Texas High School Football

There is a cheer team and a flags team and a spirit team and a color guard and I'm not sure which one is the group of young ladies wearing sequin-spangled hats and which one throws fake rifles spinning into the air but I know it's not the one wearing overalls hand-painted in school colors because they are the Rock Hawks or the Hawks Rock or some such thing. I learn one marching band needs eight xylophones on the field for the half-time show. I learn that the same inflatable architecture that brought you the bouncy castle can also make a tunnel, complete with fog machine and inflatable bird head and inflatable talons, and it is so distracting you may not notice that an entire football team is crowded behind it waiting to run through and onto the field. I know you can sit close enough that the players on the field look bigger than the players on the jumbotron, and I know that if you pay for season tickets you can sit in real molded-like-chairs-with-back-support-and-everything seating, but if you buy one ticket at a time you'll be sitting in the bleachers next to the marching band. I know "a moment of student expression" is not the introduction to a brief interpretative dance because I learn it is a prayer over the PA system. I know I'm rooting for the girl holding the A to catch up to the H so the kerning is right as they run the length of the field with the flags that spell out H-A-W-K-S. I know that the sun goes down just before game time and everyone is beautiful in the glow and the air is noticeably but pleasantly warm even at the final whistle. I know I should only cheer when it's my team that does something admirable, but I'm so proud when the Rebels finally break through the Hawks defensive line that I stand and I shout and I punch the air. And we are so far ahead that no one comments on my eccentricity. They just wave their fans in the warm night air and wait for the next down.

The Smoking Gun

When Dustin and I moved into an apartment building with a little courtyard patio with some deck chairs and a barbecue, we didn't think we would ever use the grill. It seemed to much like apartments with a lap pool in the middle, pools that inevitably were always too cold and and too chlorinated and just collected leaves. But we were wrong. We grill steak tips and shish kebobs and burgers when the mood is right. I go on runs and walks in the evening and appreciate how many neighborhoods smell deliciously like grilling. It was all becoming so absolutely ordinary that I might not have noticed the grill outside a nearby apartment building had someone not said, "Hey, look! A gun!" Pistol might be more the word, revolver if the chambers could move, but sure enough it was a grill fashioned to hold coals where the cylinder would be, and then accessorized with a barrel and a backstrap and a supporting post to keep it level. I feel better that it is pointed away from traffic, but that consolation is tarnished by the fact that this gun grill is strangely diminutive, low to the ground, like a child's toy.

Cheaters: An Anniversary

This time last year Dustin was on a bus. He was coming home. It was starting to get dark outside, and a guy in a nearby seat asked, "What time is it?" Dustin told him.

"Whatcha reading?" the guy on the bus asked. Dustin told him.

"Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend?" She lives in Iowa, Dustin said.

"Well you better hope she doesn't watch that show Cheaters. Do you watch that show? Cheaters?" the bus guy asked. Dustin didn't. The guy on the bus explained that it was a show that caught people cheating on their significant others. The guy on the bus didn't say "reality TV" or "Gotcha Journalism." The guy on the bus said they used to go from city to city to film it. But then they got to Dallas. They got to Dallas and they found so much material they've been filming here for two years.

"So you gotta be careful," the bus guy told my boyfriend. "You cheat on her in Dallas, she's gonna know."

Toads

I liked the ring of a "Texas Toad Strangler," the sudden heavy downpours that fill the gutters past their banks and, at their worst, make the view from car windows resemble the sloshing sheeting frenzied view hitting hard against the windows in a car wash. I liked the color of the expression, its quirky regionalism. I liked it a lot more before I started meeting the toads. What they do during the day I don't know, but I can't take an evening walk without a jerk of movement in the grass snagging at my peripheral vision. They seem always to be in the devil's strip, seem always to be heading toward the curb and the asphalt still not cool even though the sun's gone down. I always, pointlessly, try to council them back into the grass, even though I always imagine the sharp blades of it must be rough and uncomfortable and prodding against the toad's soft belly. They are unmoved by my concern, respond only to the towering of my figure suddenly stopped and bent over at them. And they bound in perfect arcs, punctuated by the sound of body against grass, until the sound is the softer noise of body against street.

