A Good Fit

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the stunning physical changes underway in the town of Round Top (Texas Monthly, the Fayette County Record, PaperCity). We’ve been seeing them first hand whenever we drive down Highway 237.

They’re hard to miss.  Hammers, saws, trucks hauling in rock, hauling in—hey—another building for what is now known as Rummel Square. (You know, where Scotty and Friends used to be.)

It’s the buildings that move, and move, and move again. Almost the only feature from last year to remain in place is the historic and specimen live oak—although for how long, who knows? (Construction is not friendly to live oaks.)

That block reminds me of packing glassware in a crate. You wrap each piece carefully, with lots of padding and fit as many pieces inside the package as you can. Except on Rummel Square, there’s no padding.

When do you have so many buildings on a block that the location loses appeal for its target audience? That’s the aggressive developer’s thorny dilemma.

Context is the architect’s word for it.

Take Henkel Square Market, for example. Begun with care, it has recently shown signs of contracting the Rummel Square virus. I’m talking about the Teague Building, rising to new heights opposite our iconic Courthouse. Dwarfing it. Sort of like Shaquille O’Neal has joined the Round Top-Carmine basketball team.

How on earth did that pass any kind of meaningful architectural review?

The architect on this project genuflects in the direction of context by picking up an element of an existing building’s profile, and repeating it, much inflated, on the new building. So Henkel Hall mimics the profile of the old barn beside it; and Teague hints at the façade of the old Apothecary Building.

But a thin slice of pumped up profile isn’t sufficient, folks. Round Top isn’t a western movie set on a backlot in California, where facades have nothing behind them. The rest of the building counts, too—the shape, the massing of elements, the way the building looks from all sides. Its size, or scale, in relation to others around it.

Ignore scale and you get buildings that hulk over their neighbors, killing the trees that made the neighborhood appealing, overloading sewers, consuming ever larger amounts of precious energy.

I’m guessing the Teague’s designers knew they had a problem. Because the building has sprouted another building like an extra nose on the side facing Bybee Square. It’s a smaller structure whose dimensions relate better to those of its immediate neighbor, the von Rosenberg house, occupied now by the Copper Shade Tree. Or would if it were separate, on a different lot, or even if its connection showed evidence of architectural intent.

Probably it serves a functional purpose for the building’s first users, but the awkwardness of its design will outlive that purpose, possibly by many years, even generations.

Change is inevitable, though, isn’t it? Round Top has a history of reinventing itself. Today’s commercial hub is just the newest incarnation.

And change doesn’t have to ruin a town if it’s handled right. With vision.

But it can’t be the vision of the most recent enthusiast, the newest arrival. The new arrival tends to see what’s there—the place and people—as aspects of himself. Either they’ll be helpful to his project, or they’ll create obstacles.

It is the most narrow, short-sighted of visions.

That’s why you need a community vision. You need a longer view. A view that looks beyond an individual project, or group of projects. 

You need questions: How much change can the town absorb before people stop wanting to visit? How much tourism can it handle without killing the appeal? How much traffic?

Do you intend to enforce height restrictions? Limit garish signs? Limit clutter, visual and auditory? 

Just having a rule isn’t enough.

Do you want a town that residents can live in? Or will it be a shopping mall?

These are questions that may very well have been asked and answered. But if they haven’t been, the time to do it is now. In public, and out loud.

(Published on March 25, 2016 in the Fayetteville County Record)

Who Am I?

The other day, in this season of political glut, I came upon the Facebook comment: I don’t like her because of WHO SHE IS. (Their caps.)

I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but it got me to thinking. Who is she? How do we answer that question? Not only for presidential candidates, but for ourselves. Who are you? Who am I?

What comes first in our answer? Marital status, religion, accomplishments? How many children and grandchildren we have? Are we measured by our resumes—the education, jobs, club, church or community offices we’ve held? And does any of that get to the essence of who we are?

Maybe it’s easier to narrow down responses that satisfy us, if the subject is a man. We’ve had more experience, historically, with men in elective positions. But even there, it isn’t easy.

We have opinions about people all the time in our private lives. Much of the information we use to arrive at those opinions comes from what others say. People we know and trust. People who actually know the person being discussed.

What people say of men and women in politics, however, rarely comes from personal knowledge. Our impression of a candidate is so often a crafted image, created for effect by supporters or opponents. Or both of them at once. One reason we watch televised debates is we’re yearning for a glimmer of reality to shine through the fog of words. And, maybe while it’s at it, penetrate the veil of our expectations.

