The Black Dahlia, she smiles and smiles

That all went smoothly. Bus got in, took cab to station, train was already there. I got on, fell asleep, and woke up to the sights of West Texas, which is supposed to be dull, but I find it very beautiful,  muttered "oh my god" upon opening the curtains. I saw a million cactuses and lots of wonderful abandoned structures and something shaped like a wild boar trotting through the scrubby desert. 

I would like to take a trip out there, maybe to Marfa sometime. People do go to Marfa.  But then it's just as magnificent once you turn north into New Mexico and Arizona, though it's a different kind of desert. So really apparently the daydream is to spend more time in the west, generally. 

The day went by quickly. The things I've brought with me to pass the time (knitting, 3 books on Kindle, a writing project that will clearly never go anywhere) are largely untouched. Guilty about this, I read some of a Nathan Englander story and knitted a few paltry rows but mostly I just wanted to look out the window. Well, Albuquerque to Chicago should be dull so maybe I'll kill that time more productively. 

Meals were in the dining car, which I never spring for in coach, but when it's part of the fare, it beats microwaved pizzas. Except of course you're at a table with strangers who turn out to be mostly boring. The food's ok and it's probably good not to spend the entire day in solitude. 

Explosions in the Sky and Yo La Tengo are turning out to be the soundtrack to this trip. 

I drank in my compartment and conked out fairly early. There was nothing to see after 6:30 or so anyway. I'd have been curious to see the Salton Sea but it was dark and we passed in the middle of the night. 

Arrived at Union Station and, as planned, took the subway to Koreatown, saw the Hollywood sign in the distance, spent a few hours in a Korean spa (cheaper here than in NYC but fewer features) and picked up my car. Now in Hancock Park at the home of my father's friend. 

(So here I am in LA, by the way, the endpoint of my trip. I've used up too much emotion to feel quite as I feel I ought to feel, but it seems lovely, and maybe tomorrow when I go to Santa Monica and dip a toe in the other ocean...)

For lunch we went to Mozza, a pizza place started by Mario Battali. I wouldn't have had any idea but Mrs. Father's Friend pointed out Lorne Michaels at a big table of guys by the door and right next to us the actor who played the priest who almost has an affair with Carmela on The Sopranos. 

Then a drive around Hollywood and a trip to find Ms. Stanwyck's star on the walk of fame. 

I didn't realize you could see snow-capped mountains from LA but you can. 

One for whom all travel is a penance now

Biggest travel day yet coming up now, and the one that for me is like stepping off the edge. Now, with no particular apologies to Cole Porter, I ride to the ridge where the west commences. 

It's tugging at me a little to have left Austin (on bus now to San Antonio) but it's dulled by (now past) annoyance at 45-minute-late megabus and curiosity about upcoming train compartment experience and sure ok fine excitement about LA.

What else happened in Austin...obligatory sighting of someone I didn't expect to run into. I left M&K's and went to kill an hour at Half Price Books and they said over the PA "Anne-Marie, your book buy is ready" and I thought "huh, I went to school with an Anne-Marie" or rather it registered rather faintly and then a few minutes later, there she was. We weren't good friends but that kind of thing alway makes me feel welcome. 

Had dinner with college friends at a new place on the East Side, Contigo, very Austin-since-I-left.  M has bought a house over there off Manor Road and seems settled. T is in a relationship with a nice fellow who joined us and also seems in a good place, in great contrast to 1997ish. R is, as ever, perpetually disappointed and a bit brittle and yet very funny. 

Back to J's, where I spent today in a leisurely fashion, re-staked a claim to my Austin soul by developing an opinion on breakfast taco places (Shack>Torchy's) and discovered that there is a soft drink called Doppleganger that appears to be Dublin Dr Pepper ie cane sugar Dr Pepper. This is important, though I am sure I will not encounter it elsewhere. 

Went to Toy Joy and Oat Willie's, which somehow survive. Lectured a young man on what Austin is really about (well I wasn't that bad) and then JS wanted to take us to Chuy's and who am I to say no to that?

Around those two, well and C but he barely talks, I notice my speech getting a little Texan around the edges which is faintly confounding because it never really was that, but isn't intentional so I don't really know, am I supposed to make an effort not to do it? Anyway it was a nice dinner and JS kindly took us all out. Then I sat around at J's and we talked about this and that like old friends might do. 

Austin is still peopled by my people. Everyone says "oh the place is full of Californians" and acts as if it's diluted somehow, but I still know the people I know, and they haven't been replaced with Californians. The skyline is different and you see fewer eccentric looking people and South Congress is fucking weird, but it is still my town. 

Oh we're practically in San Antonio now so this is not the most exciting entry but I should wrap it up. The next few hours are weird. Arrive, see if there are cabs, anyway somehow make my way the mile to the train station--San Antonio at 11 on a Monday night? I have no idea!--and then perhaps wait around quite a while for the train which is for some unknowable reason meant to get in at 12 and leave at 2:45. Do they let us on when it gets in? Will it be even nearly on time? Tune in and find out! Because I am on the train all day tomorrow and will probably go on and on about something. 

