The UnTexan

ALMOST ALREADY GONE (WOO-HOO-HOO, WOO-HOO-HOO)

"You don't have to live like a refugee." Tom Petty

For nearly 10 years our house in Austin has been more than a home and not quite a home at the same time (a sort of Mid-Century Post-Modern place).

A lot of things happened while we lived here. For a few years it was the place where we had parties, Thanksgiving dinners with Texas-types and non-Texas types, visits from children, grandchildren; parents visited (my father, Dauna's mother) and siblings showed up a few times. I turned 60 here, then 65; Dauna turned 50 and then 55. We became older than that. Our mothers died a few years apart while we lived here. Dauna's best friend here died from cancer. My brother was killed in a motorcycle accident in Florida. We collected art. Dauna earned a Ph.D. (that's why we came). She deserved it. I became, of all the unlikely things I never thought about becoming, a corporate vice president. I also worked for the worst boss I've ever known - longer than I worked for anyone anywhere in my life. It took more than two years of therapy to untangle the mess and grope my way out of the dark place I was in because of that man and that job (I did it with the help of the best therapist I've ever had - and I've had a few over the past 40+ years. He was so good that I untangled lots of other old crap in my life while I was at it. Dauna dealt with her own issues - with a little help of her own). We survived things in this house that would have crushed other couples. Sometimes I wobbled, sometimes she wobbled, but our marriage never wobbled a bit. No matter what happened we always leaned toward each other, never away. We learned things we never knew about each other and pushed deeper into what it means to be really married than either of us thought was possible. Over time we wrapped the house close around the two of us and it became OUR house, as houses usually do for us, and closed the door. It felt like home. But it wasn't. Quite. It was our hiding place.

We love this house and are on intimate terms with its walls, windows, cracks, creaks, quirks, the feel of the floors under our bare feet, where the light switches are along the dark hallway. We should be happy and count our blessings here. But we can't. The house is in the wrong place. Austin, Texas. And Austin not-Texas (self-proclaimed without a trace of irony). But Austin is just another version of the wrong place. In fact, I think the Texas state motto should be: The Wrong Place. I'll bet that's what Davy Crockett was thinking as he died from a bad case of Mexicanitis at the Alamo. "I am in the wrong place, amigo." And the Mexican(s) said, "Si, senor." Or maybe the motto should be: "Where Davy Crockett came to die." Homey happiness and blessing-counting eluded us here. So more and more this house has been our refuge from Texas.

But who wants to live like a refugee? We've done that long enough. We need a home.

Selling this house has been a surprisingly unemotional experience but that is because my emotional attachment is where it's always been - hundreds of miles to the west of here. And Dauna's has shifted in that direction too. So we're almost gone, feelin' strong and about to sing our victory song, as the Eagles sang (approximately) in a song (in an entirely different context) a long time ago. But it all means the same thing. We're out of here. Almost. And pretty soon Texas will have to eat its lunch all by itself. Woo-hoo-hoo. Woo-hoo-hoo.

LIES, PICKUP TRUCKS AND REMEMBERING REMEMBERING

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." Mark Twain

"...falsehood, especially if you have got a bad memory, is the worst enemy a fellow can have."

Abraham Lincoln

I lost my truck in a parking lot a few days ago. I walked out of the hospital after a bit of skin cancer cutting and burning by my dermatologist and could not remember where I parked my pickup. It is a large pickup, a Dodge Ram 1500, and not easy to lose. But I lost it. I tried to visualize where I'd put it, but I couldn't. I knew it was there somewhere but that's all I seemed to know. After walking the entire lot in 90-degree heat and doubling back I found it, though I didn't recognize it at first. But the key fit the lock. I climbed in and drove on over to Target to pick up some pain medication (I have no idea why I was allowed to drive at all, but I made it). There weren't many shoppers at Target (there never are around here) and I found a front-row parking space not far from the door. And the pharmacist helped me right away (I wanted that hydrocodone in my hand before the numbness in my chest wore off). But when I left the store I couldn't remember where I'd parked my truck. I'd lost it again, just like I did at the hospital an hour before. I didn't even remember parking it near the store (and didn't recognize it when it was sitting directly across the driveway from me). I searched, found a familiar truck, made sure the key fit and drove on home.

Nothing like this ever happened to me before. The doctor believes it might have something to do with epinephrine. The numbing injection I received in my chest contained lidocaine (numbing) and epinephrine (stay number longer). Whatever it was I didn't like losing my truck. But I remembered enough to know that it was lost. At least I remembered that.

I do not forget things. I've always counted on not forgetting things. It's a good part of who I am. A good memory (and a way with words) kept me gainfully employed for my whole working life. It's also a bad part of what I used to be (the very same memory and words).

