Visitors

Four years ago, when I was picking out a graduate school, I noticed my friends had opinions. Not about schools, but about location. Some of them wanted an excuse to visit Vancouver, others could see meeting up for a beach date in North Carolina. They'd come to see me or welcome me as a neighbor in Boston or New York or Los Angeles. I was saying to one of my friends in Chicago how strange it was no one was rooting for the only option in the same time zone as us, the University of Iowa a mere three and a half hours away.

"Oh, I'll say it," she said. "I won't visit you in Iowa." And, to wit, she didn't.

Most people didn't, in fact. I had hoped while moving to Dallas that it might be a bit more like Chicago, that people would visit if only because they had a long layover or were going to be in town for a conference. Historically, it takes at least three years for all six members of my immediate family to visit me in a new city. In six months they'd all come at least once to Dallas. Plus there's been Dustin's friends from Seattle, his brother and soon to be sister-in-law from San Diego. Today, in fact, we're expecting two friends and a dog on their way from Iowa City to Houston. If I'd had any idea, I would have started a guest book.

The data seems to be significant. Dustin thinks this is what happens when you have a guest room, a kind of "If you have it, they will stay" interpretation. I wonder if it's not some form of morbid curiosity. Dustin says no. Dustin says we are now part of the couples mafia, that couples tend to visit couples, that the two of us together have a greater gravitational pull. I hope our gravity does not just accelerate the rate of visits, but maintains an orbit, has the power to bring people back in another six months, when I finally know the city well enough to show it off.

The Washing Machine Will be Replaced Next Week

Because they are metal, because presumably there is some hour the sun shines directly on them through the doorway that has no door and then they radiate that heat for hours afterward, or else because it is so hot outside it doesn’t matter that they have a little shed out between the parked cars and the dumpster to protect them—because it is summer in Texas, the washer and dryer for our apartment building are hot to the touch, even as I stand with them in the shade of their little room, slowly realizing that the shade of the shed is the only reason I can stand to touch the white enamel lid of the washer at all, that in full sun I’d be burned the moment I reached to open the dryer door.

They seem especially hot as I’m on my knees this afternoon, head and one arm in the dryer, trying to scrub off the cinnamon gum that has melted to the blades. I wonder for a moment if people die this way, but no, that’s surely ovens, and even then an issue of gas and not of heat.

I first noticed the gum at the end of the wash, the pink strips all free from their paper wrappers, their paper wrappers scattered about all wadded and white and wet. I had pulled these pieces of gum out one by one, thankful they were not sticky, impressed at how well they’d maintained their shape through the spin cycles. I had felt fortunate in having avoided a bigger mess. But gum smeared and stuck to the dryer is different, feels more like an act of aggression, as if the dryer had somehow egged my house and keyed my car. I have been waiting six weeks for the washer to be fixed, one of my neighbors calls the maintenance line every day, and now that there's an email saying the issue has been addressed I'm doing a trial load, and if it weren't still broken in exactly the same way, I might not even care about the gum. The gum, at least, is clearly my fault†, and every blot of my sponge, no matter how furiously I then scrub and pick, makes me see that the injury was not to me but to the dryer, and I am now tending its wounds in supplication.

† Dustin wants it known, for the record, that the gum, and the fault, belong to him.

West Nile Virus

Dallas, why do you give me new reasons to fear going outside?

I was just starting to feel good about things. I was finally willing to believe that, July or not, it can be reliably nice enough to go outside for a long walk every single evening. Even during the day, I've discovered I can plan a trip down the shady alleyways and still make it to the post office by five o'clock. And, this is the thing I'm really going to miss, I was just starting to get lost.

When I first came here, I used to take one-street out-and-back runs, switching my cell phone from palm to sweaty palm, turning around when the street ended because I was afraid I would forget the dogleg or the hard right turn or the T-shaped intersection on the way back, forget what I had already seen and what I hadn't, forget my address if someone tried to help. But only this week I was investigating a tangle of streets with the cutest little houses and following the street just because I liked a series of red doors I'd never noticed, when I got to an intersection of streets that meant nothing to me—not their names, not their angles. Do you know, Dallas, how happy I was to be lost? Do you understand that you need to know a place pretty well before you're willing to go so far as to lose your bearings? Do you see that I wasn't worried about finding my way home because, running these streets, I already felt at home? And that's taken a while. It's still taking a while.

Which is why I wish you wouldn't make me afraid to leave the house. I appreciate the novel ways you warn about the quality of the air and the threat of the heat, but when people start dying, here and there, in the neighborhood next to ours, and you suggest that everyone stay indoors at dawn and dusk because that's when the mosquitos are most active, well I've already itched the bite on my knee until it bled, and the bites scattered across my calf itch too, and I didn't mind until you said that this, too, was a problem, that this is one more irritation I'm not supposed to ignore.

Mrs. Backhouse needs shade

An old man judging daffodils once took the time to explain to me, a mere layperson who'd wandered inside out of the rain, why a ribbon-winning arrangement of daffodils in a cowboy boot should actually have been disqualified from competition. Let me say first that the boot display was impressive. Its flowers were bright and well formed. Its narrative was both more developed and more cohesive than, say, the beach scene or the gardener's hat entered in the same field. Let me say also how glad I am that people care about things, all sorts of things, and especially things so varied and minute and gloriously irrelevant to almost everybody as to only exist for the scattered smattering of people who happen to take an interest. So while I don't expect it to come up often, I appreciate the education. I like that I can now say with authority, with the full endorsement of the Texas Daffodil Society, that the point is to present the flowers to best advantage. Be wary of distractions. The boot is just a vessel. The lasso and the sand and the taxidermied rattlesnake drawn back ready to strike, well that's all just a step too far.

For Your Safety

1. "Do Not Climb on Toads"
2. "Non-Service Animals Prohibited"
3. "Use Of The Water Feature If Ill With A Contagious Disease is Prohibited"
4. "Do Not Drink Water From The Water Feature"
5. "Use Of The Water Feature When Ill With Diarrhea is Prohibited."

Frankly, they had me at "Do Not Climb on Toads." As much as I would like to report that this is just good advice for all of us anywhere (and clearly, it is), I should perhaps mention that these signs are not posted throughout Dallas. There is, in fact, only one, and it's worth the price of admission to visit the Dallas Arboretum and see it for yourself.

There are, actually, any number of reasons to visit the Arboretum. It is a world class garden, for starters. The spring tulips, innumerable in quantity and variation, are breathtaking, even in the rain. The summer lawn concerts—did I mention the summer lawn concerts?—include an evening of Elvis Tribute Artists. The delightful glass squiggles and blobs of the Chihuly installations will float and sprout and fan until November. But among them all, only the sign is perennial, its particular collection of wisdom a marvel I return to, one season to the next.

Missed Opportunity

I have no stage combat expertise, no equestrian experience at all, really no form of performance on my resume of any kind since I taught Korean high schoolers to sing English pop songs eight years ago--so it comes as no small surprise that I am nonetheless totally qualified to be a Squire at the local Medieval Times. I can lift 40 pounds. I am a team player. I do have an interest in moving up, someday, to a Knight role. It seems providential: half a  dozen bullet points, and with each one I tick off affirmatively I am more and more startled that this is in fact something I can do until I have said yes for them all. Having spent the afternoon realizing I am, at best, passably qualified for one or two of the hundreds of posting in art, education, nonprofit, writing, ETC, part-time, and gigs, Craigslist seems for a moment like kismet. There's only one thing Craigslist has offered me without hesitation, and if I clicked on it only out of curiosity, it seems for a moment that was no mistake: I was meant for this.

Except there's a line of fine print. The writing is kind of beautiful, actually, exquisitely nimble in its lawyerly care, so impressive I hardly feel discriminated against as it explains that a commitment to historic accuracy means the part has been scripted for a male. Females need not apply.