Neiman Marcus

Neiman Marcus used to use a hyphen—Neiman-Marcus—a fact I reflect on as I pass the doors to its first and flagship store, where a Neiman-script N and a Marcus-script M serve as the door handles to every pair of doors, undone with every entry, restored with every door shut. Inside there are $650 scarves and smoking slippers—sure to be a big deal this Fall—and a woman named Shari who will smile at your interest in Neiman history and point out the line where two different floorings meet, the marble belonging to the store's original footprint and the wood part of the expansion, and before you can leave she will give you her card and a petite bottle of water, even though there's a coffee bar connecting the shoe department with the scarves, and you will think she is being very nice considering the outfit you decided on back when it was raining so hard you couldn't see.

That's Dr. Botts' Dot, To You

The "raised pavement marker" is a familiar bump in the road, and if you know it by any name at all, you might call it a Botts' Dot. No one calls it a Dr. Elbert Dysart Botts' Dot, which is only a shame because you might never otherwise say the words "Elbert" or "Dysart," but what breaks my heart is that this Missourian born in 1893 died in 1962 California having never driven over one of his eponymous dots. The first dot wasn't secured to the road until 1966.

Fifteen years ago, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that thrermoplastic stripes might replace California's 20 million Botts' Dots. If the California dot faces extinction, the Texas dot has adapted.
It is huge. I mean enormous. I mean you see one and you know it has eaten all the other dots on its block and grown bloated and shiny and white from their corpses. Not that they evidence violence; no, they are perfect, polished, shining hemispheres—and they stay that way because they are too big to run over. Seriously, they are intimidating. They are the size of volleyballs, a hybrid of speed bumps and the common dot, and they suddenly define a turn lane as if to terminate forever the fraternization of those who would turn left and those who would drive straight through. I assume these giant domes have a name of their own, but I suspect that if you used it, you would preface it with a title. Mr. Dome, for instance, Sargent Dome, Your Mighty Excellency High Commander Dome, and so on. But only if you dared to address them at all.

The Central Library

Sometimes, when I am downtown, I understand why you would film Robocop here. Dallas is a little gritty, in the way neglected things are, and there are architectural choices about concrete buildings that make you think someone in the 1960s was trying to create a city of the future, even as you can't help noticing how that future never came to pass. But you walk another block or two and there's the stone work from an earlier era, the mosaics and the statuary, buildings that must of been bold and dramatic and stately in their day, but the beauty has faded, their grandeur and their glory easily imagined but largely passed.

The Central branch of the Dallas Public Library is downtown among the government building and department stores. It seems quiet, even for a library, but comfortable. If people have come to the third floor in the middle of the day, they seem to have come for the computers, and I have a row of tables along the wall of windows all to myself. When I leave, I push the button to call the elevator, and the doors open. Three people walk out laughing, leave a fourth still in the box. I ask the man if this elevator is going down. "No," he says, and another elevator dings behind me. As the doors close on his elevator he adds this consolation: "You wouldn't want to be in here anyway—it smells like ass."

Buck-ee's

The stretch of Interstate 35 between Dallas and Houston is notable for many things—a lot of advertising for "fried pies,"  the off-ramp for both the Texas State Prison (just west of the highway) and the Texas State Prison Museum (just to the east), an unthinkable amount of green fields for what you might have thought was a desert state—not the least of which is the reocurrance of a cheerful cartoon beaver wearing a red cap at the various Buc-ee's establishments along the way. The blog Yodi's Big Move gives a tremendous account of this 60-pump "rest stop/convenience store/gas station/deli/bakery/gift shop," and I bow to the headline writer at The Statesman for the gem "Buc-ee's gnaws itself a notch on Texas' tourism belt." So wholly has the phenomenon been treated that I find there is almost nothing more to add, except to say that one night from a bus I watched a Buc-ee's marquee blink out phrases in patterns of red light bulbs overhanging an offramp. Some phrases were connected, a whole sentence parsed out in two or three consecutive messages, the marquee flashing one fragment for two seconds and then blinking to the next. Buc-ee's had a lot to say that night, cycled through statements without repeating for as long as I could keep the marquee in sight, calling out to me, FABULOUS RESTROOMS, blink, APPLY TODAY.