When I was younger I was a very good liar. No, I was an exceptional liar. Because I had a talent for it. And I own the tools of the trade: (1) an exceptional memory, and (2) a gift for language (and how to use it) that is not an ordinary gift. It is a gift so grand that it is like the best Christmas present ever and I still play with it after all these years. I have my mother to thank for all of it. She made me remember things (lists, facts, names, numbers, addresses, anything other people might write down) and she taught me to read (and I did that by remembering the way the words looked on the pages she read to me). Her intention was to love me. She didn't intend to teach me to read and I don't think she intended to teach me to lie either. But she did.

This is how I described her in something I published a few years ago:

"My mother is a word person, ace-speller, Scrabble-player, crossword-puzzler, letter-writer, marathon telephone-talker; she thinks it's a sin that modern children can't spell and write better and blames it on computers with spell-checkers, public school integration, Spanish-speaking immigrants, younger teachers 'who don't know their you-know-what from a hole in the ground,' the general decline of good manners and the idea that things were better when she was young."

She passed that word stuff on to me. Unfortunately she also passed along the need to live in a world where the truth simply isn't enough to get a person through. The combination of language and an ongoing sense of insufficiency is a powerful thing. My mother was a self-stitched patchwork of lies and truths. We all are. But she was the middle child among nine children and she lost her way at some early age (when she was a young child she asked for a boy's haircut, boy's clothes and boy's toys for her birthday - she wanted to be like her two older brothers, not like her sisters - and that's what she received) and never quite found the way back to herself. Ever. She was always uncomfortable with who she was and where she was (unless she lied about that too). She was many things in her long life, but she felt like nothing and nowhere. She would not be convinced otherwise. Some people grow old letting go of their old lies and seeking the truth of their lives, but she picked her way through the pieces or the life she had made up, hid from the life she had lived and clung to that patchwork camouflage, keeping it between her and everything and everyone around her even as she felt it begin to unravel. She feared the naked truth, just as she feared her own nakedness because she didn't know what she (or even worse, others) might see. In many ways she grew old without ever growing up.

But why lie? After a while, if you are dissatisfied, displaced and disemblative enough, there doesn't have to be a reason. It is a life of distorted proportions.

A good lie is built out of just the right words in just the right order and leaning slightly toward the truth if they must, but that isn't really necessary. But grammar, spelling and a dictionary are not enough. A good lie is a work of art. The right words artfully arranged become their own truth (liars and writers know that). Once the lie is built you have to remember to tend it. And a good lie is worth nothing if you can't remember where you stashed it. And you can't forget where you buried the truth either; someone might stumble across it. Forgetful people are not good liars.

My mother and I were very good at those things. Make it up. Make it real. Don't forget where you put it. But it is an exhausting way to live and my mother led a weary life (though she often lied to cover it up). I tired of the weariness. And I did not want to grow old without growing up. Besides, I am her oldest child. I was never lost in the middle. I just learned to feel that way.

The real truth of my mother's life was clear at her crowded funeral and proved she had had nothing to fear. She was something (to a very large number of people), but she wasn't there to see it. I'd decided long before that I could not wait that long. I changed my mind and decided to change my ways. It took many years - and it took leaving and staying away - but I quit lying. I became a writer instead. Fiction writing has been described as lying in pursuit of the truth. I figured I would be good at it. But liars fear the truth and writers seek it. So fear of the truth was a problem for a long time (it clouded both my writing and my thinking). I realized changing my mind was not enough. But I worked at it and just in time I had a change of heart. Life has been easier since then. And that's the truth.

DESTINY MANIFESTS: NEW MEXICO, THE REAL PLACE

Why return to New Mexico? Why now? Why ever?

It began when I quit my job and took a drive in 1974. It was a very long drive, a giant loop through the west, and lasted the better part of a year. I was 29 years old when I left Atlanta in a blue Ford Pinto heading for Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, but I was only passing through. I'd decided the west would begin for me in New Mexico. Everybody's west has to begin somewhere. Mine began with a decision made years before - I was in junior high school - as I studied gas-station roadmaps and plotted my escape route. I was always plotting my escape and someday I would escape to New Mexico. It was more than a drive.

When I was a young boy my favorite TV show was Route 66 (a dark and dangerous-looking guy and a boyish light-haired non-threatening guy in a Corvette on the road and doing stuff) and a few years later my favorite book was On the Road (a dark and dangerous guy and darker, more dangerous guys doing more interestingly strange and dangerous stuff). Neither dark nor dangerous (I still wore shirts with button-down collars like the guys on Route 66), I had been wanting to hit the road for as long as I could remember (though I never imagined it would be in a blue Pinto), but it's difficult to go anywhere when a man remains a boy as long as I did.

I was a reluctant Peter Pan. I wanted to grow up, I really did. I even pretended to be an adult for several years in my late teens and early 20s and did some grownup things (the way a child does such things): boyishly, enthusiastically, stupidly, chaotically, destructively, painfully. A boy acting like a man starts many things he will never finish and his world becomes littered with the victims of his false starts. It's what happens to boys who aren't given the tools to be men.

