Newly re-elected Texas Gov. Rick Perry said in his inaugural address the other day that U.S. is entering the "Texas century" but economist Paul Krugman believes if that is the case, we all are in big trouble. I'm with Krugman. I feel like I have been in Texas at least a century already and I haven't even spent a decade here. I don't think I can face a Texas century.
But 2011 has begun. And here we are. In Texas. Still here. Still happily married. And still homeless.
My wife and I are not homeless the way people who stand on a street corner holding a sign are homeless, or the way people who live in their cars are homeless. We have a house (we REALLY LIKE our house -- though it sometimes feels like our own private Alamo, threatened, surrounded). We are safe and comfortable. We love each other. As time passes we understand things about each other we never did before. Our marriage grows richer and tastier with age. Our children are grownups we like with lives of their own and we like that, too. My wife has a good job (and is doing well at it) that allows her to use the Ph.D that brought us to Texas in the first place. I lost my job months ago (the job we allowed to keep us here far beyond our original expiration date) -- though what I actually "lost" was the opportunity to spend more time dying slowly and grimly among people I was smart enough to distrust a long time ago and too damned dumb to walk away from until it was almost too late. Now, with my wife's encouragement, I stay at home; she goes to the office. I have the freedom to do what I love all the time. I write. And write some more (for the first time in many years I have written thousands of words in a few months, some of them quite good). We have money coming in. We have health insurance. We have opportunities. We travel some. We take nice vacations, eat good food. We have all of the ingredients for a wonderful life. We should feel good about it. We deserve to feel good about it. We don't always feel good about it. The homeless remain homeless even on the best of days.
We are homeless together in our house in Texas because it is not easy to make a home on shaky ground. And Texas is shaky ground. This is our ninth year here and the land proud Texans revere and just as proudly desecrate will not hold still under our feet. So, in the best of times, in the worst of times, there is no comfortable or steady place to stand. This makes the best of times not as good as they should be and the worst of times even worse (and as my wife said, "We've had a really tough year" in 2010 and we did) because there is no stable perch from which to gain perspective. The struggle to gain a foothold is exhausting.
So as the old year died we were weary and in need of rest. But Christmas was good and we slept well over the holidays. Now it's 2011. And here we are. Still. Neither here nor there. Holding steady in Texas, but as Joni Mitchell says, "...constant as a northern star/where's that at?"
The dismaying thing is that we know all too well where "here" is; the frightening thing is that I am not sure we know where "there" is any longer. Meanwhile we talk, we stay, we talk some more, we stay longer. As we talk we know we will be here for the forseeable future, but we keep talking. We keep living a good life on a bad piece of ground. It is not an easy way to live. Homelessness is exhausting. But as Bob Dylan says, "You ain't going nowhere."
Comments