Arrived in Dallas an hour or so late and took DART up to practically Plano where my aunt and uncle live. DART is great. Dallas is too sprawling for it to do what public transit does in northeastern cities but for what it is, it seems well put together.
Got up and went to Half Price Books, which is in the building that used to house the department store my family started and ran for thirty years or so, where my mother was a switchboard operator when she was a teenager, paging people or whatevs.
Honestly I didn't need books but I needed something to do with my day and also HPB is near a Taco Cabana and TC is my getting to Texas ritual. Of course I bought some books to lug around for two weeks because I'm a moron. But I mean what if I were on the train across west Texas and really wanted to read that biography of Daryl Zanuck?
Odd driving again. The fine motions of the left foot on the clutch particularly getting from zeroth into first gear are still there, but less automated.
It was a gross morning and I forgot how walking-oriented Dallas isn't and ended up trudging on a sort of a abandoned looking street to get my black bean taco.
Funny to drive past the gold-windowed office buildings off Northwest Highway that are so bland but so iconic of Dallas for me.
Then up to the Home for Aged Hebrews (phrase from Angels in America I think, can never resist it) to see my grandmother. We had lunch at Dicky's, a mediocre barbecue chain the whole family loves, and as it was Tuesday it was two sandwiches for one, and I ever so gallantly picked up the check, which with my fried okra and Dr. pepper came to $9.35. My grandmother kept staring at the receipt and saying "is that right? It seems like a lot" and now you begin to understand about me and money.
We sat around some and I had a panicky feeling about what to say to a 92-year-old person I have known all my life who has treated me with extraordinary kindness and generosity but who will not, oh will not ever really understand my life and vice versa probably.
She asks after my boyfriend by name which is really very sweet.
Had to return to my aunt's house to get a jacket for the special Mardi Gras themed dinner, so I grabbed a strand of purple and a strand of gold beads for her, and then everyone turned out to be wearing Mardi Gras beads and I felt rather gallant!
Then we went to her apartment and looked at old photos of people most of whom are dead (most of whom I didn't know well, one or two of whom I am very sad about, plus vicarious sadness for my 92-year-old grandmother who has lost almost all of her friends and contemporaries.)
This and some other things like her asking what I would like when she dies* just drove me over the edge and I had to leave. I don't know whether I'm emotionally frozen in NY or psychotic in Texas but I've wept three times in two days.
It's about thoughts of mortality of course but also about the partial way your family must know you (my grandmother has no idea, I guess, that sometimes I am an asshole!) and all that other stuff.
So yes. Travel is fraught, for me!
Came home. Watched SOTU with aunt and uncle and cousin and neurotic dog. I like these people. I'm going to bed.
*there are several things because they remind me of her house where my childhood most resembled what other people who liked childhood more seem to remember. But it's quite a conversation to have.
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