I didn't even have a tool belt when I walked out into the world and, sadly, I am not the only guy in my family to grow older without growing up (there are cousins, brothers, nephews, even some of our fathers). We are the confused legacy of seven self-involved sisters and two brothers and the various enablers they married (or didn't) who were themselves better at being children than being adults. I sometimes hear parents say things like, "We did the best we could," and I think often that is true, but I suspect the people who raised me were not doing the best they could. And knew it. And did nothing about it (unless you count alcohol, drugs, anger, fear, sex, secrets, spite, bullying, self-pity and a whole catalog of narcissistic indulgences). All the while we seemed to be happy families, but it was a pretend life (pretend lives lead a hunger for something real). I don't know how the rest of the guys in the family feel about it, but I felt lucky to live long enough to slip off to Atlanta and beyond family grasp.

In the nearly six years I lived in Atlanta I began to acquire the tools it would take to bolt the various pieces of my manhood together, but when I was 29 my adult life still lay before me like the pieces of an Erector set without an instruction booklet. I certainly was not the man of anybody's dreams. And I wasn't man enough to go it alone. I'd discovered long before that being "alone" for me usually involved more than one person (and disappointment and misery for someone, usually not me). I finally found someone fool enough to indulge my boyish fantasy to hit the road, driving west with no particular place to go. And no promises when we got there.

West to Memphis and a night spent on the bank of the Mississippi River; further west to Texas and a night in Palo Duro Canyon. And on the third day "west" quit being the direction of my dreams and became a place. I was in New Mexico. I had arrived at the real place. I wouldn't become a full-grown man for years, but New Mexico was a step in the right direction. I could feel it.

So in the early summer of 1974 I camped in the mountains above Santa Fe for 10 days. Then I drove north and camped in the mountains near Taos another four days. That's all I knew of New Mexico. Two weeks. But I came close to abandoning my trip. I drove north to Colorado (years of pent up driving dreams demanded it and I had no way to understand that I felt "at home" in New Mexico because the words "feel at home" had meant very little to me for a long time). But I was barely into southern Colorado and had been on the road only a few hours when I wrote this in my notebook:

"After 14 days in New Mexico, Colorado. From the Sangre de Cristos to the Rockies in one short afternoon. It was sad to see New Mexico fall behind.... New Mexico already is calling me."

And a few days later:

"Santa Fe, will you take me back?"

A year and thousands of miles later I was living in New Mexico. Then I left (ego and ambition led me astray) and didn't return to live for 17 years (and missed New Mexico the whole time to the point I was never happy anywhere else). I stayed nearly 10 years that time before I left again - for Texas (love led me astray). Now I have been in Texas for 10 years (not only missing New Mexico but really disliking Texas the whole time). Everytime I left I had my reasons - and regrets.

But now Dauna and I will return to New Mexico (again) in a few weeks. I know now what it means to feel at home, that New Mexico feels that way and I need to feel it. And Dauna is the only person I've ever known with whom I never feel alone and always feel at home (of course we were real grownups when we met). Soon we will be at home together in the mountains above Santa Fe for the last time. We do not plan to leave again.

 A sketch I made in 1974 at my campsite in the mountains near Taos, New Mexico

 

HEARING BIG PINK, SEEING THE BAND, FINDING A RESTING PLACE

Levon Helm died last week and I got to thinking about how long his old and soulful voice has been part of my life. He was 71 when he died but Levon and I were young men with southern accents back then (he made music with his, I tried to get rid of mine; it worked out OK for both of us). He was singing and I was drowning in the mess I'd made of my life - and still more than a year away from pulling myself together enough to take a deep breath and swim for higher ground. Levon and I have gone through some stuff together.

It was 1968 and things were happening. The Summer of Love happened in San Francisco in 1967 and hippies were happening everywhere. Vietnam had happened, was happening and would continue to happen. The draft darkened my days because I knew being drafted would force some difficult choices about fighting or fleeing and both promised dire consequences (it was much easier to picture myself in a hippie uniform than an Army uniform). There were protests and they were growing. In March, Lyndon Johnson said he he would neither seek nor accept the Democratic nomination for another term in office (I watched the speech alone in a beer bar). LBJ was going (and we were glad), Nixon was coming (but we couldn't see him clearly yet). North Vietnam's Tet offensive happened in January. In March as many as 500 villagers were massacred at My Lai by U.S. soldiers (no one would know about it for a year but there was already a nagging feeling that terrible things were happening to somebody over there somewhere every day). Walter Cronkite turned against the Vietnam war (if he was against it, who could be for it?). Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April; Robert Kennedy was killed in June (a couple of days after somebody shot Andy Warhol). There was violence in Chicago and the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey to run for president. Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Onasis. Nixon defeated Humphrey in November to become president.

