first time I've been back to El Paso.  Each time was a little different.  The first time I was anxious to show off our new born baby son, Everest.  The next time I was anxious to show off his three older brothers, who didn't come previously.  But each time, as glad as I was to be back on this porch, I was still anxious.  I wanted to prove something.  What?  I'm not sure.

This time I just sit and listen to the conversation and the wind chimes.  

I'd like to say that there was some grand change in me, perhaps, that my religion had changed me, or that I'd done some heavy emotional lifting, and that I'd overcome.   My religion has changed me.  Perhaps I've overcome some things.  But mainly, it's just been time.  I don't know why the bullying I received in junior high and high school affected me so.  Many people go through far worse trauma seemingly unscathed.  Physical abuse.  Addiction. Rape.  War.  Statistically speaking, I've been about as lucky as one can get.  Yet, one doesn't totally get to choose how one reacts to the world.  We like to think we do, and certainly choices are ours along the way, but not unlimited choices.  Our biology and our environment together confine our options even as they teach us.  That confinement is an illusion, but it is a strong one.  

I showed up in El Paso broken.  What Bobby and Lee had to teach me was built for the future.  I was capable of writing good poems back then, perhaps far better poems than what I write now, but I wasn't capable of sitting on a porch in the company of others, at ease with those around me, and at ease with myself in their company.   I could observe life, but I couldn't live it.  My shyness removed me from everything.  I stood outside the world and watched, walking around this giant glass cylinder, looking in.  I'd try to enter, and every time I did, the glass would push back.  Sometimes the people inside the cylinder would even be waving, welcoming me.  But I couldn't enter.  My fear was just too overwhelming.  I had the choice to go to a party, and I often did.  But I didn't have the choice to be part of the party.  I never was.  I was always on the outside looking in.

That night with Marci, Bobby and Lee, I was not only where I wanted to be, I was actually there.  Still shy.  Still not having much to say.   But the glass tube was gone.  I was no longer outside, looking in.

I have a strong belief in God, but I don't think he always works the way we think he does.  Mainly, he just gives us time.  Some people, not so much.  Perhaps they don't need as much.  Some people, a little more.  But, except in the case of infant mortality, everyone gets some time and some experiences.  Those experiences, and that time, softens us, transforms us, without us really being aware of it.  We dream and make plans along the way.  Dreams of stardom, dreams of wealth and fame.  Some get it.  Some don't.  We work.  We accomplish.  We show off our success--whether it be our poems, our family, or our new boat.  Some of us have a lot to show; some not so much.  But what we all learn sooner or later is that we all fall short, that we just don't quite live up to our desires, and if we do, we desire even more, so that we still fall short of our own expectations.  And that softens us, makes us kinder.  To what degree?  That depends on the person, how open they are, but nobody gets out of this life without being a little more understanding and a little less selfish than when we showed up.

Life teaches, in varying degrees, that we are less important than we ever could have imagined in our youth, and once we realize that, ironically, we also become aware that we are important beyond measure, as is everyone else.  God gives us experience to break us down to the point where we can recognize the divine.  There is no transcendence without pain.  No one gets out of here unchanged.  And that change always comes from the same realization:  Oh, I'm not the center after all.  

Those moments of recognition are the moments we truly live.  People like Bobby and Lee are the rare individuals who have let those moments sink in and become part of who they are on a regular basis.  I always felt that peace around them.  I just wasn't ready to let that peace in.  What they had to teach me was built for the future.

That time is now.  At least while I write this.  A few moments from now I might be ranting and raving over the most trifling thing.  I often do that.  I've seen Bobby do that plenty of times also.  But thanks in part to Bobby and Lee, once I can talk my ego down from consuming me, I know how to return to the front porch and the stillness of my being.  That peace is available to everybody if, and when, they are ready for it.

God gives us life so that we can become ready for the peace that he provides through porches, and windchimes, and conversations with those we love.

He also gives us life so that we can become ready for the peace that he provides through revolutions, pandemics, wars, and famine.  Far fewer of us are ready for peace in those moments, certainly not me, which is fine.  He gives each and everyone his/her own timeline regardless of what some madman is doing across the water or in our very own backyard.  

Yet, whatever our individual timeline, transcendence is what we are here to experience.  A moment might occur while slowly tuning into the slow drip of the kitchen faucet on a warm Thursday afternoon while home from work with the flue.   A moment might occur while facing down hate on a bridge near Salma, Alabama.   Yet, those moments of knowing that we are both nothing and everything simultaneously are ultimately what we are here to experience.  Knowing God well obliterates any notion of I individually without you, whoever you are, whatever you think, whatever you do.  The moments those glass tubes shatter are the moments we are truly living.  Everything else is the dream.  Transcendence is real.  Mortality exists so that we can tell the difference.

   

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 69: The El Paso Municipal Rose Garden

Although I walked every block of Sunset Heights and Downtown hundreds, if not thousands, of times, as well as Skyline Drive and even parts of the Five Points neighborhood, I'd never been to the El Paso Municipal Rose Gardens until this trip.  It was like I was tourist in a foreign city.  I always wonder why so many people love to travel to other cities, and when they do, they go to museums, theaters, and municipal parks and gardens, but when they live in the city themselves, their life is confined to the freeways, the shopping centers, a few favorite restaurants, and home.  They put up with all the bad that comes with city living (the traffic, smog, and congestion) without reaping the benefits.  The grand parks, zoos, museums and aquariums seem to be for visitors, outside the holidays, or when company comes.  The cities that I resided in, I owned.  The Dallas Museum of Art was mine, as was White Rock Lake and the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens.  I claimed them.  If I was going to put up with Central Expressway, LBJ, and I-30, by gosh I was getting something in return.  The same was true with El Paso.  I knew the border like few others.  Yet, somehow, I'd missed this jewel of a garden.

Even though we hit the garden off-bloom, with only a sprinkling of color here and there, it was still wonderful.  What we missed in blooms, we gained in light.  It was late afternoon, and the light sculpted the Italian cypresses magnificently, throwing beams of shadow across the tight, formal layout of the garden.  The air was warm and sweet with the faint smell of scattered blossoms.  

I didn't expect much, as grand parks is one thing El Paso is lacking, despite the city's abundant culture and history.  Most of the parks are little squares of grass trying to hold on under the intense heat, and unlike Phoenix, the city isn't willing to squander ballfields of water and risk the survival of future generations in an attempt to turn the desert into Kentucky.  Yet, they also haven't invested the money to return their outdated parks into natural spaces set aside for native species.   Therefore, most of the parks are dirt patches with sprigs of yellow grass clinging-on for dear life.

Yet, walking down those long, stone walkways of the rose garden, in the late afternoon light, shadows thrown from the the very architectural cypress trees, I felt like I was is in Italy.  I felt a low melancholy sweep over me as I realized this space could have been mine too.  How many wonderful afternoons did I miss sitting among the fragrant scents and bright colors, distractedly reading a book, my eyes now and then drawn to butterflies and hummingbirds, my ears pulled into conversations of people from other places?  I could have owned this place the way I owned the Plaza.  

I never want to live in a city again, but if by chance life forces me to, I will make that city my own, whether it be Provo, Utah or New York City.  Wherever you live, don't let the tourists know your city better than you do.  Life is short.  Experience more than the line at the checkout counter.  Hit those clubs.  Hear that music.  Taste that food.  See that art.  Know the city that is yours for-the-taking better than the tourists do.  You pay the taxes, you breath the air, you spend mind-numbing hours waiting for red lights to turn green.  Get something out of the deal.