Paying our respects

Well, here I've actually gone and done something. I flew to the Dallas/Ft. Worth area to visit various friends and relatives, living and dead. The main reason for my trip was to see my friend Clifford, who has known me since the day I was born. One of my father's oldest friends (they knew each other from the seventh grade on), Clifford and two other of my father's friends brought a big, soft, pale blue teddy bear to the hospital in honor of my birth. I still have that bear (Joe), though the pale blue has long since faded to grey, he's lost his stuffing and been restuffed more than once, with negligible results, and the big black eyes were at some point replaced with pale pink pearl buttons, that somehow make him look cross-eyed. Nonetheless, I love this bear.

Clifford is now the only one of "the gang" left, and has reached the impressive, but somewhat unsettling, age of 90. I thought I should check in on him. I also did some grave-hopping while in Ft. Worth. At my father's and stepmother's grave, which is located on a hill over-looking the Trinity River, it was so windy that I realized I was not going to be able to leave the flowering plant I'd brought, as it was quite likely to get blown away. I later picked up a heavy ceramic planter at Walmart's garden center, tucked the basket with the plant inside that, and made a second trip out to Oakwood to put it in place. It looked like it would now be able to withstand that Texas wind, and, if no one steals it, should be available for future "plantings."

I was accompanied by my sister-in-law, Karen, on this trip (on the first it was Cliff). Karen is the widow of my stepbrother who died in 1999, while I was spending three months in France. I didn't even know he had died until I returned home, and had never yet been to visit his grave. I had also never been to visit my stepbrother Dean's grave, though I had attended his funeral, in southern Louisiana. Both of these brothers died at sadly young ages (54 & 53), and I was reminded of how sad that was, standing at their graves. But it was great watching Karen in action. Not only had she brought artificial flowers which she tucked in amongst the ones still there from her last visit ("Very unusual that they're still here," she said. "When they mow they usually take them away."), but she had bought little plastic pumpkins full of candy for each grave (she tended a total of six, all her husband's relatives, not hers, which shows you what kind of person Karen is), as well as a package of Twizzlers for Mike's grave, as that had been his favorite. I loved the efficiency combined with affection with which she freshened and tidied the graves.

And I also visited my own husband's grave, in Terrell, the morning of the day I flew back to Maine. Here, I cried. I always do. Micheal also died too young (58). All these men who don't take proper care of themselves, dying early.

But I didn't just grave-hop. I also spent some time with one of my high school classmates, whom I try to see whenever I go to Ft. Worth. On my first evening there he and his mother took me to dinner at Pappadeaux, which doesn't get very good reviews on Trip Adviser, and which was too noisy, but which served me up a delicious almond-crusted talapia. (The next night, when Karen and her partner took me to dinner, I had crab-stuffed talapia. I said it was pretty ironic, coming from a coastal state to this land-locked city and having fish twice in a row.)

Our second evening together Robert and I drove to Dallas to visit yet another high school classmate, where I admired his beautiful town house, with a view from the bedroom balcony of the Flying Red Horse, Pegasus, atop what was once the Magnolia Petrolium Building, and is now the Magnolia Hotel. This building, at 29 stories, used to be the tallest in Dallas -- I can remember driving from Ft. Worth to Dallas as a kid, and spotting the building's winged red horse soaring above the city -- but now this iconic sign can barely be discerned amongst all the city's much taller buildings. But from Steve's balcony you have a very nice view of it. At Steve's we consumed lots of champagne, the hottest Thai food I've ever had, and did lots of reminiscing, which is one of the things old friends are for. Thanks to the champagne we were all extremely amusing.

My final evening was spent with my Dallas cousins, in the first house I had been in in four days that was always cool enough for me. Temperatures were in the 80s while I was down there, which as we all know is too hot for my tastes. Jim and I are both heavy into tracing the family tree, and had a bang-up time pouring over a bunch of old photos he'd inherited from his mother, who'd inherited them from her mother. I hadn't seen either of my cousins, or their families, in over six years, so it was good to see them all again.

All in all, a satisfying visit, during which I did everything I intended to do, saw everyone I intended to see, and didn't hyperventilate too much, driving in all that mad traffic.

