Thanksgiving in Texas

Holy hell! 

We drove all the way to Austin to meet our newest nephew, Miles, who was not yet two weeks old when we celebrated Thanksgiving and new life. We had plenty of stuff to hand over, for both Miles and the (as of now) un-born kiddo of family friends in OKC, so flying was off the table.

Driving, though, is hard when you have two kids 5 and under, and the destination is 20+ hours away. The kids did great, with limited screentime or tears. Making us parents feel like winners.

First stop was Phoenix (six hours away), where the kids got to see both Grandma Kate and Grandma Lorraine, one's my mom and the other's my step-grandma, so my kids' only living great-grandparent.

With Grandma Kate

After spending an entire day in Phoenix, we drove on to Fort Stockton, TX, a drive that took about 12 hours of real time, even if we lost an hour and it looked like 13 hours of clock time.

We stayed at a place calling itself the Atrium. The outside was pretty normal, as far as cross-country freeway-traversing goes:

And the stairwells looked like what you may see on our salt-aired neck of the woods:

And I couldn't understand why the place was called the Atrium. Inside the room, there was a balcony door at the back of the room, away from the parking lot door. That's weird, I remember thinking.

Then I went to check it out, and everything started to click:

That balcony looked out onto an enclosed hangar-like place, a weather controlled space with a pool and a work-out cabin (for some reason). It was very surreal.

We finished the drive the next morning, making the six hour drive from Fort Stockton to the north-east satellite of Austin named Pflugerville, betraying the area's rich German settler heritage.

A brand-spanking new subdivision carved out of the formerly remote tall grasslands, our friend and Thanksgiving host Joey's house can be found. Joey was at the Mexico wedding for Mary we attended this past October, so Cass remembered him well. Camille also seemed to remember, and she was mostly enthralled to be there.

Cass too, since there were so many dogs to love on. Here he is with one of them:

Camille wanted to just climb and explore:

Cass got to meet Aunt Stephanie's boy, ten-day old Miles:

It was family, it was wonderful. It was fleeting. I made turkey, but there was so much going on and I didn't really need to do anything besides make turkey, which was easy.

We left Friday afternoon and stopped in Fort Stockton again, after a very relaxing drive along an in-the-cut series of roads that avoided the crowded US HWY 290, which was to be our regularly scheduled return route.

Saturday in the car was brutal, but made sense, seeing as how trying to drive I-10 back to the Southland on this particular Sunday would have fully sucked. We made it over 1000 miles in under 16 hours (but clockwise was more like under 14). I wouldn't recommend it otherwise.

These family visits are always so refreshing, even as they last a total of 50 hours in Austin and 15 in Phoenix, and we're ground down to nubs by the end of he drive.

To family!

In the Neighborhood

Across the street (basically), what used to be a parking lot and a decrepit yet historical former bookstore (affectionately named Acres of Books) have been a construction site for at least the past year, and it looks like likely another year.

Do you have something like this going up across the street from your place?

Sometimes it sounds like work is happening at all hours.

Once it was determined that the Acres of Books was a landmark, it was quickly decided that just the facade was important, and they went to work with that in mind. Below, the facade is along the blocked sidewalk, and the hole of the site drops behind as they work the corner's commercial space:

It may be an energy dump, because even in the darkness, the site is well lit:

Because of its height, it can be seen from all over, like the walk home from the grocery store:

Lots of construction projects in our neck of the woods...

Something Quick About Perspective

I heard a fact the other day, but it was hard to really grasp the reality of it. The sharer of the fact seemed to understand that, so they tried to put it in terms better understood. I'm not sure it was that helpful. Check it out.

First it was: beside your cells, inside your body are forty-trillion microorganisms.

I mean...trillions? How easy is that to wrap your head around?

The "help" statement was: if each one of those microorganisms was as big as an adult, you'd be as tall as 8 billion Mt. Everests.

Oh sure, that's helpful.

Halloween Action Will Need to Improve

As my kids get older, our plans for Halloween will surely need to improve. Costume execution and trick or treat opportunities will need to improve as well. But that will wait until at least next year.

Costumes this year weren't so bad, and the candy collection was passable, but...pandemic, maybe...?

Cass wanted to be Jack Skellington, but by the time I got to a costume dispensary, he had to settle for:

Wakanda Forever!

Camille wore Cass's friend Vera's ladybug outfit:

It was a good time, for sure, and I'm enjoying the last few years while I can get away with only putting half a brain on this holiday (is that right?) shenanigans.

Finished Milkman

I finally finished Anna Burns' Man-Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman.

It's a masterpiece; it's fun and dense and challenging, and it captures the sense of violence hanging over every interaction. It takes place in 1980 Belfast, but never really tells the specifics. Conformity was out of mortal necessity in most cases, and for the random people who fail to conform, as long as they weren't outright killed, they'd be labeled "beyond the pale," which was a fate nearly equal to death.

The book has been called "experimental" by some critics. Paragraphs can run multiple pages, dialogue between characters doesn't break up those paragraphs, and characters don't have names as such. The main character and narrator is eighteen year-old middle sister. Other characters who populate the story are maybe boyfriend, a mechanic and possible hoarder; wee sisters, middle sister's three youngest sisters; second brother-in-law, a gross side character and small antagonist; and the forty-something paramilitary who's taken a shine in middle sister, the eponymous milkman. In this zone of this segregated community, the paramilitary fighters are folk heroes, and rumors can lead to death quite easily. 

Rumors about the relationship between middle-sister and milkman start to overtake her world, no matter how false they are or how impossible it is for her to stop them.

Ms. Burns writes in the past tense and makes clear early, as in the first sentence of the book, what the ultimate fate of the milkman is, but middle sister's ability to have the perspective of a character at least thirty years older adds to a sense of peace at the end of the maelstrom. 

I marveled at the sentence structure, and the ways some of the narrative was presented. I grabbed two sentences to give a sense of that structure and what some critics complained about. Other critics mentioned that if the author was male, whatever difficulties, perceived or otherwise, would have been called signs of genius.

The first sentence is from early in the book, and is a microcosm for the whole concept. Just to dispel ignorance, a balaclava is basically a ski-mask.

"It was that people were quick to point fingers, to judge, to add on even in peaceful times, so it would be hard to fathom fingers not getting pointed and words not being added, also being judged in these turbulent times, resulting too, not in having your feelings hurt upon discovering others talking about you, as in having individuals in balaclavas and Halloween masks, guns at the ready, turning up in the middle of the night at your door." (page 28)

The second sentence here is from far later, and sums up much of the conflict between middle sister and maybe boyfriend, and about how being unable or unwilling to fully disclose as much info as possible can have dire consequences.

"And it now seemed these rumours were converging, with his viewpoint shifting from 'my not wanting him to call because I was ashamed of him' to 'not wanting him to call because I was in a relationship with Milkman', and my viewpoint shifting from 'not wanting him to call because of ma demanding marriage and babies' to 'not wanting him to call in case Milkman took his life'." (Page 282)

There's just so much good here. The realities of teenagers and rumors and death all around; the way the neighborhood gets spooked out by a "regular" murder, since political murders happen with alarming frequency; how a part of the city is just known as "the ten-minute area," as in it takes ten minutes to cross and no one likes to spend any time there and just hurry through, and people call it such when estimating arrival times, as in "I'll be there in fifteen and ten minutes."

The reward is real. The book is a classic.