I have already learned from Craigslist ads that I am too old to be an egg donor, too childless to be a surrogate mother. Now I'm just too female to apply for a job wearing a tunic. I spend a few days wondering about gender identity and Medieval Times, about the historic accuracy of paper crowns, and by time I'm ready to bind my breast—because, seriously, what is more historically accurate than a female dressing as a man for the economic advantage or personal fulfillment denied to her sex?—it doesn't matter. The ad has come down.

Help Wanted

The Craigslist Dallas classifieds suggest that my most marketable skill is reliable transportation. Not if I want a paper route in the suburbs—the hiring manager specifically says that if you live 15 miles away or more it will NEVER BE WORTH IT—but it's my major asset if I become a school portrait photographer: "No photography experience necessary." I don't need reliable transportation to become an art handler, though I should be willing to do two long hauls a month. There is a "specialty genre" romance novelist looking for a ghost writer, could become a long term thing; she'll email details if you like, but you'll eventually need to meet. Otherwise, my best shot seems to be an employer that doesn't even list qualifications. There's a man looking for a copy editor for his novel, for instance, ideally someone who could also write the ending.

Summer Boys

Six boys with swords, or rather, long sticks and blunt plastic tapers wielded like swords, move up and down the driveway, travel the thin strip of concrete between a van's wide black side and the border of lawn, slosh back and forth like waves in a tank. The porch lights are on, the boys a bit more epic in the glow. If they see me on my evening walk, the boys take no notice, even as I pass by.

Last summer the heat was record-setting. Even now I'm told not to get comfortable, the mid-90s of July a false start to unrelenting 100-plus days that will last into September. Last summer, Dustin's barber gave him what is probably my favorite Dallas advice: "Don't let anyone tell you the summer of 1981 was worse than this." I don't doubt that the dog days are yet to come. I believe the faithful when they say it will be bad. But it's strange to me there isn't more said about the shoulder season, these days that would be hot except you can know how hot it can get, the evenings that still manage to cool down to something resembling pleasant. The evenings, in fact, are kind of lovely—the light hanging late, the air too warm to believe it's time to go home.

The boys are still there an hour later as I loop back on my own way home, but now they have settled some, a few are sitting. They are no less boyish in their repose. The porch light seems brighter now. They have yet to put down their swords.

Mr. Sushi

The woman on the airport shuttle from DFW keeps apologizing. She alternates, actually, she apologizes and then she blesses us. We will be blessed for taking her into this shuttle. She has been turned down by seventeen drivers, she says, the cab drivers say her destination is too close and the shuttle drivers say it's out of the way. If it weren't for her luggage and her shoes, she says, she'd have walked there. It's that close, she says. Except that everything is different. She's been away for four years, girl, and she's back for ten days, and they've changed the airport and the onramps and the roads all around it, and you know what she misses? The Whataburgers. They don't have those in Venice, Florida. They don't have crime there either, you know—zero. But really what she wants is Mexican food. They don't have that in Florida, either. A lot of gray-haireds in Florida, you know, amazing sunrises and sunsets and beaches, I love the beaches, but there's no Mexican food. And the best sushi anywhere is right here, right here in Dallas, look over there, it's over there, right off the freeway. Are you looking? Man, that's good stuff. Old school. Not kitschy, not retro, but old school. Every guy at Mr. Sushi has been there twelve, fourteen, fifteen, twenty years. I don't want this new age stuff—is this flower edible or not, you know, I mean forget it. Just give me the fish. Y'all like sushi? You gotta go. You have got to go! I've sent fifty, a hundred people there, and you know what? They keep going back. Brad's like, these people, they keep coming back, and I'm like, of course they do. This is the best sushi anywhere. You tell Brad: Ms. B said to hook you up!! Really, I'm so sorry for this. Bless y'all.

Dust

When my mother was a girl, in Utah, there were chores to be done. I never thought of them as Utah-specific chores. My sister-in-law did the same milking in Vermont. My brother and I did the same dish washing in California. But I've begun to wonder about the dusting.

When my mother, as a girl, was in charge of dusting, she did it every week. She didn't just do the edges, either, she actually bothered to lift up candlesticks and books and whatnot so she could run a cloth along the table or the shelf or whatever underneath. And when she taught me, as a girl, to do the dusting, she taught me pretty well the same thing. But she also taught me there was another school of thought. My aunt, for instance, believed dusting was unnecessary until there was enough dust accumulated on a given surface to draw one's finger through it and write a legible word.

While I did my best as a girl to dust in my mother's style, I always suspected my aunt had been on to something. I never owned a dust rag or can of Pledge in adult life, but then I didn't acquire wood furniture, either. Really, as long as I maintained the nomadic existence of a new apartment every year or so, I found an annual dusting entirely adequate. For years my only dusting routine has been a final wipe of windowsills and plastic blinds before I turned in the keys and reclaimed my security deposit. There must have been the occasional touch-up when company was coming, my mother raised me right, but I remember them only occasionally and only in the apartments I stayed in for two years or more.

I'm not much one for dusting here in Dallas, either, but here it's not for lack of accumulation—it's just impossible to keep up. Here, you can dust every week and still write you name on the dresser top just as often. Here I could keep my grocery list in finger-wide script on the coffee table. Here I dust everything before visitors arrive for a long weekend, and a new layer has settled before they've even packed to go home. You'd think there'd be a film on the windows. You'd think you'd feel it in the air. But instead it is like waking up after a snowstorm, as if the layer over everything was pushed up through the ground itself.

Hair

I have good hair in Texas. I often have pretty good hair—the curl and I living in harmony, neither of us trying to influence the other unduly—but my stats are better in Texas: better curl definition, better volume, better good hair days and more of them. The cut I gave myself in January is still kicking here in July, which for a short-haired person is a very long time, and I may indeed find myself with downright medium length hair before I am moved to trim it again.

Which is a shame, insofar as that will obviously delay the event of my first Texas haircut, but is frankly just as well as it will also delay my disappointment that I am not in fact the kind of person who gets adventurous haircuts in new places. A friend living in Nowhere, Maryland once visited me in Chicago  and asked where to go for a proper city haircut. I couldn't tell her. I had gone for years still having mine cut in California.

You know that scene in Roman Holiday when Audrey Hepburn gets a hair cut and it changes her because now she is part of the city? Over the years that scene has brought me thisclose to having an Athens haircut or a Seoul style or a New York do, but because I have no faith that curls have all that many options, I just excuse myself from the discovery of yet another hairdresser who's not all that comfortable with the special needs of curly hair. I did finally get someone to cut my hair in Chicago before I left for other cities, but they were cuts that gave me confidence I could do at least as well myself. Still, if any city can win me over to a new person cutting my hair, Dallas has both a legendary hair culture and a place with a neon sign I pass on my way to get groceries that says "Rocket Science Salon." I'll think about it;  probably as I pass the shears across the back of my neck and let red curls fall on our bathroom floor.

Texas Pop Rocket

A curious compromise: it's not illegal to use fireworks more or less whenever, but you can only buy fireworks in Texas a few weeks each year. And when I say you I mean anyone 12 years of age or older. No need for parental consent, no limit on how much you buy. Well, two limits: you can't get bottle rockets, and Texas won't actually sell you  something called a "Texas Pop Rocket," but don't fret; there'll be more than enough colorful explosives to get you through your grief. So stock up June 24 until midnight July 4, or else December 20 to midnight January 1. If that's not enough, you'll need the commitment to find a seller within 100 miles of the Mexican border in a county that has approved sales and visit in the brief window from May first through fifth. How interesting that we recognize two and a half fireworks holidays. Maybe if we had a border within 100 miles of Asia, we'd also celebrate Chinese New Year.

