The Reader Travels

In Stephen King’s The Stand, the ultimate battle between good and evil happens between the western US cities of Boulder, Colorado, and Las Vegas, Nevada.

The good guys are in beautiful Boulder, surrounded by mountains and streams, Rocky Mountain National Park and the University of Boulder. The bad guys are in Las Vegas, home of lights and luxury, money and industry, a place where nature is tamed, desert turned to oasis and rivers turned to energy.

What do you think that’s about? Is this thinly veiled propaganda? Is there a judgment here? I can see why Las Vegas would bear the bad guys. I mean lots of folks have trouble with gambling and gangsters. But did he have to choose a hippie haven to house the good? Not that there’s anything wrong with hippies. I just think it’s a little strange that good and evil seem to swivel the same way as bipartisan politics.

Not that I care about politics. I’m just saying…

One of my favorite books took place in New Mexico — Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya. Ultima is an old wise woman, a curandera, with magical secrets and an owl for a familiar.

One of the things that intrigues me about this book is the juxtaposition of Catholicism and the old beliefs that remain an important part of the culture. That’s where the fishes come in. The Golden Carp is a symbol of the old beliefs, this large, wise and beautiful fish.

So, of course that ties me into Halloween, because I wanted to be The Incredible Mr. Limpet in honor of Don Knotts. I’ve been searching the Internet and costume shops around town, trying to find a fish costume for Tuesday. If you search the online costume stores for “fish,” pretty much all you get is slutty costumes that feature a pair of black fishnet stockings. And the closest thing I found in town was a rubber fish head with an elastic band used to strap the fish to your nose. Not quite the look I was going for.

Anyway, I decided it would be much easier to dress up as Henry Limpet before he turns into the fish, so I bought some round glasses, which strangely make me look like an owl. See how I did that? Full circle, baby.

They call New Mexico the Land of Enchantment, and I don’t think it’s all about the peyote, either. If you want to fall in love with New Mexico, just visit. If you can’t go there, pick up a copy of the movie Off the Map, and you’ll get a small taste of the beauty.

Off the Map enchanted me to my core. I laughed and I cried and I stared in awe. The desert is as the sea. The horizon is endless, and it flows around and connects the world beyond. Deep, right?

The first time I went to New Mexico, I went with a friend whose family had a cabin in the mountains outside of Santa Fe. We had no electricity or running water. We groomed ourselves from a box of baby wipes. We removed our watches. We ate when we were hungry and slept when we were tired. She meditated. I wrote.

That was thirteen years ago, and I still refuse to put my watch back on.

When I was sixteen, I took a road trip with my family from Galveston, Texas, to Colorado Springs, Colo., up to Jackson Hole, Wyo., and back down to Texas. Despite the usual teenage complaints about driving around with my parents, it was a beautiful trip, filled with waterfalls and caverns, mountains and splendor.

The landscape flattened as we got closer to home, and I was behind the wheel of the family van when we crossed the state line into Kansas. I looked at the straight road ahead of me, and arching across the highway was a beautiful rainbow. I suddenly felt like Dorothy, and I wondered why she’d ever want to leave. Then I smelled the cow turds, and I quickly figured it out. (Sorry, Kansans.)

I’ve also been to Missouri, literally and literarily. Literally, I recommend the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City. It’s a place where you can see the rhythms and hear the rainbows. Not only do you get to listen to jazz music from greats like Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, you get to make jazz music, too. I could have banged on the drums all day.

Literarily, I really enjoyed Fannie Flagg’s Standing in the Rainbow. It starts in a small town in Missouri with a housewife’s living room radio broadcast that connects people across the state. The characters parade into her living room and then parade right back out, taking us with them. We get to tour the state with a family gospel band, head straight for Jefferson City with an ambitious young salesman destined for greatness, even take a side trip down to New Orleans. But I can’t really talk about that. That place is way beyond the rainbow, if you know what I mean.

So I must admit I’ve never read, James Michener’s Texas, but I did wear a big old Texas belt buckle in his honor for Halloween in 1997, the year he died.

Okay, some may think it’s morbid, but my annual Halloween costume is traditionally some sort of tribute to a famous person that died in the last year. Well, 1997 was a bad year for celebrity deaths. Just to name a few:

• Allen Ginsberg
• Brian Keith
• Jacques Cousteau
• Robert Mitchum
• Jimmy Stewart
• Gianni Versace
• William S. Burroughs
• Princess Diana
• Mother Teresa
• Burgess Meredith
• Red Skelton
• John Denver
• Chris Farley

Because there were so many, I chose to do a collage that year. I wore a tiara for Princess Di, hiking boots for John Denver, that Texas belt buckle for James Michener and a nun’s habit to do a double whammy for Mother Teresa and Burgess Meredith. (Duh, he played The Penguin on the Batman TV shows.)