Hibernation weather

Well, it's snowing and snowing and snowing. Which it has been, off and on, since the afternoon of New Year's Eve, but now it's getting serious out there. I'm glad I forced myself to shovel out this morning, as soon as I'd eaten, showered and dressed, since now besides snowing heavier the wind has come up, and the snow is blowing all over the place. I wouldn't have shoveled out at all -- would have just holed up in my little house, as I did all day yesterday -- were it not that I was getting low on food. And the weather forecast was telling me it would be even worse tomorrow. In Maine you ignore weather forecasts at your peril -- they're sometimes wrong, but not often -- and shoveling 4-6 inches sounded better than a foot.

The first week I was in Texas it often got up close to 70 degrees -- indeed, when I arrived at nine o'clock in the evening on Dec. 14th it was 68 degrees (it had been 30 when I left Maine). I had taken a pair of shorts, just in case, and wore them several times. By the Christmas weekend a cold front had moved in and the daily highs were about 55. For myself, my brother who lives in Santa Fe, and my sister who lives in Colorado -- who have all lived in colder climes for many years now, and simply can no longer tolerate the extreme Texas heat -- this was weather sent from heaven. At night it was pleasantly, seasonably cold.

Jeremiah and I went for a walk around the neighborhood Christmas night, relishing the crisp air. We enjoyed seeing the sidewalks lined with farolitos. I was reminded of the first time I ever saw these lights-in-a-bag, when I visited my brother in Santa Fe in 1987. Christmas Eve he took me on the Farolito Walk, along Canyon Road. Hundreds of little brown "lunch" bags, with light glimmering through them in a welcoming kind of way. Back then most people were still using real candles set in sand at the bottom of the bag. Now I believe most people use bags with electric candles in them -- certainly the ones we saw in S.A. were all like that. And in Santa Fe there were the occasional small bonfires, called luminarias, where you could warm your hands and chat with people. Someone might be serving hot cider or chocolate. Everyone very friendly, but it wasn't boisterous. A lovely community tradition.

On this year's walk (and how amazing to think that that other walk took place over 20 years ago. We weren't spring chickens even then, but Jeremiah was still dancing -- I went to a couple of his perform-ances -- and we weren't senior citizens, as we now officially are)...on this year's walk, we were also quite taken with the tree trunks and branches that were completely covered with lights. We decided there must be a mesh drapery covered with lights that one wrapped around the trunk and branches; you'd never be able to get such regularity, and such total coverage, stringing lights yourself. Besides which, it would take you forever. It looked like a major undertaking as it was; some people are really serious about decorating for Christmas.

As yet another example: one house had a little Ferris wheel turning (ever so slowly) on the lawn. It was about the size of a small swing set, and the seats were occupied by Santa elves. On another lawn Santa's sleigh, looking big enough to hold a real Santa, was all lit up. And there were lots of lit-up wreaths (they're mainly non-electric here in Maine), and large candy canes, and reindeer, and little polar bears. And one giant, inflated Santa, that Jeremiah swore, until he got up close enough to see it clearly, was a penguin.

So, what the heck, it's the holidays in New England -- let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Growth

On my recent trip to Texas, when I was making the five-hour drive from San Antonio to the Dallas area, I was appalled by how much development there now is along the I-35 corridor, the main connector between these two metropolitan areas. There is very little unadul-terated land to be seen anymore. San Antonio now bleeds into New Braunfels which bleeds into San Marcos which bleeds into Austin which is indiscernible from its bedroom communities of Round Rock and Georgetown to the north. Urban sprawl in spades. There was a tiny stretch around the tiny town of Jarrell where you could see open loping land, with the occasional tree, a scattering of cows, that is the basic landscape of central Texas; but then you hit Belton/Temple/ Waco. There used to be countryside between those three small cities, but not anymore. Land can again be seen around the small town of West, which boasts a large Czech community. As an aside, I stopped there once at the much-touted Czech Stop and Bakery, right off of I-35, to try some of the much-touted koloches, which are firm, chewy pastries with some kind of filling – poppy seed or prune paste, apricot jelly, sausage, cream cheese – in the middle. I had the cream cheese and found it "all right," but not really as satisfying as a good cheese danish.

So small town West, and surrounding farmland, are still the same, but so much else...