We Are 1976

The first thing Dustin found that he thought would make me feel at home here in Dallas was a letterpress and Japanese toy shop he discovered somewhere between groceries at the Sunflower Market and iced coffee at The Pearl Cup. When he told me, he was visibly relieved to have found anything at all. As he settled in to the knowledge of it, he remained more than a little proud of himself, and I must say he had every right. We Are 1976 is responsible for at least half the cards I've mailed in the last year, as well as my current crush on Japanese fabric handkerchiefs and patterned washi tape. But it wasn't until they opened the new Bishop Avenue location with its big open room and three presses just waiting to run that I actually sighed. There are no cases of type yet, maybe never will be, and the polymer plates have to be ordered off-site, and there won't be workshops until at least December, but just the sight of a Vandercook with a clean tympan and a neat rack of furniture made me reimagine what life in Dallas could be.

Mum's the Word

A Texas teenager just took me to task for not knowing what a mum is. 

It started with the text message, This is my mum so far what u think. On the screen of my decidedly not-smart phone, what I see is the fanciest first prize fair ribbon ever. Its head is three half-domes that might be full bloom flowers or might be those clusters of looped ribbon you stick on top of birthday presents. The top two are white and there's a green one at the bottom of what I think is a triangle but which I am informed is actually a heart, which I am sure matters, but I am already distracted by the streams and streams of green ribbons rushing from the heart like a unicorn's magical swishing tail. It's hard to determine actual size from the image, but even at postage stamp scale I can tell it is beautiful and grandiose and very green, except where it is white or where school-spirited gold words run vertically down the thickest ribbons in bold block caps. What I think is that it's amazing. What I can't imagine is what it will be when it's done. What I ask is: what is a mum?

A day later, on the phone, the teenager is still shocked.

"You don't know what a mum is?" she repeats.

"Like the flower?" I ask.

"You really don't know what a mum is?"

"Not unless it's a flower."

"Seriously, you don't know what a mum is?"

"I'm guessing it's not a flower."

Don't doubt yourself, dear reader: a mum IS a flower. Indeed, because it was for so long the specific flower given to a girl for homecoming, it is now the name for the whole wearable display that single flower has since morphed into. Reuters tells me it was somewhere in the 1970s to 1990s that things got bigger, and nowadays they can weigh as much as 30 pounds and cost as much as $500. If you don't buy one at the grocery store or make your own, there's a whole cottage industry at your service. LED lights or audio equipment can be built in. A harness may be required. Mostly it's a torso-length glory of ribbon and silk flowers, and clearly there is no broach or corsage to compare them to. I am duly impressed. And I am a little scared to go to the grocery store until homecoming is over.

Mr. Macintosh & The Drunken Nut

Why has no one else adopted the business model of cute young women in even cuter faux vintage aprons leisurely skinning apples behind the counter and selling pie at $5 a slice in a sweet little parlor room? Is it because there are only so many places you can set up a pie shop where the address is 314? 

The Emporium is the kind of pie shop that does not currently have its own website, yet the internet tells me that in the last year it has grown from selling at markets to having a Mardi Gras pop-up shop and now has transitioned again to a permanent place you can stop in and curse because they have no more slices of Smooth Operator. The internet also tells me there's a kitchen in the back that handles the wholesale business, and I like to think that if there are three or four young women in adorable aprons milling about the charming shop kitchen behind the counter, there are a dozen such bakers in the back. 

The whole experience is coo-worthy. The curtain rods alone get me, with their sweet white lace curtains shading just the lower half of the windows with freshly painted sills. Dustin and I could pick no favorite between our respective slices of Drunken Nut and Mr. Macintosh, the most recent bite was always our favorite. We will certainly go again. We were not three bites in before we were making list of all the people we would bring to visit. But, and we feel a little provocative even saying this out loud, the recipe we wanted to take away was for Lance's Iced Tea. We will go through every kind of pie they will serve us—I am particularly looking forward to their ginger pumpkin this fall—but we will never stray from the iced tea.