And 1968 had its own soundtrack: Cream, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors; Marvin Gaye heard it through the grapevine and only needed Tammy Terrell to get by; Ohio Express had love in its tummy; Janis Joplin fronted Big Brother and the Holding Company in a world that was down on her; the Intruders sang "Cowboys to Girls;" the song said Otis Redding was sitting on the dock of the bay, but he wasn't (he was dead already); the Byrds released Sweetheart of the Rodeo and Gram Parsons was already rethinking country music (lots of Byrds fans hated it); meanwhile the Rolling Stones were playing let's pretend - fronted by Jumpin' Jack Flash and posing as street fighting men; and the Beatles sang "Hey Jude."

In 1968 there were music and mayhem aplenty.

The Band's Music from Big Pink came out in July 1968. I first heard it in a grubby apartment with a grubby guy named Bill and his pale, lank-haired girlfriend. They weren't dirty exactly, but they were unwashed and had achieved a sort of hippie-grubbiness that I admired, even aspired to, but didn't achieve for another couple of years (and then mostly on weekends because I was always a hippie with a good day job). Bill was a student from Antioch College who was spending a semester as a copyboy at the North Carolina newspaper where I worked as an editor - Antioch students had to do odd things like that as part of their education - and he brought the album with him from New York City, where he'd stopped off to visit friends in the Village on the way from Ohio to North Carolina (Bill intrigued me and words like "Antioch," "Ohio" "the Village" and "New York City" sounded exotic to a guy who had never been farther south than Myrtle Beach, SC, farther north than Culpepper, VA or farther west than east Tennessee). The record wasn't even for sale where I lived. I had never heard of The Band, but Bill wanted me to hear the album. He said they had toured with Bob Dylan; he said Dylan wrote some of the stuff on the album (I liked electric Dylan). Dylan even did the painting on the album cover. He said it was something I needed to hear. He hinted there would be drugs involved (I was a southern boy and my idea of a good time in those days involved large quantities of beer and the occasional bottle of Rebel Yell). "Come over after work," Bill said. I said, "Sure."

Bill was right.

The first song on side one was "Tears of Rage" and I knew from the beginning that it was something brand new that sounded like I had been listening to for a long, long time. The feeling grew as the needle moved to "To Kingdom Come" and "In a Station" and "Caledonia Mission." Richard Manuel sang; Rick Danko sang. And then the first accoustic notes of "The Weight," and then the drums, and then the voice of Levon Helm, taking me to someplace I might have been before but via a brand new route, a place of mystery and music and language gathered up in ways that were foreign and familiar at the same time. A journey to Nazareth, a message (several messages from "Miss Anny"), Miss Moses, Carmen, the Devil, Luke waiting for Judgement Day, a guy named Crazy Chester and a dog named Jack, freighted blblical-sounding words and mysterious meanings, not quite religious but hymnlike. A new song with the heart and soul of an old song. Folk music, rock and roll. Country music (but what country? Those were the days when Bobby Goldsboro was singing the smarmy "Honey" on the radio and it wasn't that country). All of those things but not quite any of those things.

We listened to the album over and over that day. I am not sure how many times because both beer and marijuana were involved, but now I have listened to The Band for 44 years - stoned, drunk and cold sober. I even saw them a couple of times in Atlanta (where I finally washed up on a slippery slope that I mistook for higher ground), once with their manager Albert Grossman in attendance. Grossman (whose wife is on the cover of Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home and reminded every guy I knew of the woman he'd never meet) died in 1986 when he suffered a supersonic heart attack aboard the Concorde on the way to London, but that night (1971? 1972?) he was taking care of business, fussing around back stage in his black-rimmed glasses and his longish hair and The Band responded with the tightest, no-nonsense concert I ever heard. They were great. I figured it was because the boss was in town. On Jan. 22, 1974 I saw The Band on its tour with Bob Dylan. What I remember most about that concert was that Dylan opened the show with "Most Likely You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine" and closed with a different version of the same song. I remember it being a good show, though both Dylan and the members of The Band remember that whole tour as dispirited and unhappy. I don't remember the details. Drugs might have been involved.

I was 24 years old in 1968 and my world was angry, noisy and confusing and things would get worse before they got better. The Manson murders and Woodstock (both in August 1969) and the Rolling Stones grim Altamont concert (December 1969) were in the future. A psychiatrist and a long hospital stay were in my future because 1969 was when I finally decided to save myself rather than keep sloshing around in my own private cesspool. And through it all, even in the worst of times, I could count on the voice of Levon Helm and the music of The Band to carry me to a refuge and a resting place. I still listen.

HERE, THERE AND THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF TEXAS

"A philosophy which exalts health and safety to the status of virtues

cannot be called heroic."

                                               J. Brinckerhoff Jackson/A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time

On July 18 we will have lived in Texas for 10 years. Hopefully it won't come to that. The clock is running. The hourglass is trickling. The details are being worked out. Forget The Alamo! The end is near and New Mexico is close at hand.

It's over. Just like that. Finally.