F is for Fossa

Madagascar's largest mammalian carnivore is kind of my new best friend. Fossa may, technically, be too busy leaping on branches and having a really long tail to return the sentiment, but that's fine. We're all busy. The day we met, for instance, my schedule also included visits to an albino alligator and the new koalas and giraffes you can feed with special wafers from a giraffe-height deck. But nothing I saw was so liquid, so lithe as the fossa—nothing so graceful or alert. I worked in a zoo once, and in four months never made such an exciting discovery as I did this afternoon. I felt like a child to have a new favorite animal, but who could be embarrassed to feel so lucky?

Hub

When I traded Chicago for Iowa, a lot of things changed but I mourned only one. Chicago has two, count them TWO, major airports. Iowa collectively can't really say that. The Chicago I left had nonstop flights, plenty of them, and often cheap, to boot. I could catch a flight for New York or DC after work on Friday and be back first thing Monday morning. I forgot what a layover even was as I visited family in Los Angeles or Oakland. Iowa, on the other hand, seemed to have the attitude that being a great place to be relieved it of any responsibility to help folks get in or out of the state. And while I've come to appreciate the tiny regional airport with its tiny regional lines and its supremely civilized free wifi, I missed the freedom of hubs.

Enter Dallas. Enter two, count them TWO, major airports. If everything else went wrong in Dallas, I figured, at least they made it easy to leave. Dallas is one of the eight places you can fly to directly from an Iowa airport like Cedar Rapids; if Dallas could do that, surely Dallas could take me anywhere. And it does. I've been to Iowa and New York and California and the Philippines, not to mention Indiana and Florida. There's usually a layover, now, and the bargain fares I remember seem to be a thing of the past. DFW is easier to love if you're riding the monorail between flights than if you are driving through the looping maze of over- and under-passes that require you to know not just the terminal of your airline but the actual number of your gate. After so many years of Southwest flights, Love Field field seems like an appropriate pilgrimage, even if they go very few places direct. Love Field does not have tiny regional lines or free wifi, but still retains the charm of a sweet old airport more or less in the middle of the city.

It occurs to me now that part of the freedom I loved in Chicago came from the swift and reliable lines of public transportation that took me out to the airport and then back home again. If you have some hours to spare, one can cobble together a public transport option to a Dallas airport. Depending on your mood, this is time enough to reconsider leaving, or one more reason to get out.

Filmed on Location

I once went to a rooftop theater in Athens, the acropolis lit up on the hill to my left, and saw the street where I learned to parallel park, a few blocks from my elementary school. In South Korea I went to a matinee and watched the Santa Barbara mountains as I sat in front of four Buddhist monks. It is, I had come to think, the birthright of Californians to travel the world and yet always have the movies ready to take them home.

This lasted until I'd lived in Chicago long enough to recognize it when it showed up on screen. There was Spider-man web-slinging from El car to El car in the Loop, Will Ferrell laid up in a hospital room in the Wrigley Building, the Dark Knight speeding through a chase scene on Lower Wacker Drive. Ferris Bueller' Day Off, it turned out, was a love letter to the city, had been the whole time though I'd never stopped to notice. 

Before I left for Iowa, I was visiting my parents, and they called three different video stores before they found one that had State Fair. This movie was what they knew about Iowa, and they had decided it was essential preparation for me. It was. And no sooner did I have an Iowa City library card than I was checking out Field of Dreams and The Bridges of Madison County.

Which brings us to Texas. A friend recently offered to watch with me every episode of Walker, Texas Ranger we can find on YouTube. It's worth noting that the Dallas Museum of Art is offering a series of movie nights this summer in the same spirit. Obviously I need to catch up with the new Dallas. Heck, I need to catch up on the old Dallas—both the 1980s television series and the 1950 Gary Cooper film. 

But before we all get our Benji-Robocop-Logan's Run on, let me thank, retroactively, the good people at Tween Studies for our recent screening of Slap Her... She's French, Kate Murphy for first introducing me to Office Space out at the farm, and Dr. Robert Archambeau's bowling film festival for including Bottle Rocket. And, especially, let me thank my parents who didn't stop my State Fair education with the 1945 version set at the Iowa State Fair, but made sure I saw some car racing before we turned off the 1962 Pat Boone/Bobby Darrin/Ann-Margaret State Fair, which of course is set, where else, in Dallas.

Drive Friendly—the Texan Way

I have a longstanding fondness for regionalisms. Even more than I enjoy the exoticness of an interstate rivalry—because it turns out there is a difference between Texas and Oklahoma; a deep, indisputable, irreconcilable difference—I am thrilled by the hypothesis that place shapes us. Of course there must be some degree of impact, but when does it rise to the point of culture or habit or type? When do you know an Illinois driver because they will only pass you on the right, or a Los Angeles driver because they will only cut you off if you do signal to get into their lane? I had begun to think these archetypes were just stereotypes, and poorly drawn at that, when I started driving in Texas. In Texas I have learned it's not state culture that make bad drivers; bad roads make bad drivers. And we have the suicide onramps and unpainted lanes and potholes of death to prove it.

Which is to say, I think Dallas has great drivers constantly tested by challenging conditions. The conditions may in fact be so challenging it is hard to tell how great the drivers are. Which means there are no small number of snickering asides about the contradiction suggested in the frequent roadside admonition: Drive Friendly—the Texan Way.

I like the phrase. I am willing to believe that without the imperative our driving would be even worse. It's worth noting that our legislature keeps renewing Drive Friendly as an official part of the Welcome to Texas sign. We are, in fact, so friendly, so on our best company manners, that we will only remind you that George W. Bush is ours if he is actually president. In 2008 the legislature had to draft and pass a specific new bill in order to take the "Proud to be the Home of President George W. Bush" off the Welcome to Texas signs. Otherwise, I suppose, it would have remained in place until we elected a new Texas president. Even at your friendliest, you can't please everyone, so I hope George W. Bush didn't take it personally. I hope, in fact, he was at least a little delighted to realize there was a time when it hadn't occurred to Texas it would eventually have to prepare itself for someone new.

The Common Grackle

The Common Grackle stalks across my lawn. That's how they move: stalking, in plagues—that's the technical term—always crossing by my window from the driveway side of the lawn towards the traffic side and out of my sight. They are the kind of birds that remind you birds were dinosaurs, not that dinosaurs necessarily had beady smart eyes and clawed feet lifted in purposeful steps, but something about the movement seems right. And they are all the more fearsome when they pant.

If you have never seen a bird pant, it perhaps has never occurred to you that (like dogs) they don't sweat, and the sun is hot on black feathers. The Grackles hold their beaks stiffly open, like chopsticks before the grasp, like cartoon birds looking for speech bubbles to title their chats. They don't seem distressed by the heat as they walk across the lawn with their beaks open. So naturally do they go about their business mouths agape that I wondered at first if this was part of their strategy, if they had learned one summer that worms despair in the heat and will, in suicidal ecstasy, fling themselves above the grass.

Anything You Ever Wanted to Know

Fridays on KERA, the NPR station that tells me I live in the geographical region of "North Texas," Jeff Whittington hosts a program called Anything You Ever Wanted to Know. I know, from pledge drive banter, that Jeff inherited this program from the guy who started it, and I assume, from the general tenor of Jeff's voice, that maybe it's not a show he would have made.

The format involves people calling or emailing in questions and other people calling or emailing in answers. Where can I go salt water swimming in Dallas? Are ingredients listed in descending order of weight, or volume? I remember this much of a plot of a book, does anyone know its title? It's a motley garage sale of information and opinion, and I was starting to thing of it as Anything You Ever Wanted Someone Else to Google For You when I realized it has a finer point. I've grown a fondness for the questions people ask that don't fit neatly into a search engine—Hey, I saw some construction off Mockingbird, does anyone know what they're building? I'm a U.S. serviceman in Japan, does anyone know where I can resurface a nonstick pan?—the reminder that we are valuable to each other.