They shoot bookstores, don't they?

So maybe how it's going to go is that every 4-5 days I'm going to have a day of nerves. Right now it's a combination of D having left, a twinge of homesickness, bigger picture Where Is My Life Going stuff,  and this font, which I assumed was not going to manifest after I cut and pasted. 

On the other hand it's 70 degrees and sunny and that moderates the agita.  

Where did I stop? J had people over, people I like a lot though I don't necessarily keep in touch with them. We drank a fair number of margaritas and afterwards I slipped out for a few minutes to walk around Hyde Park feeling overwhelmed by being here and to get a burrito at Taco Cabana. 

I slept terribly. I explained to D that when I visited...wait I'm sure I already told this story. It's hard to go to sleep the first night in Austin because every time I've been here in the long while before, I've woken up back in New York, and there is always a fairly not-in-jest fear of that happening, the first night. 

So Friday I came over to M and K' s house in a swell neighborhood I wasn't familiar with and hung out a bit before picking D up at the Holy Shit Far Away New Airport which is not new at all but new to me. 183 is too much road. 

Dinner with old friends S and A.  S I have know since 1999. Saturday was a little Austin tourism, Mount Bonnell for the best view of town from above, Mayfield Park because it's fun to bring people there and be all "surprise! Peacocks!" A boring nostalgic walk through campus, and a stroll by town lake. 

The strange part was a few hours on South Congress which has turned from a nothing stretch of road to an insane pedestrian mall with people standing in hour-long lines for stuff that used to be no big deal to anyone. We sat outside at Güero's patio/music space and had Shiners. The local beer, not the face injury. 

D liked it well enough but it was strange to me to be showing him my town in a form I completely didn't recognize. So the nice thing then was we walked around Travis Heights which looked about the same and then as we were driving off, I realized we were very early and parked by South First, which also used to be nothing but now feels kind of like parts of Austin as I knew them in the 90s. Much, much quieter. 

Traffic has gotten pretty bad. 

Oh and we had barbecue at Ruby's. I had thought D might want to go on a barbecue junket to one of those towns one goes to in order to feel like a barbecue martyr, but he felt more like seeing things in town, so yay. I'm not a barbeconnoisseur, so though I thought it was great, I was nervous my foodier friends would look askance, but everyone was actually fairly skance about it when I said we'd gone there. So hooray. 

That's good for now. I'm meeting folks in a couple of hours and though I'm not very underfoot, I think it's nice to have your house to yourself after company so I'm going to zip up the suitcase and find a place to be. 

Keep Austin something

I used to hate this drive a whole lot, Dallas<->Austin. I made a point of never figuring out whether Waco was closer to Dallas or Austin because then I could say to myself "I think it's actually a little more than halfway" whichever way I was going. Later on I would do Chicago<->Lexington and learn what a boring drive actually looks like. 

Of course these days I like it better also because it's a bigger deal to be between those two cities. 

There were things I liked to see along the way, anyway. The big truck billboard at Carl's Corner. Signs for West and Waxahachie which had associations with the past, albeit superficial ones. 

It's a good drive for my particular brand of escape fantasies--the ones that really rescue me in certain moods are the ones about moving to a terrible little town where I don't know anyone but where you can maybe buy a house for $40k and not do much of anything ever again. 

Pardon the gap in blogging, if you're reading. I got to Austin, had a few too many with one old crowd, and then D was down here for two days and it was a mad, gay whirl and all that. Maybe I'll write about that tonight. I'm suddenly halfway through my trip, and suddenly only halfway through my trip, and a little anxious now. 

Lunch is a lot of things. Lunch is complicated.

I'm hoping everyone along the way lets me sleep on couches. Sleeping on a couch is somehow so much nicer than sleeping in someone else's bed. I finally slept in today, til 9. 

Then of course I went to another Half Price Books just to get out of the house. My uncle was home maybe doing work and I always have the feeling he doesn't know what the hell to say to me. Like he actually seems somewhat bewildered by me. 

My aunt on the other hand I never talk to when I'm not here and then I get here and remember I really like her. 

So back to the Home for Aged Hebrews for lunch and then I watched TMC for a bit with my grandmother, some comic short that I actually found rather funny about this couple that kept trying to win on quiz shows. Now of course I can't figure out what it was. I'm using search strings like "comic short couple radio Errol Flynn sneeze" and it's not working. It reminded me of Robert Benchley in comic sensibility. 

My grandmother went to the dentist and came back and we went through another box of photos and as god or someone is my witness, I will not, this vacation, look at another photo of a person who was relatively happy and now is dead or someone now very old looking like all the 1970s in one fashion choice or a lovely house torn down to make way for some faux Tuscan monstrosity.