Cynthia

Debbie, in 11D, has the window seat, and every time a bead of water condenses in the ceiling panels and drops on her head, she tells me about it. Between the water torture and a high pitched squeal that now fills the cabin, Debbie is convinced she is being punished by the employers that sent her on this business trip.

"Yeah?" I ask. "Any idea what you did?"

"Oh, there's plenty!" Debbie assures me. By time the pilot announces we are in a holding pattern over Dallas, that we have been waiting for the radios at the airport to come back online but now we are running out of fuel and will return to Houston, Debbie is convinced. She deserves this. It would probably be worse, but there's a priest a few rows up. And it perhaps is because of this fatalistic mood that she changes the subject.

"What's your name?" Debbie asks me, and when I say Kendra she wrinkles her nose like I'm wrong.

"I would have said Cynthia," Debbie says. I ask how one knows a Cynthia, and Debbie doesn't skip a beat. "Cynthias are wholesome and down-to-earth and intelligent and kind. Every last one." Kendras, it turns out, are harder to pin down. You can't stereotype a Kendra. "I've known outdoorsy ones and ones that party 24-7," Debbie says. "One thing you can count on, though: a Michael is no good."

I enquire if it matters if said Michael goes by Mike or Mikey or M. Debbie, who is always mistaken on the phone for Cathy, thinks a moment and then shakes her head. "No. They're all just as bad."

La Popular

Dustin calls from Texas to tell me, "I wish you were here..."

I am thinking this is a sweet sentiment, until he finishes the thought.

"...If you were here, I wouldn't have eaten a pound of tamales by myself."

A different hypothetical: if La Popular Tamale House was not, in fact, so popular, it might not sell its tamales by the dozen and Texas newbies might not assume that the minimum order corresponds to an appropriate serving for one person. Because, really, if I was there, we would just have tried to split two pounds between the both of us and then sagged together on the couch with the same repentance I hear now over the phone.

The Marquee, or, The Taco Joint Part II

I like The Taco Joint, not because it has a four-foot by six-foot marquee out front in the parking lot, but because The Taco Joint staff slides the black vinyl letters across its plastic yellow face until their composition has exhausted the range of punctuation that comes in the set and what it is left is an urgent announcement, wholly unrelated to the Tuesday lunch special or the menu item called The Disaster. Tomorrow it will say something else, but today it is perfection:

LADIES, IT'S TRUE:
CHUCK HAS A NEW HAIRCUT—
AND IT IS BREATHTAKING!

The Bus, or, The Taco Joint Part I

Dustin likes The Taco Joint because it's kitty corner from the bus stop. This is important because the bus runs on a schedule it guards jealously from the prying eyes of mere mortals. Were it a sphinx, the bus would at least offer a riddle, some small hope that its timetable might in fact be knowable to the very clever and the very brave. As it is, however, one might show up every day at the same time and never gather enough data to predict the next day's bus. If you are my boyfriend the scientist, you count yourself lucky that you know at least this: if you get to the stop just in time to see the bus pulling away, you have time to cross the street and enjoy a leisurely breakfast burrito before the next bus comes.

An Offer

I mailed a letter at the post office. To get to the post office, I had walked enough blocks to be surprised at how many elementary schools you can fit in a single neighborhood. I had marveled, too, how Dallas neighborhoods do not have a single character, are not separated by one side of the tracks or the other, but might hold empty lots and boarded up buildings and restored historic houses bright with new paint in any order, as if at random. It was hot, and I was glad I'd worn a hat.

I was thinking, perhaps, of what I would have for lunch, or else the words I had just sent on their way out of state; I was walking the long side of a schoolyard field when an already slow car slowed down to the speed of my stride. It was a long goldish car, low and smooth the way cars were made in the 70s. There were no children in the schoolyard. There were no other cars on the streets. There was one man in the car, and he asked if I would like a ride. 