I was especially intrigued last month to discover the show goes on break and plays archived episodes, that somehow this is a thing you don't just hand over to a substitute host. It seemed a little like playing last year's news or reading the classified from six months ago. But I listened for a while, as I inevitably do, and heard my favorite question ever: How do you bake cookies on your dashboard? As I was waiting for someone to explain why this is a bad, bad idea for innumerable health code reasons, what I got was a flood of people adding their two cents. It would appear, and other local media confirm, that this is something we do in Dallas. Google suggests folks in Minnesota and Pennsylvania and Arizona do this, too, but still. We have to do something with million bajillion degree summers, and this, my friends, is our heat stroke inducing silver lining. I'm looking forward to a batch myself. Let me know how yours turn out.

Chupacabra Ice Cream

Chupacabra Ice Cream is as much a gas station as it is ice cream shop, more so, really. The mini-mart is mini indeed, but you could still wander for quite a while before realizing there really is ice cream to be had. It's a narrow case tucked in the back, and you could change your mind and order a sandwich instead, though you can't see where there's any room in this tight space to make one. There is no goat flavored ice cream, no ribbons of strawberry swirl called blood, nothing at all to link Chupacabra ice cream to the goatsuckers reported in tabloids. Which, I think we can all agree, may be just as well. But if there is no cryptozoological thrill to the ice cream itself, my scoops had the familiar summer flavor of cheap cookies and cream, it's still nice to live in a neighborhood with a little imagination. The ice cream isn't really the point in the end; the bright signs on the corner are quite enough.

Softball-sized Hail

The Storm Prediction Center is certainly a serious place. I assume this from the number of official sounding words in its parent organization: the United States Department of Commerce National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Which I mention because I want you to take seriously that our government scientists have an official table for "object-to-size conversion for assessment and translation of severe hail reports." They would really prefer a measurement, thank you very much, but because there are so many estimators running around making colorful comparisons, they have a chart to compare hail size (in inches) to "object analog reported."

I mention this because that means "softball-sized hail" is a technical term. I had always wondered why the  weather forecasts in Dallas said things like "quarter sized hail" instead of "hail of one inch diameter." It seemed so unscientific, even for meteorology. But now that we have experienced not just a hail storm, but break-the-bedroom-window-sized hail, I appreciate the standardization. Officially, then, hail comes in the following sizes: marble/moth ball, penny, nickel, quarter, half dollar, walnut/ping pong ball, golf ball, hen egg, tennis ball, baseball, tea cup, grapefruit, and softball.

It's a strange thing to be proud of, but I'm kind of excited that at softball-sized hail, 4.50 inches diameter, we topped the scale. The chart doesn't say what comes next. I assume that means there are physical/chemical properties that keep hail from getting any bigger, or that any bigger than softball-sized hail—-poodle-sized hail, for instance—no one would believe your folksy comparison anyway.

Dallas is for Friends

Texas has a motto, my friends, and that motto is: Friendship.

That's it. No long statements about rights or liberties. Nothing pithy or anachronistic. No latin trying to class up the joint. No, the official state motto of Texas is "Friendship." Which means the signs along the highway that read "Drive Friendly—the Texan Way" are kind of an inside joke for fourth graders and the rest of us who keep up on official state things and wink at the curiously definitional quality of this roadside imperative. And while I find it kind of cool that our motto is in fact a translation, I can barely stand the irony that the Hasinai people gave us the Caddoan word táyshaʼ, meaning friends or allies, and in return we took the word and used it to name the land we then took from them and all their neighbors--not really a friendly thing to do at all.  

We may feel a little contrition about that. Which would explain why a place so hip that it has adopted "Don't Mess With Texas" as its official anti-littering campaign, is not so bold as to make known its otherwise enviable status as the BFF state.

Department of Public Safety

I like that one "surrenders" an out of state driver's license. You can't "exchange" or "trade" or "swap" it for an in-state equivalent. You don't use any latinate alchemy talk to express how with just some paperwork and an eye exam, poof, your perfectly good Iowa license is gone and a slick new Texas one appears in its place. No, you surrender. You admit to your lawlessness; you concede you are outgunned and you submit to Texas—though, I like to think, with the understanding that you put up a good fight first. The DMV is a strangely combative place, and I like that they have a language of appropriate hostility and domination to go with it.

There is no DMV in Texas. If you've never had a particularly positive experience at the Department of Motor Vehicles, that may sound like some kind of advance, an abolishment of note, a sort of "The Wicked Witch is dead!" event. But of course it's nothing so momentous. You can still plan on giving up half a day to stand in unfathomably long lines at a drab government waiting room hoping someone will be in the mood to give you a driver's license; in Texas, you'll just do all that at the Department of Public Safety. Everything will seem familiarly routine, except for maybe at the end, when the woman with the clip-on earrings who has just said you are this close to getting a vision restriction on your record now signs and stamps and files everything away and you ask, "Is that it?" Because it will surprise you how warmly she tells you, "Welcome to Texas," and it will startle you that, indeed, you genuinely feel welcomed.

Pegasus City

If you're one to believe a city's nickname, Texas is home to the Rose, Chile, Spinach, Turkey, Wildflower, Watermelon, Mohair, Horned Lizard, Cowboy, Cutting Horse, Goose Hunting, Fruit Cake, Leap Year, Blackeyed Pea, and Execution capitals of the world. None of these distinctions belong to Dallas.

The Big D is neither the "City of Champions" nor "Where Yee-Ha Meets Ole." We do not pretend to be the Polka or the Cheeseburger or the Dinosaur capital of Texas. Wikipedia claims "The Jingle City" and "Triple D" are nicknames of Dallas, though I've never heard them said out loud; which only underscores the fact that we have not managed a sobriquet as colorful as such fellow Texan cities as "The Town Without a Frown" and "The Town Without a Toothache."

This is inexplicable to me. Dallas, if anyone was bothering to market it to eight year old girls, would clearly be known as Pegasus City. This could have started as early as 1934, when the Magnolia Building, already Dallas' tallest skyscraper, crowned its own glory by erecting on its roof a red neon flying horse. It must have been stunning. They say you could see it for miles.

Now, the Magnolia Building is no longer the tallest skyscraper in town, just as the Magnolia Oil Company (the building's namesake) is no longer the Magnolia Oil Company. Nonetheless, the trademark of what is now Mobil Oil is also no longer just a corporate logo. Long since adopted as a civic symbol, the pegasus is used to mark bike paths and public trash cans and signs pointing motorists toward downtown attractions. You can, if you are in the mood, visit Pub Pegasus and Pegasus Bank, just as you might enroll at the Pegasus Charter School or read the Pegasus News.

But, while I am all for a collective pegasus pride, I like to think not everyone's noticed the iconic sign at the top of 108 S. Akard Street. Urban pegasus spotting is a fine hobby indeed, but ever so slightly more than I like discovering each new pegasus in my city, I like to think there are people who earnestly call up the very real businesses of Pegasus Solutions or Pegasus Logistics or Pegasus Advisors and, having no reference at all for the mythological name, imagine, just for a moment, that a pegasus will answer and all their problems will be solved.

Scorpions

We are an hour and a half outside of Dallas, nearly to the cabin where we have been invited to a birthday party, and on the right side of the road interrupting vast fields and pastureland, we pass in succession, at one mile intervals, the isolated stores Texas Boot, Texas Gun, and the tattoo parlor Texas Ink. It feels like a progression of some kind, and I ask Dustin what it all means, what ultimate Texas thing this path is leading us to. An hour later, when a party guest calls us all to the bathroom to see the scorpion twitching in the sink, I take that as my answer. It's not enough that there are snakes in the brush and children keep falling into cactus needles, there are scorpions climbing up through the plumbing.

