My father grew up in Texas, until his high school principal called him down to his office one day and introduced him to the Dean of Harvard, who wanted to know why he wasn’t applying. He said his father wasn’t too keen on him going that far. The Dean took my grandfather, who sold textbooks, out to lunch, and when my grandfather came back he told my dad “one thing I appreciate is a good salesman.” The rest is history.
In a way, my dad is the rancher type. Stringy. Do-it-yourself. Leathery by late summer. But, though he regaled us all throughout our childhood, and now regales my children, with Texas tales, much of it has washed out of him over the years. My godfather, Bert, teased him often for coming home from high school each day and, while the other kids were cracking open Dr. Pepper’s, making himself an instant-coffee affogato. His father hated sports. They were staunchly liberal. He never felt at home in Texas after leaving Austin for Dallas around middle school. It’s not hard, after spending a few hours with him, to understand why.
Last week, I accompanied my father on a pilgrimage to Texas, to visit his old haunts. He will be eighty next year, and the last few years haven’t been kind to him.
In Austin, I saw lots of folks wearing all-denim, which my father has taught my seven-year-old son, who also loves to wear all-denim, is called the “Texas Tuxedo.” We met an old friend of my father’s and godfather’s for dinner, Mark, and his wife Sue, and went back to their house for fresh baked blueberry pie, which I managed to spill all over my much loved white shirt. Sue found her favorite stain remover and sent me home with some in a travel sized bottle. When I told her I could take it in a ziploc she replied “Don’t be silly. You’re our guest.”
Mark said that as a teenager, he loved eating dinner at my dad’s house because the conversations were always intellectual. His parents valued sports and he was never a good student until his senior year, when he wanted to impress a smart girl. He took us upstairs to see his antique guns, in a locked room. He pointed to a long one (shot gun?) that my father had given him after clearing out his parents’ house in Dallas, when his dad died, when he was 20, and another (a pistol?) that my grandfather had given my father for his birthday. It was hard to imagine my father holding a gun, even to hand it to another, more classically Texan man. Another gun was a present from Sue to celebrate Mark’s retirement. “I got a trip to Rome” Sue explained.
Outside, lightning snapped through the sky like fireworks. My dad remembered that it was Mark who helped him move my grandmother into a high-rise apartment in downtown after his father died, before she began a string of addiction-and-depression-related relapses and rehabilitations that would require that she live in care facilities for the rest of her life. Two college kids in a ‘58 VW station wagon, singing show tunes the whole ride down from Dallas.
With every Lyft driver, my husband’s cousins, these kind folks who knew my dad before he was my dad and run a non-profit out of the modest home they thought, 40 years ago, was a mansion, I don’t know how to calibrate the politics. People say the oil money should go back to the people, electric cars won't save the planet, the city has changed, it is more like California than anyone would like. I ostensibly agree with all of these statements, but tread lightly, trying to avoid a moment like the one on the plane to Portland where me and the lady next to me where just commiserating about over-development and all of a sudden she was slipping in morality-based judgments of the poor which I sensed really meant the not-white.
But I suppose that like Carly Rae Jepson fans, Texans are not a monolith. Every driver I had came from a different background and had a slightly different take on things. Every friend had a different set of complaints and praise. Over the trip, I was often impressed, myself a resident of the second most diverse city in the country, at how integrated everything was. Black and white and Latinx families mingling and joking in the elevator. Everyone in so many spaces together and seeming very comfortable about it. It seemed easier than it did back home, these spaces that were rarely for just one kind of person. I found myself feeling jealous. This was a state that outlawed abortions. Then I remembered that many women in California even struggle to get one.
The next day we drove to Dallas in a rented Tesla, which no one could get to work, and which didn’t have anything in the places you reached for it. Then we drove further North to Bonham, where my grandfather, perhaps apocryphally, saw my grandmother walking with her daddy by his lemonade stand one day and vowed he would one day marry her. In the cemetery, we drove around reading off the names of the stones, looking for Wheeler and Burton and Truss. “I didn’t mean for you to read them out loud” my father teased my sister and I. So we read them louder, in some kind of incantation, laughing while roll-calling the dead.
We found the Burtons, and got out of the car, knowing the Wheelers had to be near. Each of us went in a different direction. I wandered, almost in a trance, scanning the graves for my name. There was Miller and Spivy and Flowers and Sparger and Haggard and Hunnicutt and Clara Nell Valentine and someone named Wheeler Martin Shlumpert. Somewhere nearby a skunk let off its fumes. It was windy, some of the taller stones were toppled over. I didn't think my family would have purchased one of these. I passed a stone that just said Baby, 1907. And one that read Our Baby Bobby Joe, Son of Effie and Geo Chris, He Came and Left us Sept 2, 1935. A white car pulled up with two older women in the front seats. They put their window down and said “You looking for someone special?” When I explained, they told me “There's some Wheelers up there.” My sister and I started off in the direction they were pointing, exhausted, still not finding anything. Then I watched the women talking to my sister again, and all of a sudden she took off running. I knew, then, that we were in a heated competition to be the first to find the graves, so I took off running too, over the stones and a zillion ankle-twisty dirt-holes, laughing and yelling and taunting her that she’d cheated. She let out a cry from over to my left and I saw them. We thanked the ladies and asked, did they have a map or something, maybe they knew our family? No, they said, they just loved cemeteries. They had looked it up on an app, findagrave.
