August 13, 2008
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things noticed: trip-recap to present (in no order at all)
1. i rarely sweat when i forget to wear deodorant. conspiracy?
2. culver’s makes the best onion rings known to man. the ones at ritzy’s are fairly legit, but it’s all in the batter and the yankees clearly win this fight (may my ancestors forgive me).
3. we cut through the heart of west texas by taking 84 from I-40 to I-20. i was able to show jen the lubbock neighborhood and house in which i grew up. we then stopped by the new jimmy john’s that parked itself on the open field of my childhood. this place was accompanied by a list of modern establishments that no upwardly-mobile area should be without. my old neighborhood is not upwardly-mobile, but this sort of thing is what you come to expect from lubbock. painting new lines on a road strewn with gravel, building new bridges over a loop lined with weeds, putting a facelift on a cracked and sagging bone structure.
we visited my grandparents’ old house. it hadn’t changed a bit. i wanted to walk through the front door, set my coloring books and toys down on the hallway table, and give my grandmother a hug like i haven’t had for the past five years. the guy operating the lawn service on the property noticed me slowing down in front of the house. my grandfather is a stubborn man. at that house, he was the only one allowed to cut the lawn. it was what he held on to that kept his routine in line. his alzheimer’s kicked in just around the time my grandmother checked out. no one was there to make the routine real anymore, and so he slipped into a forgetfulness that has landed him continually slipping in a home in houston. the house might as well be one of bradbury’s back-lot scene props. it looked like it hadn’t changed a bit, but i’m convinced that if i put my finger on the door bell the entire structure would fall back into a cloud of dust.
fields for miles and miles.
4. flagstaff, arizona is freaking awesome. we ate at the casa olé snuggled inside a structure making up part of the historic downtown area. the weather made me want to halt the trip home completely. maybe i remembered what i was coming home to.
5. i desperately need my own car.
Comments (8)
I really like the doorbell line.
did you find happiness in your rear view mirror or growing nearer and nearer?
I haven’t been to Lubbock since 1991 yet I could picture it by your writing. Lovely thoughts of your childhood…sweet.
I remember playing with Legos on your grandparents’ dining room table. I never felt old enough or cool enough to play with you and Jake, but I felt too old and too cool to play with Alyssa and Charlsie.
@efildrawkcabeht - when bradbury wasn’t writting short stories, he fell into a lot of old hollywood nostalgia. you might like some of his books.
@AliasUndercover - before we hit ft. sumner or clovis, all i wanted to do was look out my side windows at absolute nothingness.
@max40 - what happened in 1991?
@zwizh - that was a long long time ago.
We moved there in 1987 for Dr. Mike to go to Med school there. We lived there for 3 yrs. but after I finished my Masters and taught at J.T. Hutchison for a year I had enough so took a job in Houston and moved down there. Mike stayed on in Lubbock until he finished and we spent our weekends meeting up in Dallas or he came down to Houston. When he graduated in 1991 I went back for that but once we moved, that was it.
For us, Lubbock was not home, merely a stop over on our journey through life.
ooo, you live in Texas? nice.
ryc: i recommend you check out monome.org. the first vid posted on that site, daedelus talks about how the founder of dublab discovered him, how he got into electronic music, and his experience with bitboxes.