A couple of weeks ago my wife sent me to New Mexico to look at houses. Alone. She put together a list of 11 places she found online - she is a meticulous and obsessive internet searcher - and sent me to have a look. And pick out a place for us to spend the rest of our lives. I picked. She likes the pick. We made an offer. It was accepted. It is a house that will embrace all of the life we bring to it and see us through. I think we recognized it as soon at we saw it on the internet. Dauna has seen photographs, but when we move there in a few weeks and she looks up the mountain and glimpses it through the trees it will be the first time she actually sees the house. ("Really," more than one person has asked? "Yes," always the answer.) I would trust her to do the same for me. And the house is right for people like us, a co-conspirator of a house. It's what we need. It's home.

Now there is the house here and there is the house there. I am juggling them as fast as I can. I spend my days wrapped up in the details of buying and selling and wandering among piles of real estate paperwork. For a man who never thought seriously about owning a house until I was 50 years old, I now have a house I want to call home and a home I want to get rid of. I am in a real estate frame of mind. Contracts are pending. It is slow and tedious work but it must be done. And it is time.

We have lived in Texas among Texans far too long - ten years in a place we always knew we never could call home. The Un-Texan was born in the first years we were here; more recently my wife has dubbed herself the Anti-Texan.

And we live in an Austin neighborhood among old people. They wrap themselves tightly in the fabric of their old lives but it does not seem to comfort them. They lament change. They worry about their health, their safety, streetlights and strangers, property values and Mexican-Americans, Jehovah's Witnesses who might be thieves casing the place (a black man and a white man together! Who knows what they might be up to?), traffic and speedbumps, firetrucks, police cars, ambulances. They worry and worry. Reports and alarms go out on the neighborhood association email daily. What we are about to do would alarm them too if they knew about it. They would advise caution. Their intentions would be good. But we have had enough of caution and good intentions, too.

So my wife and I are about to leave Texas and step into the mysterious and unsteady space between here and there one more time. It won't be the first time - in 24 years of marriage we have moved from apartment to house, renters to buyers, Minnesota urban to Wisconsin rural, Wisconsin to northern New Mexico, and from there to Texas - but we have promised ourselves this move will be the last. When we get back home to New Mexico this time we will stay. Besides, Austin's elevation is approximately 540 feet. The new house is at around 8,000 feet. We are rising in the world. We can feel how thin the air will be.

Dauna in New Mexico, 2011

2011: GRIEF, EXHAUSTION, ANOTHER NEW YEAR IN TEXAS, AND THE DISTANCE FROM HERE TO HAPPINESS

My wife told me the other day that I should not say things like, "I hate Texas." She said I partucularly should not say them in front of real Texas-loving Texans (like some of the people we know here). She reminded me that we had just spent a couple of days enjoying a friend's farm near Tarpley, Texas, and that the friend is one of those real Texans. She said I should say, "I am not a Texan" or maybe, "I will never be a Texan" and let it go at that. And while those things are true, after a decade here I am not a Texan and never will be because I really don't like Texas. But in deference to her I will not say I hate it. The truth is that she doesn't like it any more than I do, but she is nicer about it. We need to leave. We have known that for a long time. And plans were in place.

In fact, we figured we would be back in New Mexico by now. We were moving forward. The Austin house was on the market. It was ready for viewing (and some people came to see it). We had begun to pack. But things happened the way things do. My wife's mother had a heart valve replaced along with some unanticipated bypass surgery and never recovered. Sometimes she seemed a little better, but mostly she seemed worse day after day. Pneumonia, kidney failure, liver problems, circulation problems. She spent two months in intensive care in Kansas, a few days at a rehab center a long ambulance ride away in Nebraska and, after a long ambulance ride back to Kansas, one night in a hospice center where she died. My wife spent much of that time with her mother and was there when she drew her final quiet breath. It was a difficult time for Dauna, her siblings, her family, all of us. When we returned to Texas in October, grief and exhaustion filled our days and left little time or energy to prepare for the future - or for moving. We took the house off the market. We needed a place to call home and the way we see it our house and Texas are two different things. We settled in.

October became November became Thanksgiving became Christmas became the New Year. Even the happiest days were freighted with sadness of one sort or another. Living near tears is an exhausting thing. We decided a trip west might help. We put it off at the last minute. A little later we decided again to take a long drive west, but a blizzard between here and where we were going forced us to cancel our plans and sit tight (at least that is what we told ourselves). Entropy threatened to complicate inertia. Dauna still hesitated; I insisted. I reserved a motel room in Lubbock. We drove west on a Wednesday morning and arrived in Santa Fe two days - and 698.9 miles - later. That is where our old friends are and where our life should be. It helped to visit. We felt better when we drove 509.2 miles to Tucson to visit our son Nick and meet his girlfriend a few days after that. A couple of days later we left Tucson and spent two days driving 900 miles to Austin. We covered lots of bare and beautiful western miles. It felt good.

