Archives for 2014

Texas 1993-1994-1995

The boys and I hit Texas for a wedding.

It is my first visit to the Lone Star State and I fall in love with it but I don’t really recognize it. At the time I figure the four days in Houston were memorable because so many of my friends are there and we are having one hell of a time.

I have no idea that in a few months I’ll go back for a business trip but this time I’ll be in Dallas. It is a good trip that would have been better had my boss not tried to eat every single meal with me.

He is twice my age and the conversations are strained because when we aren’t talking about work we have nothing in common. The Saturday night of the show he tells me to go entertain a prospective client at a bar in the West End.

When I get there I find out it is not a client, it is clients. It is a family business and now I have to make them happy, president, vice-president and general manager.

The president and general manager are substantially older than I am but the VP is my age.

They drink like fish and tell me that a surfer boy can’t possibly keep up with them. I give $20 to the bartender and tell him I am playing a joke on my dad, uncle and cousin.

“Pour real shots for them and water for me.”

Bartender thinks it is funny and does a great job of making sure the guys don’t realize that they have have multiple shots and beer and all I have had is one beer.

Later on they’ll tell me how impressed they are with my drinking skills. I am almost tempted to call my folks and tell them fraternity life has paid off again.

Had that taken place today it probably would have been immortalized on some smartphone but back during the payphone era unless you were a professional or amateur photographer you probably weren’t going to carry a camera with you.

****

It is February of 1995 and I am back in Houston for another wedding. Two weeks ago I was in Jerusalem and I am not happy to be back in the states.

Two weeks ago I sat a pub drinking beer with a group of people from Scotland,  Australia and a couple of South Africans. They made fun of my American accent

It is Friday night here in Texas and the groomsmen are sitting at a table with bridesmaids, most of whom are recent graduates from U.T.

One of them tells me I have a drawl and wants to know what part of Texas I am from. When I tell her I am from LA she says she doesn’t believe me.

Now I am shaking my head. It is the second time in a month where someone claims I have an accent.”

Maybe It Is Time To Leave LA

It has been almost twenty years since my last trip to Texas but I am not going back to Houston. I am going back to Dallas for another business trip.

Same sort of business as before but a slightly different industry. It is a ridiculously easy flight from LAX to DFW and within an hour of landing I am in my rental car heading for my hotel.

The first thing I notice is how it feels like it could be home. Can’t decide if it is because the weather is almost identical to what I left behind or because houses, malls and stores look familiar.

It is not quite exact but close enough.

Two nights and three days go by in a blur but I still have time to kill so I drive around and check out a few open houses. The prices here are so much lower than back home I wonder if maybe we should take a serious look at leaving LA.

****

Eighteen months later I am back in Dallas for business again. Things back in LA have gotten very ugly, won’t be long before the entire country is mired in a big recession.

I have that same feeling of belonging as before. Texas could be home.

It is something I think about the whole flight home.

When I get back to LA we have a conversation about moving but it just doesn’t happen. Won’t be much longer before circumstances change and we have to sell the house.

The last night in it I shake my head and think that I should have sold it years earlier and moved to Dallas.

Two years later I am in Texas again but this time I am living in Fort Worth. It feels surreal to be here. Been to, in and around Dallas but never made it to Fort Worth so it is brand new to me.

Doesn’t take long for me to get settled and I decide Texas could definitely be home. The rest of the family is back in LA with a plan for them to come later.

During each visit back to LA I grab more of my stuff and bring it back with me. Slowly but the most important pieces of my gear end up in Fort Worth. All I need now is to get the kids over and I’ll be set.

But life happens, things shift and I end up moving back to LA. It is not my first choice but it is supposed to be temporary so I shrug my shoulders and go.

He Named His Intention Texas

Been back in LA for a bit more than a year. Everything on the short term list of accomplishments was taken care of but the long terms ones got shifted, mixed up and tossed around.

I was certain I would have moved back to Texas already but it didn’t happen.

For a brief while I sort of shrugged my shoulders and said I would just go with it but then I had this thought that it was time to name my intention.

I name it Texas.

LA hasn’t been very good to me for a while now. It will always be home, but it is time to spend more time planting my Texas roots. That feeling of home has been around for more than 20 years now, about time to really do something about it.

Dear Grandpa,

Almost three years have gone by since I wrote the letter below so I decided to share a few new thoughts with you.

I am going to attend a party in a few hours that I don’t want to go to. The who, what and why don’t really matter much because I am going to do it in spite of all the reasons not to.

If you asked me why I am going I’d point my finger at you and say I learned more than a few things from you and that in this case my anger though deserved and well placed won’t make life any easier but going might open a few doors down the road and I am playing the long game.