I wanted to tell him it was laughable, that strangers offering to take you into their cars was a thing one was warned about, not a thing that happened. I wanted to tell him people would get the wrong idea. But what I told him was No, thank you, and I wondered if I was wrong, if this was chivalry itself. I wondered, even as I waited to see which way he turned before I picked the opposite direction to continue on, if this was the southern hospitality I'd heard so much about.

So Much Hotter Than Iran

My cab driver is a political refugee. Religious issues in Iran. When the U.S. government was trying to place him, its representative in charge of my cab driver’s destiny asked if he had family or friends here. My cab driver said no.

“So it doesn’t matter where we send you?” the representative asked.

“No,” my cab driver said.

“We could send you anywhere, and you wouldn’t care?” the representative confirmed.

“Yes,” my cab driver said.

“And so they sent you here?” I ask, waving toward the cab window at the skyline just beginning to approach us, and my cab driver says yes. Don’t get him wrong; employment’s better here than a lot of places. 

“But it’s so hot,” my cab driver says. “So much hotter than Iran.”

“If they asked you again—“ I begin to ask, but he interrupts with the answer before I finish the question.

“California,” my cab driver says. “I would tell them California.”

The Egg Roll Hut

I cannot recommend the food at The Egg Roll Hut, except to say that the portions are generous and that if you judge things by dollars spent per unit of weight, it’s also pretty cheap. The noodles are bland and the cashews in the cashew chicken are soft in a disconcertingly squishy way. I myself never plan to eat there again, but I would not discourage you from supporting their business. This is because I love the Egg Roll Hut, and I would hate to see it go.

Before it was The Egg Roll Hut, the property was some sort of Dairy Queenesque establishment: a squat brick building on a busy four-lane road with a kind of patio out front and a drive-thru wrapping around the back. The new owners have kept the patio and the drive-thru and the long marquee above the counter, though they have rearranged the letters on that marquee to spell out a different menu. One would perhaps not notice, except that they have also kept the previous sign, a big illuminated twist of vanilla on a glowing yellow cone, high on thick pole out front on the corner.

Viewed from the side street, the ice cream sign floats over rooftops and treelines, at night seems suspended like a beacon, disembodied, without context, except for a tube of red neon, twisted not into rivulets of cherry syrup but bent into four clear words that make no sense because what they say is: The Egg Roll Hut. It is so guileless and inexplicable, and for some reason that charms the pants off me. I will not try to articulate why The Egg Roll Hut on an ice cream cone is so unspeakably endearing, but I will add that it is all the sweeter because I never remember where it is, am never prepared for the shock of seeing it again, and so am forever discovering its sweet strangeness anew.

It's a Feature, Not a Bug

If you grow up in California, you have a certain affection for earthquakes. There is something civilized about their unpredictibility. They don't menace you for hours and days ahead of time, they just show up and a few seconds later they're done. They can be ruinous, of course, dangerous and destructive and devasting, and I don't mean to minimize that. But they're ours. I find this applies to wherever you're from. Midwesterners can take a tornado in stride—tornados you can plan for—but an earthquake will loom like a threat and arrive like a sucker punch. Which is to say: the familiar, even the familiar threat, is better than whatever they've got over there.

And what goes for natural disasters, I think, goes for whatever is poisonous or venomous, too. Black Widow spiders are never exactly a good thing to encounter, but you accept them as part of the woodpile if that's where you live. Move to a state with scorpions, though, and venom lurking in tiny bodies just seems like bad manners.

Objectively, then, the Cicada Killer Wasp is an attractive specimen. It has the familiar black-and-yellow warning stripes and waggling antennae of your usual yellow jacket, but on a body nearly the size of the first two joints of my thumb. It's as if you could order insects in the large print edition. And I'm sure that if I grew up with them, I'd be telling you about how handy that is, that nothing that big sneaks up on you, that when you leave a drink on a picnic table they don't climb into your soda and drown without you knowing about it. I'd tell you that it's only the females that have stingers, and I might even claim I could tell the difference without having two side-by-side for comparison. I like that Texas version of myself. I want the shock and awe of this place to feel like it's mine. Which maybe is why even now, months later, I still have a pair of softball-sized hail remnants picked off our lawn, two furious little blobs still impressive at half their original size, which we keep in our freezer and show off to out-of-town guests.