So we remain in Texas for now. And of course it is impossible to drive far enough or fast enough to outrun grief. But we have traveled 2,100 miles toward recovering the exhilarating momentum that carried us through last summer. We are not sure exactly how far we have to go to get there and get away from here. But we are back on the road again, 2,100 miles farther along than we were 10 days ago. That is a good sign.

Dauna visits Dauna's in Harper, TX.

VISIONS OF FRUITCAKE DANCE IN MY HEAD

"Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish...." James Joyce, Ulysses

Fruitcake was part of what Christmas tasted like when I was a boy. Dense, dark, full of nuts and candied fruit. To be more specific: Claxton fruitcake was part of what Christmas tasted like. We lived in North Carolina. The fruitcake came from Claxton, Georgia and I loved anything that came from anyplace else, even Georgia. My fruitcake dreams turned Georgia into an exotic place and I'd wanted to run to exotic places for as long as I could remember. I had maps and plans. But when I grew up and the time came to run I hesitated. Perhaps it was fear of going. Perhaps it was unfinished family business (there was lots of that and some remains as unfinished as I finally left it). Perhaps it was fear of coming back. Perhaps I knew that once I began to run I would never stop again (and I haven't, not really). Whatever the reason I delayed my departure until staying was unbearable and leaving was preferable to suicide or some slower more painful form of death. Finally I could stay no longer. By then I was a man in my 20s and hoping for someplace more exotic than Georgia, but Atlanta was the only place I could run to from the middle of North Carolina with $80 in cash, no job, a briefcase full of clean underwear and a bus ticket. Georgia never lived up to my exotic fruitcake dreams - and I never went to Claxton - but I stayed anyway. Until a few years later when I left for someplace else - this time without so much hesitation. And after that for someplace else - with even less hesitation. And after that - with none. And. And. And. And here I am, for now anyway (there is always someplace else), with another birthday a week behind me, another Christmas a week ahead and a couple of Claxton fruitcakes chilling in the refrigerator. I like to eat it it sliced thin accompanied by a good cup of coffee. But I no longer have fruitcake dreams of exotic places (I've been to some and Georgia isn't one). And the fruitcakes no longer taste like part of Christmas. I lost my taste for that long ago. But I've never quit eating fruitcake at this time of year. Dark, dense, crammed full of nuts and candied fruit. I particularly enjoy the bright red candied cherries. Nowadays it tastes a little like the dimming past and a few bright dreams of the future, but mostly it tastes like life right now and I eat it without hesitation, pause, and prepare to move on.

DIESEL FUEL, TRUCKSTOP FOOD, DELTA DAWN AND THE MOST FAMOUS FICTION WRITING WORKSHOP

Recently there was a family emergency and we spent a week at a motel beside Interstate-70 in Salina, KS. The motel was nice enough. The desk clerk said musician turned geezer-rocker Kenny Loggins once stayed there, ordered out for food from IHOP (he explained it was a hassle for a star like him to be recognized in places like IHOP) then stiffed the delivery guy; she said the funny part was the next morning when Loggins became angry because no one recognized him at the motel's complimentary breakfast buffet and stormed back up to his room. Kenny Loggins slept here. So what. But it was an okay room. We had a suite with two rooms, a wet bar, a microwave and a refrigerator. There was also a large hot tub in the living room and we used it at night to soak away some of the stresses of hospitals and heart surgery and its tentative and increasingly troubling aftermath. The motel was near one of those freeway interchanges devoted to the care and feeding of trucks and truck drivers. Big rigs rolled off and on I-70 day and night; some refueled and moved on; others parked and idled in the lots nearby. The smell of diesel fuel was in the air 24 hours a day. A couple of times we crossed the highway to eat fried food at a diner called Grandma Max's. The portions were huge, the service friendly, the salad bar a little limp, the smell of diesel and hot grease pervasive. I felt right at home.

Once upon a time I was a graduate student at a famous fiction writing workshop. Actually I was at the MOST FAMOUS FICTION WRITING WORKSHOP. It was a place where the language-gifted and the word-cursed - at least those of us who were chosen to be there - gathered as they had for decades to take each other seriously and eye each other warily. We were happy to be there. But we were not particularly comfortable because it was also a place where the truly gifted and the truly cursed separated themselves from the merely talented and the not-quite cursed enough. We were hungry, predatory and stalked the classrooms, the parties and the visiting authors' hotel rooms seeking sex (well, if we had to), money (everybody needed some), an agent (everybody wanted one of those) and, best of all, publication (better than sex and money combined). It didn't pay to get comfortable. Jayne Anne Phillips loomed, Michael Cunningham demured, Bill Kinsella posed, Sandra Cisneros was still a girl from Chicago not a Latina from San Antonio, T.C Boyle and Jane Smiley were leaving and Louise Erdrich hadn't arrived yet. I flourished. I published. I once angrily threatened to throw the director of the program out of his office window when the money was handed out and I felt I didn't get my fair share. It was that kind of place. Eventually I received what I figured I deserved (good), then I had a Michener Fellowship when I graduated (even better). The director was glad to see me go. He congratulated me on my Michener Fellowship, shook my hand and said he hoped never to have to read anything I wrote again - ever. But that is how it was supposed to be. It was a heady time, a fairytale time.

