The UnTexan

JOHN UPDIKE DIES

John Updike died today. It took me by surprise (and I am not easy to surprise). John Updike? I never considered the fact that he might die. It's not that I thought Updike was immortal. I met him once, shook his hand, had a chat with him and he said good things about something I wrote), attended a party in his honor. It was a good party that lasted far longer than the host intended. He groused because it seemed the party would end early because the host had not provided enough beer and wine, So I know he was as mortal as the next guy. But years ago, just when I decided to read seriously, Updike had begun to write seriously. There he was, something serious on my reading landscape. And he has been there for me for more than 50 years, book after book, year after year. He wrote and I read. Of course, there came a time when he wrote things I didn't read, but he remained there for me, waiting to be read. I suppose it seemed that he would always be there simply because he has always been there. Updike. Death? Nah! Not until I catch up on my reading.

ALICIA PARLETTE SIGHTING

I published this encouraging note several weeks ago at the bottom of another piece where many faithful readers (and Alicia-philes) failed to see it:

Hundreds of people have come to my site in the months since I wrote about Alicia (Where Is Alicia Parlette). Finally someone passed along this link to a piece about meeting Alicia and says on her site, "she she looks healthy and vibrant (which didn't work for me today, but try it) and that was inspiring to me since she had written about many unpleasant cycles of chemo." It is good to know she is still out there.

POST-OP: OBAMA'S INAUGURATION AND THE LONG-AGO WAIL OF A SMALL, BLACK BOY

My thyroid has been replaced by tiny pills that I will take every morning for the rest of my life. The surgery went well. For a man who has learned to measure all other pain against the pain of gout attacks and kidney stones, it didn't even hurt very much. When the nurses asked me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten (ten, I've been there), it never measured up (and there was morphine to get me over the rough spots and even some spots that weren't all that rough). Even better was the news that after a thorough biopsy, nothing cancerous was found. The incision is healing. I am recovering and was ready for the inauguration of Barack Obama. Watching it made me feel good -- and made me feel American in ways I haven't at several points in my life. I especially liked the part of his speech where he said we are a young country, but that it is time "to set aside childish things." I liked the we-are-young-but-not-that-young tone of it, the oh-grow-upness of it.

I was raised among racists in North Carolina and around all of the formalized and enforced racism that involved. However, my people discouraged the use of the word "nigger" (most of them, most of the time) and felt pretty good about themselves for doing it, but they still drank from the "Whites Only" water fountains, rode at the front of the bus, etc. It was a word I knew and knew better than to utter. I still cannot say it or write it without squirming a little. And I never felt I needed to say it. From a very young age, I didn't get the point of the racism around me. I was exposed to it, schooled in it, baptized in it. Once when I was very young, my mother and I were in a department store. She heard a child crying, turned around and I was gone. I was a little boy, but I was bigger than the kid I had trapped behind a counter. It was a black kid. I wasn't hitting him or threatening him. I was rubbing his hair (at least that is how my mother described it later, laughing as she told the story; other people laughed too). Nobody in my family had hair like that. I had never been close enough to hair like that to touch it (I didn't know any black kids). Simple curiosity. But he was wailing because he was scared (he didn't know any white kids either) and I never heard my mother coming. Suddenly I was jerked up by my arm and hauled around the counter. She put her face close to mine and said in a forceful near whisper (my mother liked to whisper that way when she was upset enough to get intimate about it), "His mother will cut your heart out." (There had to be a relentless imparting of this sort of knowledge and information to make racism work from generation to generation.)  I have always wondered what that little boy's mother hissed at him, but no matter what was hissed, whispered, said calmly, jokingly or shouted at me then or later, the racism never took hold. Of course, people I grew up around never missed a chance to run down "niggers" in one way or another. I heard endlessly that they were, among other things, "worthless," "shiftless," "dumb" and "dirty." I heard they were armed and dangerous (apparently even when they took their children shopping downtown). By then I had seen lots of black people up close (the same people who called them names hired them for maids and gardeners, cooks and cleaners and we hired them too). I found none of those things to be true. Then I heard what was called "nigger" music and its niggerness sounded so good to me, it pretty much became my music. After that it didn't matter. I suppose black people set me free. I know I could not have escaped without their help. I left North Carolina, then left the South completely not too many years later. I am sure there were people who tagged me a "niggerlover" and I didn't want to live around people like that (or become like them). So I didn't.