"At least it's a small one," I remark, looking at the pale little thing, but I am corrected. It's the little ones that are the most venomous.

"You probably won't die," Ed tells me of their sting. "But you'll throw up all day." And I am thinking about this possibility as someone scoops up the apparition in a plastic cup and adds enough alcohol to drown it. Scorpions, someone remarks, are not good swimmers.

Piñata Grande

Everything, so they say, is bigger in Texas. I was hoping that applied mostly to hair, but either the heyday of massive bouffants has passed, or I'm traveling in the wrong circles. For a while, my best illustration of Texas-sized things was the Mexican restaurant where the tortilla chips were each half a tortilla. Now, however, I would like to pass the crown to the single largest piñata I have ever seen.

My mother used to fill piñatas for the last day of school, the name of every kid in her class written on a brown paper bag filled with kazoos and finger puppets. In Iowa I saw piñatas hung indoors and out, always big enough a grown person could expect to land a hit on a crepe paper side instead of swinging into the nearby television. But in Texas I met a piñata as tall as I am and wide as my wingspan, plus a foot deep. It was covered in big pink pieces of crate paper pushed into rose shapes over a big heart attached to a small rectangular base. If there was any irony that it took the diminutive Tinkerbell as its theme, I was too busy estimating how many human bodies would fit inside to notice. 

The 16-year-old birthday girl proudly announced she had filled it with five pounds of candy, and I thought why stop there? This was a piñata that didn't fit in a car. A piñata you might jump out of like a cake. Why just Ring Pops and Mexican mango suckers covered in hot chiles powder? Why not a month's worth of groceries of a lifetime supply of bikinis? It was only a question of how much weight the tree limb could support.

As the teenagers went at it with a bat and a stick and a long flat piece of fencing, an adult mentioned to me that the first piñatas were made of a thin ceramic, and I imagined how those piñatas must have been all shatter and shard, even as I watched this one thumped and smacked until its aggressors changed weapons and it was summarily slashed and stabbed. Progress was so slow there were calls to raise the piñata up to the canopy and let the teenage girls jump on and hang from its base until something tore loose. That seemed right to me, a collective savagery against this behemoth that would not die, but eventually one teenage boy brought it down, and no one seemed to have energy left to race for its spoils.

Election Day

Texas, as well you know by now, has provided Mitt Romney with the final votes necessary for the Republican nomination. Having not registered as a Republican, I have nothing to do with that. As I discovered between plastic partitions in a church community room yesterday, the Texas democrat's ballot is decidedly less interesting this primary season. Unless you take an interest in local races. There's been a lot in our news about redistricting and voter registration, which must have taken up the news cycle for looking at the candidates for Dallas County Sheriff. Happily, the Dallas Morning News offers a voter guide that allows one to compare candidates. Feel free to play along: http://c3.thevoterguide.org/v/dallas12/race-detail.do?id=10254371

Now don't waste your time with race for Railroad Commissioner--however much you may want to imagine a politician wearing striped overalls, there's just one candidate running unopposed. Instead compare the responses of 64 year-old Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez to her 23 year-old challenger Charlie J. Thomas. On the question, "Have you ever been arrested or involved in any criminal proceedings or civil suits?" Valdez says only, "No." Mr Thomas, on the other hand, takes two paragraphs to explain a public intoxication charge that lead to his resignation from UTSW Police Department.

Valdez is at all times professional and concise, if a little vague for my tastes. Mr. Thomas, however, describes his "Highlights of current civic involvement/accomplishment" as follows:


Currently I have been bogged down with the current economic situation that most Americans are experiencing; High gas prices and not enough pay. I am employed at two jobs working over 52 hours a week and still struggling to support myself like most other people.

He also takes the opportunity to discuss Vitamin C at one point, and a lengthy history of Abraham Lincoln, the political leader he most admires, includes the fact, "He stood 6 feet 4 inches," and ends with the conclusion, "He was someone like a Julius Caesar for America." If you wonder why Thomas is running for office, he's got a 30 paragraph explanation for that. I'll reprint the first paragraph here:

I am running to hopefully advance to greater office and fundamentally change this country in line with the U.S. Constitution. I do believe everyone has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thomas Jefferson once declared that, “ In questions of power let us hear no more of trust in men, but bind them down from mischief with the chains of the constitution.” And that is what I eventually want to do.

I find his honesty genuinely refreshing, if rarely on topic. This is a man whose response to "What specific improvements would you make to jail operations to ensure that the county doesn’t repeat the inspection failures of past years?" reads, in its entirety:


I believe the current Sheriff has done a good job on passing state inspections. I want to continue some of her policies.


I think it's kind of bold to slip in a Jefferson quote in a campaign for local office, bolder still to aspire to binding people down with the chains of the constitution, but the endorsement of the opposing candidate is downright special. I don't know if Charlie Thomas explains anything bigger about the politics of a state that produced Ron Paul or Rick Perry, but he's given me a reason to read the voter's guide with closer attention, and it's hard not to appreciate that.

Graduation

One of the things I admire about my neighborhood is the spirited use of white marker on car windows. You normally see the stuff advertising prices on a used car lot, though anyone trying to sell a vehicle around here makes a sign. If, however, it's Brianna's sweet sixteen or the Cougars are going to the finals or some driver/passenger has or will soon log basically any milestone/accomplishment of adolescent life, well we will break out the paint markers and go to town. Big letters, lots of exclamation marks, a circle framing where the driver's head will go and an arrow pointing to that circle with an explanation that takes up the rest of the windshield: enough writing to impair visibility and distract other motorists, but too gleeful to begrudge. Which is all to say, I knew it was graduation this weekend.

I didn't believe it, however, until a teenager in a neighboring district confirmed that after a week of standardized state testing, a few days before it was even decent to wear white shoes, Texas had released her children into the wilds of May. Having once been a schoolgirl myself, I find this news as subversive and enticing as the rumors in my Californian elementary school that, somewhere, some children got whole days off school because of snow. Dallas kids may not take off Illinois' elusive and mysterious Casimir Pulaski Day, but they seem to have everything else: both the occasional possibility of a snow day AND a school year that ends a full three weeks before my alma mater. I am, frankly, scandalized both that this is true and that they aren't shouting it from the rooftops. And I thought they were lucky to have paint markers.

Noah Puckerman

As a Californian, I would be hard pressed to tell you about famous Californians. I know my state history, in a fourth grade report kind of way, and I know there's a reason Richard Nixon's presidential library is in the Golden State. But big states don't keep track of their native sons. There is too much, there are too many to enumerate or remember. Big states, I always thought, found themselves inundated by so many points of pride they all kind of blended together into a general satisfied glow.

Not so in other places. For instance, did you know John Wayne was an Iowan? Ditto Herbert Hoover. Ashton Kutcher and Elijah Wood still are. We could go on, of course. Not forever, but a few more. Maybe enough to change how you think of Iowa.

Texas is a big state, and Dallas is a big city in it—second biggest city in the state, in fact, and the ninth biggest city nationwide. Which is perhaps why no one brings up famous natives to bolster the overall reputation of the joint. Perhaps they should.

I have it on good authority that I may be the only person I know who still watches the TV show Glee. So it may not mean much to mention that Mark Salling, the actor who plays Noah Puckerman, was born in Dallas. Not to worry: those of us in need of a city pride shot-in-the-arm, Dallas style, need not stop there. Lance Armstrong is one of ours. Likewise, Norah Jones. Aaron Spelling. Luke and Owen Wilson. Usher. Melinda Gates and Robin Wright were both born in Dallas. Bonnie and Clyde are just from nearby, so we don't feel responsible for their hooliganism. But if you were wondering who can lay claim to the singular Vanilla Ice, it's definitely us.

Society Bakery

Salted Caramel. Pecan Praline. Boston Cream. Oreo.