I realize this kind of development is everywhere, that land that was once fields/hills/woods has disappeared beneath giant shopping malls/discount outlets/chain motels/fast-food restaurants/cookie-cutter housing "estates," and Auto World (auto sales/gas stations/ parts houses/tire distributors, etc.) I'm not talking something new, something that lots of other people haven't already commented on. But here's my point: this god-awful consumer sprawl represents the very "growth" that they keep telling us we need to return to, from the retrenching of the current economic crisis. We need more of this? I don't think so. It made me think of the 1972 book, "The Limits of Growth," which talked about the exponential growth of five variables: world population, industrial production, food production, pollution, and resource depletion. In 2008 somebody named Graham Turner from Australia published a paper comparing the reality of the past 30+ years with the predictions made in the original book, and found that "changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the book's predictions of economic collapse in the 21st century."*

So here we are, collapsing. We've been churning out too much stuff, too many unnecessary gadgets, too many absurdly large houses to be lived in by a couple with one or maybe two kids (and now they can't pay the mortgage), too many Office Depot/Home Depot/Wal-Mart/Best Buy clones. This growth, which is supposedly essential to our economy, to the world economy – and the rest of the world has recently been jumping on the consumer bandwagon with us – has been eating up the land, and other of the planet's resources, destroying the ozone layer, wiping out species, increasing commute time and aggravation, which increases stress, making everyplace look like everyplace else, and in short, not impressing me one bit. I'm thinking, there's gotta be a better way. We've already tried the drop-out, get-back-to-the-land hippie alternative – and some people are still living that way – but it really doesn't seem like the solution for a whole planet. So what is? Let's hear it from the Wise Men (and Women). I'm not a big fan of my native Texas, but one thing it always had going for it was land. I don't want it all to disappear beneath concrete and Target stores.

*Graham Turner (2008). "A Comparison of `The Limits to Growth` with Thirty Years of Reality". Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

Where's home

Talking about the weather makes me think of a phenomenon I observed when I lived in the Boston area, which I did for nineteen years. There I encountered numerous people who had been born there, lived there all their lives, but hated the winters. “So why don’t you move someplace warmer,” I’d ask, perplexed. “Oh, I could never do that.” And they could never do that because this was home. This was the place they were familiar with, the place where their extended family lived, where their friends were. It was where they felt psychologically comfortable (and this was the case even if they didn’t get along with their father, or whatever). How could they exchange mere physical comfort for all that?

Intellectually I can understand this reluctance to “leave home,” but not emotionally. For one thing, my physical comfort is extremely important to me. One of the reasons I live in Maine – and moved to New England in the first place, all those years ago – is that hot weather makes me miserable. My body simply does not function well when it’s hot. And this was as true when I was growing up in Texas, as it is today. I once wrote that I would be perfectly happy to live someplace where it never got any warmer than 68 degrees. I wasn’t particularly fleeing the heat when I left home at eighteen, but once I discovered cooler climes, my fate was sealed.

But it isn’t just physical comfort that is important to me. My soul is fed by beautiful natural environments. Growing up in the urban centers of Texas (San Antonio, Ft. Worth, Dallas), I don’t recall having any sense of natural beauty, except when we would go on camping trips to Colorado. Even now when I go back for visits, it seems to me there is no natural environment. Just endless freeways, shopping malls, what I think of as Auto Miles (one car dealership after another), the reflecting glass walls of business parks. Certainly there are attractive residential areas, with trees, and grass – that gets baked a brittle yellow in summer, unless there is no water shortage and people are able to dedicate great gobs of the precious stuff to keeping their lawns green – but you have to be driving through the piney woods of east Texas, to see much in the way of trees. So much of Texas is gently rolling prairie land, which has its own attractions – you get a nice sense of unfettered space – but it is simply not my idea of beautiful.

Here in Maine I encounter all these people who grew up here, and can’t imagine living anywhere else. And it is for all those reasons I mentioned in the first paragraph, but also because Mainers really love their state, terrible winters and all. Like me, they delight in the lush, green natural beauty – which turns stunningly aflame in the autumn, and into a magical winter wonderland at the appropriate season. Like me, most of them prefer cold weather to hot, even if they wish the winters didn’t go on quite so long, even if (like me) they get deathly tired of shoveling snow. And they value the small town pace and friendliness. For most of us, Maine really is “life the way it should be.”