But I don't mind living around all of those people who are glad Barack Obama is president (and some of them are back home in North Carolina, which Obama won). Things have changed some, and I am sure some of the people I grew up around have changed too (black people attended my mother's funeral a couple of years ago, so I suppose she changed too). Now I hope we really can set aside childish things like Obama says. Trapped and wailing children, trapped and hissing mothers. Maybe Obama will help all of us grow up. I hope so. I really do.

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Meanwhile, I listen to Otis Redding singing Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come (my favorite version from the album Otis Blue) and Sam Cooke singing it too. Bettye LaVette sang the hell out of it (with Jon Bon Jovi for some unfathomable reason) at the big shindig for Obama last Sunday. I wish I had that one too.

SNAPSHOTS FROM RENE MAGRITTE'S VACATION IN CALIFORNIA

At Point Lomas.

 

 

On the beach at Coronado Island.

At the end.

The False Mirror and The Pipe That Is Not a Pipe.

Home.

Fini.

EMBRACING THE NEW YEAR (SORT OF)

 Saguaro cactus in the national park east of Tucson, AZ.

My wife and I didn't go home for Christmas. And we didn't stay at home either.

Whoever wrote that song about how "There's no place like home for the holidays" didn't know what in the hell they were saying or - worse - they knew it was a lie and said it anyway just to sell some records (people will tell a lot of lies when there is money to be made). Still, home always sounds like a good idea before Christmas, especially the way Bing Crosby describes it. But after Christmas most people make it sound like they were taken prisoner immediately upon arrival and held against their will until the festivities ended. "I'll be home for Christmas," Bing Crosby sings. But Christmas at anyone's home can easily become a hostage crisis. My wife and I like spending Christmas on our on turf -- or at least on our own terms. We don't pressure our adult children to come home.

Sometimes we travel, sometimes we don't. This year we went to visit our sons - one in Tucson, the other in San Diego. We left on Christmas Day and returned on New Year's Eve. We enjoy both our sons' company and we never run out of things to talk about when we are with them. They are grownups and we talk about grownup things. And we did. In Tucson we reminded ourselves of how much we love desert places; in San Diego we stayed on Coronado Island and spent time walking on the beach, getting caught in the fog, indulging our love for the sea. It was a good trip. And the only Christmas trees involved just happened to be there when we arrived. There was one at the Mexican bar on the south side of Tucson and another at the home of our son's friend on Coronado. The only bad part of the trip was coming home and that was only bad because home is still in Texas.  But I always have the nagging feeling that our real home is somewhere else, somewhere not Texas, maybe even somewhere we never have been. But that is old news. I don't call myself the UnTexan for nothing.

But it is 2009 and I am still here in Texas. I love my house in Texas and I love the life my wife and I share in it. I have a wonderful wife (we have been married more than 20 years), a loving family (our sons were happy to see us), a good (but stressful) job. I have a sailboat, art on the walls, a nice car (hers) and a pickup truck (mine). I have great dogs. I have some friends. I love my patio. I like the weather here. It's a wonderful life but I do not feel wonderful. I feel like I am being held hostage by an enemy I do not recognize in a place I don't like. I am at odds with myself. I am a remarkably happy man who is remarkably unhappy and I do not understand how that can be. I understand the Texas part. But there are lots of things that I do not understand. I do not look my age, but I feel my age. A lot of men my age have appeared on the obit pages recently. My eye always drifts to the ages of the dead. The year always 1944 jumps off the page. I have thyroid surgery coming up next week. Musician Delaney Bramlett (he was sort of a star back in the day and collaborated with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Leon Russell and others) was a little (not much) older than I am, but he died last week of complications from the same gallbladder surgery I am supposed to have later this year. Perhaps it is simply mortality that is on my mind, but I don't think so. But it is 2009 and I am still here in Texas, trying to understand.

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ALICIA PARLETTE SIGHTING: Hundreds of people have come to my site in the months since I wrote about Alicia (Where Is Alicia Parlette). Finally someone passed along this link to a piece about meeting Alicia and says on her site, "she she looks healthy and vibrant and that was inspiring to me since she had written about many unpleasant cycles of chemo." It is good to know she is still out there.

Happy New Year.

Christmas tree in a bar. Tucson, AZ.