Sometimes the phone rings and I expect to hear your voice and if I did I would fill you in on how much has happened in the now heading on 9 years since you died.

When I said below I wasn’t the same man I meant it, but now I am even more different than before yet more like the man I think I was supposed to become.

That poem above has more meaning to me than ever before and so I find myself writing about the future. It may be fiction today but it is the reality I am working towards.

There is one hell of a story to be told grandpa and a thousand more adventures to be had and that is me being conservative. I opened doors and walked into places from which there is no going back.

And now I require a much bigger working space than before. I suspect you of all people would understand. If by some chance you should stumble upon this you may read the words below again because it is one of the moments which made it clear that I was on an unexpected journey and that the adventure would be worth having.

Dear Grandpa,

You died about 4.5 years ago and much has happened since then. I don’t think that I have told you about all of it. In fact I am sure that I never told you that they fired me the day of your funeral. Didn’t tell you about the text messages and emails that they sent me during the funeral asking me to call in. My phone was off so I didn’t get them during the service. It was only when I got back to mom and dads that I discovered them. They called me again and told me that they they were sorry that you had died and that I shouldn’t come in the next day.

I haven’t aired this sort of dirty laundry here, at least not this story. I haven’t shared it for a variety of reasons but for some reason today feels like an appropriate time to share some of it.  I took the call in the car and said what I had to say. Then I walked into the house and looked at my father. He has your blue eyes you know. I didn’t say anything about it. I didn’t mention it because it wasn’t that important. He had lost his father. Just a short time earlier we had stood graveside and he had told us about how you were his hero and how much he would miss you.

How could I tell him. I know my father and I knew that he would try to comfort me. I knew that he would say fuck em and tell me that I was better off.  All true and all accurate. I had been trying to get out of there so they made it easier. But the moment wasn’t about me. It was about my father. Grandma was long since gone and so was Uncle Jimmy. Once you died that meant that dad was an orphan, albeit a 60 something year old orphan, but an orphan nonetheless. I didn’t know how he would feel. I mean I knew that he would miss you terribly but I didn’t know if it would be made worse by not having Uncle Jimmy around. There are things that siblings understand about parents that no one else can get, not even a spouse.

So I walked inside, picked up my daughter and hugged her tight. Her brother came over and grabbed my hand and tugged on it. It seemed surreal, you were gone, the construction on the house wasn’t close to being completed and I had two small children. I did my best to hold a poker face, but you know that it is not something that I am very good at it. You and dad were/are card players. Maybe it is more accurate to say that dad recognized my tell and asked me to tell him what happened. Really, I shouldn’t be surprised that he knew that there was something more. How many times did the three of us sit together communicating in silence.

Anyway, I told him what happened and got the expected response from him. I made a point of shifting the conversation quickly. I didn’t want to focus on me. I was furious about it. Even though it was demonstrative of the character of the people I had been working for, it wasn’t right. But there is a time and place for those things and that was neither.

I remember walking to the bathroom next to my old bedroom. Our picture was hanging on the wall. It is the one of you, dad, your father and myself. I am about 18 months or so in it. I remember staring at it and thinking about how young you looked in it because you were. I was 37 when you died and you were about 92. So in that picture you weren’t even 60. Can’t tell you if you had gone gray yet because the picture is in Black and White.

Your great granddaughter talks about you relatively often. She likes to pretend that she is you. She hikes up her pants and and acts silly. It is bittersweet to me because she doesn’t remember you. Sure, she knows who you were and she recognizes your face in pictures but she doesn’t know the grandfather that I remember. When I coach her soccer team and see my folks on the sidelines it reminds me of you and it makes me smile because she is building the same sort of relationship that we had. But I am selfish and I want more time with my grandfather.

I am selfish because I got a small taste of getting to know you as a man and not a boy. I miss your stories. We can’t tell them as well as you could. I miss sharing secrets with you. Sure, whenever I come to visit you I make a point of telling you one or two, but it is not the same as having you sit across from me. You never knew about this blog but you would have enjoyed it. You always enjoyed my writing and most of the time I enjoyed sharing it with you. I qualified that because when I was younger it was harder doing that.

Blame it on youth. You always said that you couldn’t screw an old head on young shoulders and you were right. Life changes us, or should I say life experiences change us. I have written a bunch of posts about you. There are keywords in them that trigger memories for me. And I share those memories with your great grandchildren. They are all getting so big. I look at my nieces and nephews and my kids and I am amazed. You would be proud of them all.

I am not who I was when you died. Too much has happened but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Changes come and we do our best to roll with them. Just know that you are missed and loved. And when I punch out a boy or two for trying to date your great granddaughter I’ll tell them that you helped teach me how to throw a punch. Something tells me that would make you smile. I love you grandpa, got to run now and play dad for a while.