I am the fourth child of east Texas white trash (some might say), hailing as my family did from the "river bottom" and the "sticks" of the Big Thicket. My father married my Mom when she was 16 after her mother told him it was alright. He was ten years her elder and ruled her destiny for the rest of their married life. Mom never graduated from high school, although she was so smart she was triple promoted in elementary, so she could study material somewhat comparable to her level. By all accounts, her school could not keep up with her and had a hard time teaching her. She did not understand basic mathematics and so she memorized equations. She told me once that it wasn't until she was much older that they figured out she did not understand the mechanics of math--that she had, savant-like, memorized everything in math class instead. My parents had been concerned about me when I was four, for instead of reading, I did the same thing. I memorized books, rather than read. They knew it because the narratives were not entirely synced up with the pages as I turned them.
I am told also my Mom drew. She painted. She wrote poetry. I have pictures of her when she was younger. I know I see with fond eyes--but to me, she was beautiful. As beautiful as any of the Hollywood starlets she ever craved to look like. She also had a movie-star figure--with measurements she often recited, and she was perpetually on a diet to make sure she kept that body. And she--well, she never did anything much other than be a mother. A mother who went to hospitals and stayed around the house, caring for a huge family: cleaning, cooking, laundry, and sewing, hanging clothes on a clothes-line and waxing floors daily. She was also delusional, when she wasn't actually hallucinating. She terrified me in a way that is hard to describe to those who haven't been terrified by the reality of others. What's all this got to do with anything? With travel, with where I am? Why is this post here?
I don't know other than my last blog was dishonest. It was dishonest in the way that when you minimize your feelings, you're being dishonest. The truth is the loathing I feel for Texas is tied up with everything I hate about my mother's life, and my own. The truth is that west Texas actually stinks to me, that it seems polluted with dust, the smell of manure, with spoors of strange things that stick in my throat. I got sick the minute I entered Texas--not mildly sick, but can't-lift-your-head-off-the-pillow-with-fever-illness. Just in time to collapse in the sad, dirty house of my mother, so ill I couldn't even speak. And I hate it here and I hate the path here. I hate flying here, and I hate coming here. That post masked loathing that encompasses everything about Texas. I wouldn't be here--except for her.
The one bright spot in my Mom's neighborhood for me is gone. I used to go early in the morning to feed the ducks and geese. The creek and pond where they swam is all filled in with landfill. My one thought when i discovered this driving in was--It fucking figures. I have told my mother we are leaving tomorrow to go see the ocean. She's a bit miffed at me, but seems to have resigned herself to accepting this freakish inclination on my part. She has even accepted my plan to care for her beloved cat while we're gone. I am not sure what I wanted to say in this blog, other than I guess I've learned that stories are always suspicious. Maybe the Llano Estacado isn't really 800 miles into Texas--it only feels like it. Maybe bears are not the thing I'm most afraid of. In noticing that the ducks were gone, recalled this poem of Yeats...I'll close with it. I left this duck pond in October 6 years ago with my Mom crying like a baby that day....
THE TREES are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.
The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
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