Cockroaches and the Like

I will say this for Dallas cockroaches: they are slow. I forget this when they only make a semi-annual appearance. Four in a week, however, and you have time to take notice. Slow emerging from under the ottoman. Slow scuttling around the sink. There is time, in fact, to retrieve a sandal or a paper towel from the other room and return to find your target more or less where you left it. It's so handy that Dustin and I were wondering if we should do more to encourage this desirable trait, if we should release these individuals back into the gene pool instead of selecting against them with a newspaper. But so far we aren't convinced it's the cockroaches themselves. It might just be the weather.

If everything is bigger in Texas, everything is also slower in the heat. This is only the 11th hottest summer on record in Dallas, a summer that drops from a high of 106 long enough to remind you that 94  can feel downright balmy, but still warm enough to put everything in slow motion. The cats lazing on lawns don't tense their muscles to run away, instead give us long looks before deciding it's not worth retreating to safety as we pass by them on our evening walk. Squirrels have likewise reduced their worry radius, letting us come within three feet before they manage enough interest to skitter towards a tree, and then reevaluating if they really have to expend the energy to climb up. The birds, too, have adjusted their risk tolerance, and maintaining a protective distance loses out to avoiding heat stroke.

Maybe it's the heat, too, that accounts for me dreaming of cockroaches. I dreamed last night that every time I went to crush a cockroach, it was a rhinoceros beetle or a scarab or something the size of a cockroach but with the most beautiful iridescent bodies. I remember that I had killed two, though their bodies were intact, and I needed to save them, one like a stick insect and one like a leaf bug, because my mother would want to see them.

Competitive Glue A Shoe

I have aspirations to big shiny belt buckles and the perfect cowboy hat, but when I contemplate the most perfect possible souvenir from the great state of Texas, I'm pretty sure that what I want in life is a blue ribbon from the State Fair. I don't grow things or raise things or can things, which I know sounds like a handicap, but if I can get my hands on a hot glue gun, I think I have a chance.

For a two dollar entry fee, I can become a competitor in Glue A Shoe. There are separate classes for Boot, High Heeled Shoe, Sandal or Flip Flop, Tennis Shoe, and Slip On. There isn't an all-around award for the Glue A Shoe pentathlete who can do them all, but the top three awards in each class come with cash prizes, including ten, count them, TEN dollars for first place.

If this exists in Iowa, that pinnacle of State Fairs, I missed it. The seed art I noticed, the origami on a stick. But otherwise I was always distracted by how the prize winning boar and the top giant pumpkin are so nearly equal in weight, each year one within about ten pounds of the other, and yet no pumpkin is ever named Tiny or Freight Train or anything at all.

Non-

Just last week, with only a little paperwork, the good people at the UT Southwestern Medical Center acknowledged my status as a "significant other." That was good enough to take my picture and print it on an ID card. Yet the ID card—which I only get because of this status—does not call me a significant other. The ID card says in little green print that what I am is a "Non-Employee, Non-Student."

There's a faction in Non-fiction that feels it is fundamentally problematic to be defined, not by what a thing is, but in terms of its not being something else. I appreciate the argument in a theoretical way, I support the idea of things being valued for what they are, but as a practical matter I find I don't mind the term. On the contrary, I like the all-encompassing nature of binaries. I like that if you aren't one thing you're the other, that everything belongs somewhere, that everything has a place. Prior to Non-fiction, I worked in Non-profit, which was perhaps too busy writing grants to worry about its Non-ness, but in any case never made an issue of it. I have, in effect, made a career of Non-. So while I am impressed by how frankly and succinctly the little green words have me pegged, I am not surprised.