We started with four cupcakes, but we could have gone on. The Key Lime was beckoning, not to mention Red Velvet. And while awards and top rankings and internet testimonials suggest the Society Bakery makes the best cupcake in Dallas, we will never know how the competition compares because we started here and now have no incentive to go anywhere else.

Little Bean

I love that my mother, who has made a career of working with three to five year olds, lives in California but her favorite children's store is here in Dallas. It's not just the circus shadow puppets or the rack of tutus in the window; it might be the small but inscrutable selection of books (get yourself a copy of "Press Here," for starters).

For me it's also the fact that the owner once left a sigh in the window that said, in the cheeriest block letters: "CLOSED EARLY--BFF IN LABOR!" It doesn't hurt that the previous owner offered yoga classes in the off hours, and I keep hoping that the new owner will decide to follow suit. I may love most of all that the store is called Little Bean. Partly I am already endeared to the word bean, a stand alone pet name or suffix of affection in my family. Partly I love that it gives the owner's sisters the opportunity to crank call the shop and, in ridiculous fake voices, ask as earnestly as possible if they can buy some big beans.

But years from now I will still remember Little Bean as the place my mother found a handmade dolly in a silver dress, the hair red like mine and her embroidered brown eyes like asterisk stars, and bought this dolly and took her home. My parents inherited my grandmother's collection of wrapping paper some years ago--brown paper with cowboy boots, 1970's bright rainbow birds and little houses, sedate blue with lighter blue wedding bells--and this year my mother unspooled the last foot and a half of Strawberry Shortcake print, a wrapping paper quite likely last used for a birthday of mine in the 1980s, to wrap this dolly for me. I can't bear to throw the paper away. And I keep the tag tied to her arm where my mother has written in a cheerful black script of her own: "When the princess was crowned, everyone said she made a lovely queen."

Fireside Pies' strawberry shortcake

The first time Dustin and I went to Fireside Pies, an estimated 45 minute wait stretched into an hour and a half. And just as we were getting ready to make a break for it, to cross Henderson for the somewhat dubious looking Uptown Deli and devour whatever it was willing to sell us, someone called our name and whisked us off to the back porch. We were pretty sure that despite our hunger, nothing we ordered would seem worth the wait. Two bites into the Texas Bibb Salad, we were convinced otherwise.

We've never had a wait since, but I'm prepared for lines around the block as diners discover the strawberry shortcake now on special. I am a sucker for bread pudding, but I am a connoisseur of the shortcake. And before Wednesday I would have told you the best strawberry shortcake anywhere is at Boccali's in Ojai, CA. I would, in fact, have given you very specific instructions: sit outside, order the homemade lemonade, split the lasagna but get your own side salad, and then shortcakes all around! The strawberries are local, the whip cream whipped there, and the biscuit-style shortcake soaks everything up. You won't want to share more than a biteful. If you find yourself in California, I still recommend you stop by. But if you want the best anywhere, come to Texas.

I have instructions for Fireside Pies, too. Share a salad, share a pie--listen to the server when she says the white pie with mushroom and arugula is even better with prosciutto. And then prepare yourself, and ask for the strawberry shortcake. There's sugar in the crust of the biscuit, in fact it tastes a smudge like cake. The berries are fresh and sweet and vibrant red. The whip cream, whipped there of course, is whipped with a lavender simple syrup, which you won't quite be able to identify until the chef comes over to see how you like it. The chef is a beautiful young woman, I would think too young to be so accomplished, but the proof is on the plate. She asks what we think. We think we should order a second one. And for the next two months, for as long as they can get the strawberries, I think we will.

The One Quilt Shop

To be fair, there used to be more. There used to be the store that specialized in batiks and the store that specialized in brights and the store that catered to Civil War reproduction quilts. There are still other fabric stores in Dallas, but if you want a quilt store, if you want a place that will recommend black batting for a dark quilt so you don't suffer the bearding of white tufts pulling through, Quilters Connection is the only bet in town. And at the edge of city limits, it's just barely that.

You might think the problem is the heat, that quilting is a pastime of places with winter weather, but the heat makes shut-ins of Dallas, too, and quilting is as good a reason as any to stay in the air conditioning. In fact, spring is the slow season here, a respite of nice weather that has people biking and gardening between the big push to finish Christmas presents and flurry of graduation gifts. Which means this is a particularly a good time to work on the big tables in the back. In fact, you're welcome to call ahead to see if there's space, and if there's not a full class, there probably is.

There are lots of nice things to say about this place, and one of these day's I hope to get up the gumption to drop by the Featherweight Club on second Tuesdays, but what intrigues me at the moment is third Saturday's Late Night Sit & Sew, an event that goes from "5:30pm until ????" Once they didn't stop until they noticed it was getting light out. It wasn't until that morning that the QC owner realized there was a donut shop next door. Happily, the donut shop opens early.

The One Farmers' Market

Is it possible there is only one farmers' market in Dallas? It's a little hard to tell because what dominates the google search results is the Dallas Farmer's Market, which sounds like the right thing, and the wares are fresh, but with the exception of the occasional honey or nut or meat stalls, you won't find anything too much more local than the pineapples with the Costa Rica tags still on them.

Which, after much hunting, leaves only one other contender. Celebration Market's Saturday morning market seems to be the only true farmer's market, even if it is basically a few house of the Celebration Market restaurant yielding up some of the parking lot between the dine-in and take-out buildings for its usual local suppliers to sell to the locals. It may be the smallest farmer's market I have ever seen. That's including the one in Keene, NH (population 22,395) that is so strict that the folks growing mushrooms in their basement have to set up in an adjacent parking lot because they are not technically local as long as they outsource some of the ingredients they bottle in their Magic Mushroom Tea. No, Keene doesn't even need the mushroom vendors to outnumber the showing of stands in Dallas.

So, how can a city of 1.2 million people have a six-stand farmers' market? Nothing against the jams or the earrings or the special Cinco de Mayo paper flowers crowding out the vegetables, and nothing against the beautiful summer squash and bell peppers and Russet potatoes I saw fit to bring home today, even if the peppers were beginning to wrinkle by evening. But seriously: how is that possible? How is it possible that if the grocery store has a local option, for instance the mushrooms I buy every week, it has to compete with the organic option because the two are never the same?

I am going to assume Dallas has only one farmers' market because it only needs one, because the one we have is so good there is no room for competition. And maybe next week, when I buy chicken and eggs, I'll come to believe it, too.

Milk & Honey

I like to think of my brain as a problem-solving sort of brain, except that once it has a task there is no calling it off, even if the problem is solved. For instance, two years ago my brother got married. Standing up as his best person, I needed something butter yellow to wear. That sounds easy enough, but I looked for months and there was nothing the right color, nothing the right cut, nothing the right mood, nothing the right size. Eventually I found myself in a yellow sleeveless shirt and black capri pants and there were lots of pictures and my brother was married and all was well. Except that I still couldn't pass a yellow thing in a store without giving it a second look. Except that my brain was still looking for the perfect yellow dress to wear to my beloved brother's wedding.

In the period of time while I was visiting Dallas but didn't live here yet, there was a jewelry store called The Shining which displayed its wears on taxidermied desert animals. The jewelry wasn't really my style, but I admired their spirit, and I brought it up whenever anyone asked me what there was of interest to be found in distant, dusty Dallas.

The Shining closed, even as I was opening the moving boxes in the new apartment, but something else has cropped up in its place. Milk & Honey is one of those rare clothing boutiques that has both snazzy new duds and a price point so reasonable it is its own conversation piece. And it is here that I find the butter-yellow summer-wedding dress I've been searching for. It is a sleeveless light cotton with a thin tie at the waist and a big butter-yellow cloth flower on the left shoulder strap. It might not actually have been formal enough for a member of the wedding party, but it was an early afternoon wedding in Southern California, and at this point I'm going to split hairs. This is a dress that makes my brain think, "We found it!" And just in time to celebrate their two-year anniversary--which, by the way, actually is the "cotton anniversary."