We read the graves and listened to my father’s stories. About our great, great, great, grandmother being barred from coming to town by her daughter-in-law because she was a quarter Cherokee and not ashamed of it. The baby nephew my great Aunt Margaret had taken in when her sister died, just as her aunt and uncle had done for her when her mother died, who died before he was six.
Back in the Dallas hotel, which had a screen print of Erykah Badu in the lobby, very kind staff, and functionally non-existent wifi, I had rinsed my white shirt in the sink, let it soak while we went to dinner. I ordered oysters, and my dad proclaimed he would never eat an oyster in Dallas, but changed his mind after I badgered him about the advancements in shipping and refrigeration that had occurred in the last 60 years. One of my oysters had gone bad, which of course, I kept to myself.
At the end of the meal I came back from the bathroom, and, slightly drunk from the mojito we’d been amazed they let us carry from the bar next door into the restaurant, I told our waiter that the toilet was broken, but that I’d flushed it anyway cause I was raised to stick your hand down a toilet tank and see what you could do rather than leave your mess for someone else to clean up. I glanced proudly at my father, who never let something like a missing chain keep him from declaring a toilet in working order. I wanted this waiter to know I had come from good stock.
Back at the hotel, I drained the sink and squeezed the shirt out, and I couldn’t find a single trace of the blueberries. I thought I’d contact Sue with the good news. I wanted to thank her for her hospitality.
I had several hours to kill before my flight, so I had my dad drop me at the Dallas Museum of Art. My godfather Bert used to take me here, used to come here often, before he died, almost eight years ago now. He taught me how to walk, speaking little and at my own pace, through an art museum. How to pop your head into a gallery, take what you needed, and pop back out again. He taught me that you always stop at the gift shop, even if just for a postcard, but often for more. He sent me little trinkets from the world’s modern museum gift stores–a hip, japanese wall clock; a heavy silver candle holder; a shiny metal fortune cookie–presented to me on my wedding day—which opened up to reveal a small piece of paper with the words “may you have a happy life together” written in his, tiny, tidy script. He taught me how to drink a cappuccino. How to wake up early enough to catch the most auspicious hours of the day. How to be quiet, which I hadn’t really known was an option.
I was the only person in the museum wearing a mask, though one man was wearing what seemed to be an enormous stuffed fox tail, attached to his sacrum somewhere, swaying with his body in a way that made it hard to believe it wasn’t alive, grazing the stairs as he walked down them. I followed this man, who otherwise did not present as the kind of guy who would wear a giant tail out in public, transfixed, past the Indigenous Art wing, pausing to glance at a sculpture, flummoxed as to why not one single person did a double take when they passed fox tail guy.
In my New England child’s eyes, Dallas was all intersecting highway ramps and lush greenery. It was wetness in the air, always, and blue corn tortillas, and never knowing when you parked in the lot behind yet another nondescript building, what trash or treasure waited inside. If I flew anywhere, it was usually there – with my dad or brother or later, with the officious warmth of an American Airlines unaccompanied-minor liaison, waiting for what felt like days in a near-empty room of a connecting airport, wearing my lanyard and looking anxiously for Bert’s face when I disembarked.
When I stayed at Bert’s I would always find him at the dining room table in the morning, showered and dressed smartly, reading the paper and looking like he had been expecting me. I believed that’s where I would find him had I woken up at the crack of dawn, though I knew that in the night time he did disappear for a time, as I often crept to the second floor lending to look down at the sleeping living room, and out the two story windows at the trees in the backyard. I slept in the bunk bed with his step-daughter Anne, and we played Pretty Pretty Princess and computer games and did little performances to delight the adults.
Bert called me Sarah Jane—he felt I needed a second name if I was going to be an honorary Texan. I didn’t so much think of myself as of Texas, but as of him. If you asked me how long my annual trips to Dallas were I would tell you, “years.” If you asked what percentage of my life I spent in that house I would say “half.” I am still too scared to fact check this with my parents, as if knowing that I really only came twice for a long weekend would be betraying my memory of Bert, my sense of our importance to one another.
Bert didn’t like to inconvenience people but he always, always, knew what he wanted. “There are some new paintings by an old French guy at the museum. I thought it might interest you to see them.” And off we’d go. He was mild but never a wallflower. Laconic but never taciturn, words he would have ribbed me for using, saying something about my Harvard-educated dad rubbing off on me, or about how down here in Texas I had to speak slower and use less Yankee verbage. As a student at SMU, he convinced Martin Luther King to speak there, at the height of the civil rights movement, at a school where a Black athlete had just been violently assaulted. He marched in Selma. He never bragged about either and would change the topic if you brought them up. Like Dana Cotton, he became a Dean, and was the kind of person about whom colleagues and students said things like “there was no one like him” and actually meant it.