My significant other, on the other hand, is a total Non-non. His ID card lists him as an Employee and a Student. He is, his ID card suggests, everything I'm not. I'm impressed at how significant and how other that sounds, and then I'm impressed at how insignificant and how same it turns out to be, at least to the extent that both cards give the same chirp as we swipe them over a little black box to enter the university gym. There I am free to reserve a tennis court or take a class in the multi-purpose room or run laps on the 1/12-of-a-mile indoor track. The towels, I am assured three times on the facilities tour, are exceptionally clean, and the number of different greens they have faded to convinces me that at the very least they've been washed a lot. In the weight room, a man I've never met does not asked why I've tipped a Bosu ball-side down and am wobbling on its hard plastic platform as I curl ten pound weights, he asks only if I need some help getting down. I don't, as it happens, I'm fine. I've just purchased a combination lock for the day-use lockers and because of that I can't shake the feeling I'm about to start Junior High, but I'm fine. I've spent a lot of time in university gyms—as a student, then as an employee, then as a student again—and even if what I am now is a "Non-," it's comforting to be somewhere so familiar. It's comforting to feel like everything belongs somewhere.

Fiesta

You know you want to shop at a place called Fiesta because there are tiny twinkling lights running around the sign like a Vegas casino and a welcoming mascot parrot and, well, it's called Fiesta. It is so festive that a friend of mine first mistook it for a restaurant, and while there is a fully functioning taqueria right inside, this, my friends, is a grocery store. A grocery store that sells perfect mangoes cheap. Where the international aisle has an astonishing array of Japanese sodas and the produce aisle offers five different kinds of banana. Lard is a prominent part of the baking aisle, while avocados are among the impulse buy options in the check out lane. Last week an end cap in produce was brimming with cactus cladodes, a riot of green paddles soon to be nopales, and this week they've magically transformed into a tumble of curvaceous "fairy tale pumpkins" whose fate I can't imagine. I never had a grocery store like this in California, and yet it comforts me to see piles of tomatillos in their papery jackets, even if I leave them in their bin untouched, because what I need today is yogurt and eggs.

Neighborhood Filming Notice

For the next ten hours, crews at the other end of my block will be filming "a series of Texas Lottery holiday TV commercials." This means a there have been notices taped to doors and slipped under windshields. The notices want us to move our cars off the street to "help maintain traffic flow." The notices want to thank us for our "hospitality." The filming also means both sides of the street have been studded with little orange traffic cones all weekend, and two houses have been lit up with Christmas decorations. And that means that Dallas in the beginning of August can pass for Dallas in late December, as if the camera always subtracts 20 degrees, or as if anyone ever dreamed of a heat wave Christmas. I am going to pretend this means that I live on the most December-like block in the city, that it is actually brisk outside, and not a temperature that causes me to break a sweat if I so much as eat a hot meal.

Cowboy Molar

I will admit that the highlight of my dental appointment, my very first with a Dallas dentist, was spending an hour with a cartoon molar wearing cowboy boots. I don't remember what the poster in the exam room was about, but I can tell you it's a very happy looking tooth. It has big eyes and a big smile and an enviable red cowboy hat. It has no arms, so I'm not sure how it's holding on to the lasso at its side, but the point is it's just so happy. Why, I have to wonder, did my dentists in California never have a poster with a blissful bicuspid wearing a wetsuit and carrying a surf board? Why no Iowan incisor wearing overalls? And why does my dentist just have a poster of this tooth, when another office half a mile away has painted the cowboy molar five feet tall on a brick wall facing the street?

The La Princessa Men

Ours is not a neighborhood of ice cream trucks. We have men on foot pushing carts and dollies strapped with blue coolers and smaller white ones and a bucket of squirt bottles for good measure. The carts have different names, but mostly they are named La Princessa, written in white script on the side. At first I thought there was one La Princessa guy, but then he kept changing, taller one day, younger the next, and when I started to pay attention I realized the carts kept changing, too: their number and configuration of different sized coolers like cubist sculpture, held together in innumerable variations. Sometimes there's a little line of bells across the push bar. It's a gentle sound, but I hear the bells even inside the house, sitting at the window, seconds before the mass of coolers pushes into view. 

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.