But the rest of the time the money was tight because that's how it is for graduate students no matter how many fellowships they win. So there were odd jobs, summer jobs, part-time jobs. I ended up as a cook at the Hawkeye Truck Stop out on Interstate 80 in Coralville, IA. Back then it was the largest truck stop in Iowa.

Officially I was a breakfast cook - eggs over easy (over hard, scrambled, poached) with bacon or sausage (or both) and hashbrowns, perhaps an omelet (for someone to ruin with ketchup), French toast, pancakes - but truckers live and eat on highway time. Sometimes they really need a Reuben sandwich at 6 a.m. (do you know what dripping sauerkraut does to a sizzling grill top in the middle of the breakfast rush?) or a roast beef sandwich with instant mashed potatoes and gravy. Or a pork chop. Or fried chicken. Whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, I cooked it. The whole menu all the time. Trucker time.

The jukebox played.

Crystal Gayle, Eddie Rabbit, The Oakridge Boys, Waylon Jennings, Kenny Rogers, Conway Twitty, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, even The Eagles ("New Kid in Town," "Lyin' Eyes" and "Tequila Sunrise" were big favorites). There were some "trucker" hits by Red Sovine: "Teddy Bear" with its maudlin lyrics, do-gooder truckers, crippled kid and CB radios; "Phantom 309" with its equally maudlin lyrics and heroic trucker named Big Joe who "lost control, went into a skid/ and gave his life to save that buncha kids." C.W. McCall's "Convoy," CB radios and truckers bullying their way across the U.S.A. ("Well we shot the line/and we went for broke/with a thousand screamin' trucks/and eleven long haired friends of Jesus/in a chartreuse microbus"). Cheating women, tequila sunrises, heroic truckers, kids and CB radios. They loved 'em all.

And they had a particular soft spot for one by Tanya Tucker called "Delta Dawn." I don't know what the truckers liked about it (romance? misery? mystery? insanity? the fact that a 14-year-old girl sang it?) but my favorite verse is: "She's forty-one and her daddy still calls her 'baby'/All the folks around Brownsville say she's crazy/'Cause she walks around town with a suitcase in her hand/Looking for a mysterious dark-haired man." I've seen overgrown truck-driving men pause and grow misty-eyed over a plate of eggs and hashbrowns while listening to Tanya sing that song. I never really understood why. But why does any song bring anyone to tears? I cooked. I listened. I watched. I inhaled the smell of diesel fuel and the greasy stink of the kitchen, and ingested a jukebox full of bad country music laced with mysteriously magical words that could reduce a grown man to tears.

Over at the Most Famous Fiction Writing Workshop people kept trying to make words do magical things too. And most of us would have given just about anything to write something good enough to make a grown man almost cry. But we weren't very successful at it most of the time. Looking back, we could have learned something from Delta Dawn.

Delta Dawn was a truckstop regular. She wasn't 41 and it's unlikely anyone ever called her baby. But she loved country music and she knew things. That was clear when she pushed through the front door, waddled through the restaurant and wriggled into a booth by the window. I could see her out there from my spot in the kitchen.

Delta Dawn was her CB "handle." It wasn't her real name. But CB handles were part of trucker reality and folklore so Delta Dawn had one. "Teddy Bear" is the crippled kid's CB handle in the Red Sovine weeper ("The old CB was blaring away on channel one-nine/When there came a little boy's voice on the radio line./And he said, 'Breaker, one-nine, is anyone there?/ Come on back, truckers, and talk to Teddy Bear./Well, I keyed the mike and I said, 'Well, you got it,Teddy Bear.'/And the little boy's voice came back on the air./'Preciate the break.  Who we got on that end?'/I told him my handle, and then he began"). And "Convoy" begins with CB talk ("Yeah, breaker one nine/This here's the Rubber Duck/You got a copy on me Pig Pen, c'mon/Uh, yeah, Ten-Four Pig Pen, fer sure, fer sure/By golly it's clean clear to Flag Town, c'mon/Yeah, its a big Ten-Four there Pig Pen/Yeah, we definitely got the front door, good buddy/Mercy sakes alive, looks like we've got us a convoy"). In a world of Pig Pens, Rubber Ducks and Teddy Bears, she was Delta Dawn. Real names weren't necessary.

Delta Dawn wasn't going to win any beauty contests. She was plain and fat. She had a round face, plump cheeks and short, curly hair, too-blue eye shadow and too-red (or too-pink or too-whatever) lipstick. She was short, thick-thighed, wore tight jeans. It was the late 1970s and she favored tube tops with her jeans. Tube tops made skinny girls look gift wrapped. Delta Dawn wasn't one of those. Her tube tops rode low across her breasts, cut into the flab under her arms and stretched tightly across her back. Looking at Delta Dawn's bare shouldners and back was like gazing across several acres of pale, drought-stricken ground in the harshest light of day; from the front she looked like all of those acres had gathered themselves into a shivering heap that might collapse at any moment. None of that seemed to bother her in the slightest.