Resistance is Feudal

I have been asking Dustin when he will take me to Medieval Times. We have one here in Dallas right next to the freeway, and I assume we will only be able to drive past it so many times before something will snap and we will decide it is irresistible. Add that to the fact I like to eat with my hands and a billboard we regularly pass that informs us, on Medieval Times' behalf, that "Resistance is Feudal," and the idea is not so far fetched. Indeed, it seems inevitable.

And yet every time I ask Dustin if we should go to dinner and a tournament, he looks at me with raw fear. Now, Dustin likes an adjustable paper crown as much as the next guy; but while he doesn't take issue with my fourth grade girl scouts outing to the Buena Park MT, the fact that my college boyfriend chose the Chicagoland location for our first Valentine's Day has seared into Dustin's brain.

"This is different," I say, but Dustin shakes his head. He remembers that the Chicago Valentine's trip started out as an ironic gesture, too, but that it stopped being funny in the Great Hall, where someone in period dress calls you up and announces loudly to the room why you've been singled out. It was fine at first--Anthony was having a birthday, Jessica got straight A's--but then the theme changed to romance. Gill and Meredith were celebrating their 37th anniversary, Mary and Jim their 10th. Mark and Cindy just got married. Leona and Richard were there on their honeymoon. I would have been in a better mood had my boyfriend been more forthcoming. He and half of the couple we were now on a double date with had been joking about this as the most ridiculous possible date for a few weeks, but they had seemed so guileless when they told us they were planning a Valentine's surprise, that all we had to do was dress nicely and be ready to leave at six.

So when the honeymooning couple accepted their souvenir scroll, I turned to my college boyfriend and said I would leave if someone proposed. Which of course was the cue for the announcer to call up Steve and Sarah. Steve did all of the talking. Steve talked about how wonderful Sarah was, how the two months they'd known each other had been the best two months of his life, how ever since they first started chatting online he'd felt a connection. And then he got on one knee and proposed. Sarah did not actually say anything. She kind of nodded enough to make him stand up and someone opened the grand doors and we all tried to file past them without making eye contact. It didn't matter that our knight didn't win.

"Just don't propose to me there," I say, and Dustin squints his eyes as if trying to literally see how this could possibly be a good idea. But then we've already driven past the castle-style building and its big illuminated marquee, and before we even hit the interchange, the mood has passed.

The Best Thing About Austin: It's not that far from Dallas

I have gotten so used to people saying the best thing about Dallas is that "it's not that far from Austin," so used to shrugging off the punchline and trying to steer the conversation to a more productive topic, that I've never though to ask what's so great about Austin, anyway. On Saturday, having only been in Austin a few house, I mention this omission to my new Austinite friends at wedding reception Table 8. Instead of telling me about Amy's Ice Cream (which I have just discovered) or the largest urban bat colony in North America (something I now can't wait to see), the Austinites say nothing about their city; they rush to the defense of Dallas.

"No, no," a handsome law associate assures me. "Dallas gets the best musicals." His girlfriend nods heartily. "The summer I interned in Dallas, we saw all sorts of stuff. Shows coming from Broadway always stop there. We've got other music here, but if you want all that cultural stuff, museums or whatever, Dallas has us beat."

I am caught totally off guard. I don't know what to say. I can hardly keep up with their sincerity, with their praise. And it occurs to me that the best thing about Austin is Austinites. And the closer Dallas gets to them, the luckier we are.

Calle Doce

Pat has been telling me about Schlitterbahn. Pat has been telling me generally about being on the water in Texas--in lakes, in waterparks, anywhere you can sit in an inner tube  and maybe tether along a second inner tube to hold your drinks. And then the subject turns to food.

"Do you like seafood?" Pat asks me.

"Who doesn't?" I reply gamely.

Well, for starters, Pat. Pat's recommendations are amazing in this regard. Do you like brisket? Pat doesn't, but she knows a place you shouldn't miss.

I actually don't have strong feelings about seafood in general, but fortunately for all of us, Pat's husband does. And after dinner on Wednesday, I have to agree: if you have even a passing interest in seafood, Calle Doce is a must. The frozen margaritas alone might be worth it, but what a shame to miss the shrimp cocktail.

Pat is a Dallas girl from way back. And even if she and Ed live outside of town now, she hasn't lost touch with things that make this city great. "Have you been to Blue Goose? You have to go to Blue Goose." "You want tamales? My mom has this lady." She is up on every festival and art faire and parade. Even her stories about the nuisances, about the neighbors that used to throw unauthorized birthday parties in their backyard when they went away for the weekend, are so good you have to be grateful for them, too.

Fireflies

Dallas has fireflies!

If I'd grown up in a place that has fireflies, that sentence ends would a period. But the bit of California I was raised in was and is and ever will be lighting-bug-free. So it is a shock and a delight every time fireflies turn up. And indeed they turn up everywhere: in Illinois and New Hampshire and North Carolina and Iowa, an element of maybe every summer I've spent since I left for college. Yet still I think of fireflies as the exception rather than the norm. Even last night, when I walked Dustin home from the light rail station and halfway home we spotted the first lighting bugs of the season, as if it had never happened before.

Sometimes the things I love about Dallas are not the things unique to Dallas, but the good things I know from somewhere else and am fortunate enough to find again here. I think about them whenever I pass porches with rocking chairs and porch swings, or trees in the front yard with rope swings dangling from high old branches. And I am thankful for every firefly.

Jimmy's Food Store

I am only a little disappointed to know that the Italian grocer/deli on Fitzhugh does not actually go by the name "Jimmy's Meat Store." Dustin has been suggesting we go there, to Jimmy's Meat Store, for ages and I've always been rather taken with its focus and frankness. We've had good intentions, indeed it featured prominently on the itinerary when my dad was coming to visit, but somehow we never found the time to go cold cuts sight seeing until last weekend. It turns out, of course, that Jimmy's is not just a Meat store but a Food store, and all this time we were waiting for some sort of prosciutto event or salami spectacular to occasion a trip, we could have made any number of other excuses. Indeed, Jimmy has anticipated not only our meat needs, but our desire for fresh pasta and pickled vegetables and imported candies, as well.

Jimmy's could sell anything and it would probably be worth it just to hang around and listen to the regulars discuss their sandwich orders, whether to sit inside or outside, how the weather has been so unseasonal lately. There's a way people can talk, especially when shopping, that takes the role of a critic while assuming a sympathetic audience, because we all can agree it's still a little too early for tomatoes. Indeed, it is tempting to become a regular myself, to be party to that same easy familiarity, and so far I haven't even found the nerve to order something from the counter. A friend once explained to me that New York City isn't rude, it's just a place that has no tolerance for inefficiencies; and there is nothing more inefficient than not knowing your order when your spot in line comes up. Jimmy's strikes me as the kind of place that doesn't have time for the amateur hour, even on a lazy Saturday afternoon where nothing seems to be happening with any great speed.

Which is fine. I'm not feeling up to the adventure of selecting an unfamiliar cut of meat, and there are aisles of Italian and Texan products to keep me amused. In honor of Easter, Dustin and I take a package of bunny shaped pasta and the big tub of "homemade marinara." Out of sheer curiosity, I buy "La dolce Fattoria fondente." La dolce is shaped like a small football, or rather, a small football wrapped in a sheet of blue mylar printed with cartoon farm animals. A cardboard label showing a cartoon farm with the smiling disembodied heads of a cow, pig, sheep, and bunny cinches collars the mylar at the top so it fans out like a floral arrangement in a football-shaped vase. La dolce does not rattle when I shake it, but then, not knowing what it is, I don't shake it too hard. I have my choice of farm animals with a pink background or farm animals with a blue background, and having little else to go on, I pick a blue one because someone has just handed a blue one to a little boy being held by a tall man talking to someone else. Clearly, the blue ones are worth having. After dinner, we understand why.