She would pick up a picture of my mother and aunt thirty years ago and say "you know these people" and pick up another of the same and say "you don't know these people" until I wasn't sure quite what joke she was making and whether this was enjoyable for her or a little bit of agony. I kept commenting on the places in the background and the time periods and she didn't have much to say about it. 

It all made me terribly sad and fortunately I find the dull expanses of north Dallas and Plano soothing. Sad isn't really the word at all, though. Something more anguished and full of doubt. I kept wondering if it was about actual misgivings about my life choices, which is what it felt like. 

My grandmother last night asked me about what things I'd like when she died. With someone who is 92 it isn't convincing to say "don't be ridiculous" though I did lead off with "ask me again in ten years" and she said "I won't be here in ten years." Five years ago it was possible to believe she might, as her health was remarkably good and her mother lived to 99 or 100. (Birth certificate in the old country, you know.)

Then her son died after a long, awful illness and now she seems very old. 

I said I wanted the giant Buddha head if nobody else did. There are also these insane mid-century lamps but I didn't want to sound like I was shopping. Jesus. 

The thing about my family in Dallas is they are family in some sense I never aspired to. They all lived along Hillcrest Blvd the last fifty years. My aunt's kids went to school close to home and the two boys have lived there again since college though the older one just bought a place (shockingly, off Preston! Which is to say, a mile west.)

Partly this is generational but actually they both make a decent living and Dallas is cheap and I could never fucking figure out how they could stand to still live there. 

So then in a certain state of emotional agitation I think what if the whole problem is that I can't figure out how they could stand to have spent so much of their lives so close to home. What if that would have been better, and I would have been nicer, and have some core to my life. It continues overheatedly down that line. 

I had dinner with my other cousin who I was close with when we were kids but haven't kept actively in touch with for years and years. We went for exactly the kind of Tex Mex that doesn't exist in the northeast. That did me some good. And we talked about the Cousins of my Existential Doubt and he and his wife also find it nuts, and that was probably good for my sanity. 

He did though ask me in a discussion of The Big Question of Where Next whether I would consider Dallas and it was like having a somewhat ego-dystonic kink discovered, because of course I've daydreamed about it but I don't know that I've ever admitted that to anyone (oh, hi!) for a number of reasons. 

I like it here. The air smells right to me. Maybe if I lived here I'd hate it. It's not a real possibility. 

There is always a Cadillac at Royal Lane

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. 

And I won't drive a truck anymore

Ugh, where was I?

There was a lot of drinking. What I can't understand about Mardi Gras is why, having had only a glimpse of it of course, it doesn't annoy me. The air of revelry doesn't seem forced or ugly, as it sometimes does. As far as I can tell, it is all honest, organic decadence. 

We went to Endymion, which is huge and the floats are insane. You start to get very excited about catching these silly plastic beads (though actually the one part of the whole thing that gives me pause is all the waste. Someone must manufacture millions of chains of beads and half of them end up crunched up on the street because nobody picks them up if they touch the rather disreputable looking pavement.)

It's good. Strangers talk to each other, though some of that is just the south. 

We didn't go to Galatoire's because it was fucking closed. I wasn't too devastated as we went to Brennan's and it was a large, rich, overwhelming brunch. We could hardly talk on the walk home. Turtle soup with sherry, eggs Sardou, and bananas Foster which was invented there and which my mom has made since I was a kid and I can now report it is exactly the same on the mother ship. 

I did the other things I had meant to do, though. I walked down to the stairs down to the Mississippi very early Saturday and watched big ships navigate the curve. I got my muffuletta, which I just ate on the bus, which was perfection. 

I drank several hurricanes walking around on the street, and the moment you do this is the moment it's impossible to imagine why it's prohibited everywhere else. 

The weather held out all weekend. 

So I guess those are the highlights. Also as I was walking back to H's somewhat late, there were people on a stoop with instruments, and I don't think they all knew each other, but they started playing bluegrass and were actually very good, so I sat there for a little while. 

Last night around midnight I had a bout of anxiety about the fact that, having had what feels like a complete vacation, I am not heading home but heading on. These are probably going to happen along the way. Anxiety is my old pal and I can generally manage it. 

The bus this morning left at 7:45. I fell asleep for a couple of hours which is great except that I missed the Atchafalaya swamp which I remember as interesting-looking. That part of east Texas after you cross the state line isn't. (Crossing the state line comes with a big emotional rush if you have a long-standing complicated relationship with Texas and the suspicion you'll never live there again.)

Killing time in downtown Houston at the Lone Star Saloon having a Shiner Bock. It's the only thing anyone drank in college and I still like it. They don't have a distributor in New York so you can't get it. 

Made some agonizing small talk with bar regulars. Caught the bus, which (to the shock of no sentient being) took an extra hour to get out of Houston at rush hour. Now seated beside some kid with a different sense of personal space than my own, ready to be in Dallas but not even in Corsicana.