And it didn't bother the truckers either. Maybe they didn't know it when they heard her voice on the CB radio. Or maybe they didn't care. "Breaker, breaker. Delta Dawn here. Any truckers out there?  Come on." They knew she was talking to them. They responded. They negotiated. They met her at the rest areas east or west of town. Then they paid Delta Dawn to do what she did, did it, and drove away. Her full-time job was cleaning motel rooms, but truckers were her business and business was steady along that stretch of I-80. Out there she was Delta Dawn - all mystery, misery, romance and country music - and nothing else mattered. She took breaks at the truckstop.

Delta Dawn understood the magic of language, the power of country music, the romance of the road, the loneliness that could make a truck driver weep - and how to use a CB radio. She knew what her customers liked and she understood how to sell it. It was the story of her life.

Meanwhile, over at the Most Famous Fiction Writing Workshop, we were all trying to figure out how to do the same thing. We stumbled and mumbled, raged and ranted, courted and seduced and stirred up a huge cloud of words, but mostly there was no magic in them. No response. No negotiation. No money. We desperately wanted someone to pay us to do what we did, just like Delta Dawn. We couldn't admit it, but we were whores without a clue, a clientele or a CB radio.

We should have hired Delta Dawn to come over to the university and teach us how it was done. But we didn't. Instead, we pretended not to care. It was a heady time, a fairytale time. We were chosen. And we knew that was how it was supposed to be. We all believed the Most Famous Fiction Writing Workshop was the true story of our lives. And Delta Dawn wasn't part of it.

WEARY AND WAITING FOR SPRING

My wife and I remain in Texas. We had planned to be in New Mexico by now, but the stresses of the late summer and early fall changed our plans. I had gallbladder surgery in late August and before I had a chance to heal completely my wife's mother in Kansas had a heart valve replacement/bypass that went awry. After a couple of months of small hopes and huge setbacks in the Intensive Care Unit in Salina, a stressful and likely unnecessary trip by ambulance to a rehab hospital in Nebraska and a long and stressful ambulance ride back to a hospice in Kansas a few days later, she died, not many miles from where she was born. My wife was with her through much of those two months and was with her on the morning she died. It was painful and exhausting. I spent several weeks in Kansas too. August, September, October. Through all of it our house in Austin remained for sale. At least once a week a realtor would call me in Kansas wanting to show it to potential buyers. No one made an offer. Meanwhile the economy trembled underfoot. By the time we returned to Austin weighed down with weariness and grief, selling the house seemed like one burden too many. Why would we sell the house we have called home for nearly 10 years even if it is in Texas? We took it off the market - at least until spring - and have spent the past few weeks letting ourselves feel at home again. It seems to be working. We chose to remain in Texas. We surprised ourselves. It is not a choice we ever imagined ourselves making under any circumstances. But here we are. Uneasy. Already waiting for spring.

THE BOAT, THE DROUGHT, THE HEAT: AGAIN

I've never found Texas, Texans or Texas-ness very amusing. So in my increasingly desperate search for something to take my mind off being stuck here, I bought a boat a few years ago. It is a classic 1966 O'Day Daysailer with teak trim. I bought it with high hopes and the best of intentions. I have a passion for wind and water and I have sailed a great deal in my life. But this is my first boat. I've never had it in the water.

I bought it from an old guy whose bald head still showed the scars of recent brain surgery intended to help calm some of his Parkinson's symptoms. His wife told me the surgery helped, but it would never help enough for him to sail again. Selling the boat wasn't easy for him. He clearly loved it and had sailed it everywhere he ever lived, from the bay at Corpus Christi when the boat was new, to lakes in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, then back here to the lakes around Austin when it was old, having it hauled by truck to the places his job took him. He lived a well-traveled life and it is a well-traveled boat. And the trip was nearly over. I could see it in his face. He was sad to sell it.

I understand his sadness. It's not easy for me to sell it either and I've never sailed it anywhere. The older a man gets the more things he is forced to abandon by health and circumstance in the full knowledge that he will never do them again. I could see it in him. And it's happening to me already and I am nowhere near the age of the man who sold be the boat. Still, I know there are trails I won't hike again, mountaintops I won't set foot on again, places I won't visit again, people I won't see again. And waters I won't sail again. The trails, mountains, places, lakes, oceans, and many of the people are still there, but I am beginning to fade and "again" has begun to lose its meaning.

It is hot in Texas. It has been 100+ degrees for more than 54 days here this summer. There is a drought. The lakes are low. I still am not amused. I am parched from the long effort of being here all these years. Soon I am going back to New Mexico to live. Again. For the last time. Before the meaning is lost completely.

The boat is for sale in the driveway.