If I had known about the deaths of the beats, I’m sure I would have worn a beret on my head. Then again, if Chris Farley had died before Halloween, he would have trumped them all.

Larry McMurtry’s book with Danny Deck may be the only novel I’ve read that took place in Texas, but it’s not the only book. The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr is a memoir vivid with life in Port Arthur, Texas, maybe 100 miles from where I grew up. It also happens to be the same town where my husband was born, though he doesn’t really remember the place.

Although she didn’t really talk about it, I know that Mary Karr and I grew up with the same pukey, petroleum-burning smell in the air. We both had clumps of black oil stuck to our toes when we stepped out of the Gulf of Mexico. We both knew people who had moved from the small, woody towns of East Texas, drawn by the prospect of jobs at the oil refineries.

“The Liar’s Club” was what she called her father’s group of friends that sat around drinking beer, playing dominoes and telling tall tales. My mother-in-law could probably describe her own father the same way, though he never moved away from his small East Texas town. We even have cassette tapes of him telling some of his stories, joyfully lying to us all from beyond the grave.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved my junialeeg grandmother. She was generous and intelligent, and she never forgot a birthday. Both her penmanship and her grammar were impeccable.

Mary lived in New Orleans long enough to send her son through a preppy high school and marry him off to the girl next door, before she moved back to her rightful place in Dallas, Texas. My first memory of her is the day she insisted that we call her, “Grandmama’.” You know, like Endora on Bewitched?

Mary’s first husband was a Texas millionnaire named Ewing, just like on the TV show Dallas, except without the stupid hats. A few years ago we had our company holiday party at Southfork Ranch, where much of the action took place on Dallas. It wasn’t hugely impressive, but we had a really great time.

Mary died the week after 9/11. The last contact I had with her was an answering machine message I left for her after the calamity struck. I wanted to see how she was taking the news, but I’m not sure she even knew it was happening. She never returned my call anyway.

She donated her body to science, so by the time I heard of her death, she was gone. That is, until four months ago when she visited my sister in the living room of my parents’ home, where she was having a conversation with someone my sister couldn’t see at the time. She always was very social.

For a short time in my early twenties, I tried to free myself of the “y’all” — that tell-tale southernism — much as one would try to stop cursing or spitting. I’m not sure why. Perhaps I thought it made me sound backward. Perhaps it was a source of shame. Alas, I was young and stupid.

Then I started writing, and I learned to appreciate the power of words. I realized that “y’all” was a very effective word, used to fill a gap where something was missing in the English language. In ordinary English, “you” is the same whether you’re talking to one person or multiple people. But there is no one word that allows us to clarify that we’re talking to all of you, not just the you there on the left or the you in the middle. That’s where “y’all” comes in.

With this newfound love for words, I started embracing other outcast words. Like the “C” word - oh, how it swam through Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. I even bought Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary just because it had the word “f~ker” in it. (See how I still slight the words, though? I can’t help it, I’m still somewhat sensitive to other people.)

I hope y’all can appreciate that.

Honestly, I think I’ve only read one novel that takes place in Texas. I guess since I live here, I usually find myself leaving the state instead of losing myself in it so completely.

The one novel was Some Can Whistle by Larry McMurtry. I must admit it’s rather endearing to read places that are so familiar to you, roads you’ve driven, sights that you’ve seen.

I’ve seen some of the movies based on McMurtry’s books - Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, Texasville. I grew up in the town where they filmed that scene where Jack Nicholson takes a joy ride on the beach with Shirley MacLaine. How well did I know the Texas City dike’s petroleum-ridden waters.

In Some Can Whistle, the main character Danny Deck takes a road trip from Wichita Falls to Houston and back. He passes through Dallas and gets lost in the cul-de-sacs of Arlington, a suburb one town to the west of where I sit now, where I used to hang out with my husband back when we were “just friends” in his filthy efficiency apartment. Danny Deck drives us south on I-45, talking about how much he prefers the personality of Houston to the white-washed blandness of Dallas.

It’s a general rule that if you’re from Houston, you hate Dallas, and if you’re from Dallas, you loathe Houston. I came to Dallas by way of Galveston and Houston, so I’ve seen it from both sides.

Come on, people, now…

My grandmother Nola was a total Ya-Ya when she was younger. When I read Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, I could see her right there on the page, drinking Dixie beer and dirty martinis, laughing and playing Boure (Boo-Ray). I could hear her talking to me with Vivi’s words.

She was kind-hearted and fun, toxic and completely unpredictable when she drank, which was pretty much all the time. The Ya-Yas weren’t from New Orleans like my grandmother was, but they were still infused with that essence of Louisiana.

One of my favorite sayings from Rebecca Wells’s book was, “that’s so junialeeg,” especially since my other grandmother, who was much more distant and cold, was actually in the Junior League. Nola was not.