That La dolce is in fact a big chocolate Easter egg does not come as a big surprise, but the fact that the chocolate is dark and delicious does. It is good chocolate in its own right, but it is shockingly good for chocolate that both comes in a novelty shape and is accompanied by a toy. The toy is a surprise of its own: first that there is one, and then that somebody somewhere decided that a toy in the shape of an insect belonged anywhere near a food product. I like to think that it is traditional, that somewhere there is an Easter Bug. Technically, it is probably an Easter Arachnic--the monochrome mint green color doesn't suggest a special commitment to accurate representation, but there are eight segmented legs extending from its notably egg-shaped body and the chelicera are convincing. Why this bit of molded plastic is hinged so it can make a clicking noise is beyond me, but maybe it will make sense next year, when I buy another one.

The "Devil's Strip"

I learn on the radio:

In Ohio, the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb is called a "tree lawn." In other parts of the country, it is a "curb," a "devil’s strip," a "parkway," a "swale," or a "street lawn." More than a dozen names for this can be found in the Dictionary of American Regional English.

I don’t know what they call it here in Dallas, but the ones flanking Gaston--a four lane street plus medians and turn lanes--seem unnaturally thin, vestigial, nominal. I myself don’t have a name for them, wouldn’t know what to call them anywhere, but I suspect they are part of what makes it terrifying to walk anywhere from my apartment. They are simply too scant a barrier from the rush of trucks and SUVs going past. I am forever afraid that, if they don’t jump the curb and hit me outright, I will be clipped by a side mirror and thrown to the ground.

So instead I court side streets, tracing the main arteries as if by their capillaries until my path is inevitably intersected by another main road. And there are so many roads. This one to the grocery store. This one downtown. This to the freeway and that to the other freeway and another one over there to go to the airport.

But it helps to keep doing it. To keep finding reasons to leave the house. To keep finding new ways to get to those new places. And it helps to have a new word, a bounty of them actually, to talk about it.

The Princess Party

I was not invited to this party. I could not, in fact, tell if this princess-themed soiree was a little girl's birthday party or a grown woman's bachelorette party.

I take my evening walk along Swiss Avenue because it has broad quiet streets and well-tended flora in front of some rather big, beautiful old houses. It is quiet at all hours, and at night lit not only by street lamps but by lights high in the branches of grand old trees. Not a few of the houses resemble tasteful little castles, a likeness I was pleased to see had not gone unnoticed by the occupants of this one house in particular, where a red carpet had been rolled from the front door down a big S-curved walk to the concrete steps that meet the sidewalk. Pink arches of little Christmas tree lights crowned the walkway, and with a pair of Disney castle balloons greeting you at the sidewalk end. The front door opened and a woman walked out as I turned to ask Dustin, "What if we went in?"

Before he could answer, a second woman opened the same front door and called after the first woman, "Do you want to take some pixie dust?" I haven't any idea what that means, and I didn't hear the reply, but I was satisfied enough to walk on.

Sheltering

In Iowa it was always a test. Tornados came through every so often, but never when I was home. Coming back from Greece one summer I retrieved my messages and spent a minute deleting the automated warnings and all-clears. A friend decided to rent a house where the garage had been damaged by some previous storm and she had to steer her silver Toyota around the fallen cinderblocks. And starting early every spring the test sirens went off regularly, but it was always a test.

Not so in Texas. In Texas I have reason to debate whether to shelter in a closet or the bathtub. In Texas I have the word "sheltering," which for all my midwest summers had never found its way into my lexicon of things that happen in the world. In Texas the local NPR station switches to continuous storm coverage, interrupted periodically by national news spots, though for the next few hours we are the national news. In Texas I learn the word "tornadic"-- as in tornadic activity, tornadic winds, tornadic conditions--because for a while the tornado modifies everything.

The upstairs neighbors once mentioned that before we moved in, they opened the unlocked door and sheltered in our unit. I found that comforting when they mentioned it. I found it comforting, too, as I sat in a bathtub full of pillows, listening to the radio, and listening for their knock on the door.

Quirky Museums

I was in Iceland when I first read about The Pest Shop, a museum of cockroach dioramas next door to the extermination business that supplies all the models. I was in Iowa when I read about the Devil's Rope Museum, one of our fine nation's barbed wire museums. In Iceland I was flipping through the archives of the Icelandic Phallological Museum. In Iowa, I wasn't four blocks from the second oldest natural history museum west of the Mississippi and its not infrequently costumed Ice Age giant ground sloth. Which is to say, I love a good museum, and I've been keeping tabs on Texas for a while.

So, too, has the New York Times. Even as I was wondering whether to cross the metroplex for the Fort Worth art museums or drive back the two hours towards Houston to catch the Texas Prison Museum during business hours, Annie Nilsson brought this article to my attention. The National Museum of Funeral History might just be my next destination.

Breakaway

"Texas is the only state to enter the union by treaty." This is the sort of superlative I now think of when I reflect on all the people I've talked to who know Dallas but have nothing nice to say about it--nothing. When it doubt, Dallas is part of Texas. And Texas, let's face it, is a pretty superlative kind of place. There's always something worth saying about Texas.

Texas, as you may well know, is second to California for population, second to Alaska for size. And while I always that thought that Chicago, as the Second City, really did embrace the Avis advertisement mentality “We’re #2, so we try harder,” I get the feeling Texas still takes itself as second to none.

Among its many firsts, Texas entered the union with the unique option to, at some future whim, break itself into up to four additional states. We still might. At any moment. Provided we don't decide instead to just break away altogether. Culture and politics aside, I always thought that just plain geographically it resembled India, a subcontinent of its own. The good people at NPR have done one better: as of today, they have liberated us. I'll let them explain the details.

Rent Out Texas

My father likes a good quote. “Whiskey’s for drinking; water’s for fightin’ over,” for instance. Or, “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

When I was growing up, I remember him saying more than once, “If I owned Hell and Texas, I’d live in Hell and rent out Texas.” He didn’t credit this paraphrase of General Phillip Sheridan’s 1866 observation, or otherwise contextualize it as anything other than a great turn of phrase. It occurs to me now that his relish of the phrase might have been influenced by his military training at Fort Sam Houston, but that was something else he didn’t elaborate on—except to say that he was surprised in the service to discover that people still read comic books; he hadn’t seen one in years and had sort of assumed comic books went out of print some time after he grew up and stopped buying them.

As a person who now actually does rent in Texas, I feel I should say, at the very least, that it is better than living in Hell. I have deep affection for other places I’ve lived—for the garden apartment I swore I would never leave unless I had to leave Chicago itself, for my Iowa walk-up with north-, east-, and west-facing windows—and this Dallas apartment is no slouch. It is, in fact, the only apartment I can remember looking at that already had the walls painted in anything resembling a color that improved the place. Likewise, the only apartment already hung with floor-to-ceiling curtains, and certainly the only one with a chandelier.

Of course I can’t speak to Hell. Hell may have more cabinets and more counter space. Hell may be closer to the grocery store and major lines of public transportation.

While it probably speaks to nothing so much as the challenges of governing a young state in the early years of Reconstruction, I used to wonder if the Sheridan statement was really about the choices one makes as a landlord. In that reading, maybe Sheridan’s point was that he would sacrifice the more comfortable and attractive situation if that property happened to offer a better return when put on the rental market. Because who would rent Hell? Unless Hell comes with in-unit washer/dryer. I have never seen so many Laundromats as soak and wash and spin right here in my current neighborhood. Some people might prefer not to make the trip.