The summer after I graduated high school, Bert took me on my first trip to Europe. Apparently he had sworn an oath to do this at my birth, uttered his plans for cultural undertaking like Maleficent mumbling about spindles. In Paris, I found him each morning at the little table in the Cavallotti apartment, often having already put away a cappuccino and eclair cafe, or I awoke to the jingle of his keys in the door, returning from some sunrise jaunt. We went to Sacre Coeur, where I fell in love with a small and subterranean Dali exhibit. We went to The Pompidou and Musee D’Orsay and ate sandwiches with both butter and mayonnaise and I laughed at his heavily Dalls-accented-French and he laughed at my American-accented gustatorial proclivities. My sister came and she and I went out to the red light district, pretended we were Swedish and spoke little English while some businessmen bought us drinks. Then Bert and I drove through southern France and the alps and on to Italy and when we crossed the border I ate rabbit ragu and drank a glass of red wine in the hotel restaurant, at the only occupied table, as Bert turned in early and rose even earlier, and I thought I had never, ever experienced a meal to satisfying and Bert was tickled at my sudden sophistication and I went back to my room bored and restless and lonely, wondering if any of the waiters who said “bon sou” would ever want to be my boyfriends and having no one, not on any digital communication advice that hadn't been invented yet, to tell. At breakfast the next morning, the waiter took Bert’s order and then, turning to me, said “and for your wife?”
What are the things we believed when we were children? That there was nowhere safer than an airplane. That our parents knew what they were doing. That dessert should never be cheese. That everyone with a southern lilt was kind. That people got sick and then they got better.
When he was dying, Bert asked me not to come. He said I had a baby on the way and had to think about the future. But the future wasn’t something I cared for much, then. No one I’d loved this much had died, at least before I had known they would. Not in childbirth or childhood or from a third heart attack when I was home from my yankee college, as my father’s father did. I guess I have been spoiled that way.
After Bert’s funeral, someone came up to me and told me he’d left me $20,000. We put half in the baby’s education fund and then, as soon as we could, we took the baby to Europe.
After wandering around the museum, I felt compelled to sit down and write. I thought about all my folks buried up there in the Willow Wild Cemetery and Bonham, the ones who came from Kentucky and the Mayflower, supposedly, and England and Scotland I believe. The ones who let my father down by dying or refusing to live. The ones who enslaved other people.
Bert, and my dad, and my son, who was beginning to focus on sounds outside the uterus and develop his taste buds around the time Bert died. The next time I came back to Texas, I realized, it would probably be without my father.
After what I suppose had been an hour or so, a guard came up to me and told me the museum would be closing in ten minutes. I packed up my things and rushed back to the main hall, where I saw that the grate on the gift shop had already been lowered. I was filled, suddenly, with tremendous grief. I had pictured myself purchasing something beautiful for someone, maybe for myself. I left Texas without a modern art postcard, without a Japanese clock, without the many, many cowboy hats I had tried on and then talked myself down from purchasing because I knew as soon as I got home I would realize they were not for me.
I did buy my children vintage Troll dolls at a roadside antique shop run by a man and his elderly mother – one doll was a basketball player, the other, some kind of Christmas-themed ice skater. As a child I had a huge collection of Troll dolls – the piece de resistance was a wizard, that, when you pushed its belly just so, laughed maniacally and said “Love you! Dreams come true!”
Maybe it is stupid to think that my kids will care about these horrifyingly ugly toys, simply because they meant something to me, long ago. But then again, maybe it isn’t.
Also, this:
I’m in the Huff Post today talking about being a lady who diagnoses ADHD who turned out to have ADHD:
But Ariana Lenarsky’s The Madness Behind Selecting the 2022–23 All-Hunk NBA Teams is quite possibly my favorite piece of writing so far this year. If you like basketball, hunks, humor, or just weird cultural niches, I highly recommend it. Big ups to Chris Martin and Angela Garbes for calling it to my attention and engaging in heated, nerdy conversation about our own, completely subjective hunky line-up (how did they omit Jaylen Brown and still sleep at night??!), respectively.
Check out this virtuosic paragraph:
“Hunks get you out of your head and into your emotions, which is an institutionally dangerous, inexplicable place to be. A hunk makes you gulp, sweat, lose your train of thought, fall silent, and maybe even grow embarrassed. It’s a little bit unnerving. Engaging with discomfort is part of the process of determining hunkitude. It takes courage.”
What niche are you nerding out in these days? Do tell!
My Dear Sarah,More brilliant writing.
I just read Chris Martin’s “Things to Do in Hell”…
Additional moving brilliance…Thanks for the reference.
Love, Paul
I'm crying, loving this...I love it extra since it's aboit our family...but I love your thoughts and perspective on so many other things, too.
As for what I'm nerding put about..well, often female rage and revenge stories. And to lighten up, articles where someone cool tells me all the songs, books and places THEY are loving. I have a fantasy where my kids do this, but they are busy living life...so I treasure your links and totally agree about jaylen.