Because we have expectations of politicians, individually and in general. For a president, we hope to see competence, eloquence, a steady hand and solid judgment. We hope for the hard-to-define quality of leadership.

We have an image of what a president should be, whether it’s FDR, Ronald Reagan, or Jimmy Carter. When an outside factor alters that image, it complicates matters. With JFK, it was his Catholic faith. With Obama, it was his racial heritage. With Hillary Clinton, it is her gender. Each designation carried, or carries, with it a fresh set of expectations, somewhat like the filter on a camera lens. It’s hard to know whether that filter is helping us see more clearly or just fogging up the screen.

What do we expect from a woman in politics, in public life? Can she be seen for herself, for the qualities and experience she brings to the job she seeks?

When someone is brand new on the national scene, we can make quick judgments, right or wrong. Sarah Palin was new. Bernie Sanders is new. Ted Cruz is almost new.

But when a candidate has been in the public eye for more than a generation, like Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, we carry with us a grab bag of impressions, most of them formed when the person was playing a role vastly different from the job of a president.

We don’t know what the Donald’s first two marriages were like. Unless we live in New York, we really don’t know how many buildings he has built, or how he has treated any of the people he has dealt with.

But we know Hillary’s husband, or think we do. He has been watched, and pulled, and twisted inside out for us while the camera focused on her face, while pundits criticized her reactions. And so many of the nasty spitballs thrown at him have missed and landed on her. Where at least an impression of them sticks. Every negative thing. No matter how untrue, if it is repeated often enough, it will stick.

Worse, given time, its details, along with the way it was thrown and by whom, will be forgotten, leaving only a vague sense, a whiff: wasn’t there something? Didn’t we hear something? This technique has come to dominate politics in the last twenty years, replacing real and honest dialogue for many politicians. Professional handlers know that it works.

Our job, dear readers--fellow voters—is to scrape off enough of it to see the reality that will let us do our civic duty.

(This post first appeared in the Fayette County Record, February 26, 2016.)

Why Doesn’t It Taste Good?                   

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about pie, lately. Not so unusual after the holidays when we seem to be wearing every extra piece we ate. But pie isn’t only for celebrations. It’s an everyday event in our community. Dining reputations are made on it. Supermarkets sell it by the stack. Some of us buy frozen pie crust and make our own pies. And a few people--I know they’re still around--make theirs from scratch. That is, make the pie crust themselves, too. How radical is that?

I  think pie crust is an excellent example of what has happened to American food.

What does it take to make a crust? Flour, water, salt and fat. Simple. But not easy, hence the appeal of “shortening.” Shortening comes in a tin and is the color of nursery school paste. It makes a sturdy crust that can be crimped attractively and mass produced, if desired. But it has no taste. Add to it the current habit of omitting salt from the crust and you have what I think of as throw-back pie. Back to the middle ages, when crust was a “coffin” intended to keep its contents together long enough to serve. Gentry got the filling (usually meat and gravy) and the servants ate the coffin crust. But I’ll bet that tasted better than most crusts today because the fat, over there in England, was likely to be lard.

The best pie crust I ever ate was, actually, in England. Fresh gooseberries baked without sweetening in a light and flavorful crust. You passed the sugar in a caster, for dusting across the top—before you dolloped on the heavy cream. The crust brought all those flavors together and elevated them because it was made with lard. And the right amount of salt.

Have you had a pie, lately, where the crust enhanced the flavor of the pie? I haven’t.

Butter makes a delicious crust, too, although not as sturdy as shortening, of course, so you don’t often see it in a store. A butter crust, however, will surprise anyone who is accustomed to shortening only, or to shortening and the list of preservatives that you find in the supermarket.

Convenience is a large part of the reason for diminished flavor. And it’s not just pie crust, is it?

Have you noticed in the supermarket how much of the produce is wrapped in plastic? Over the holidays, I even bought some haricot verts, the skinny green beans that when fresh (and properly cooked, not raw) will burst with green bean flavor. These came from Guatemala. They looked beautiful inside their plastic wrapping, all grouped in the same direction, ready for the pot. And they were terrible. They had maintained their fresh appearance, that appealing green, but lost every trace of flavor.

Why buy something shipped “fresh” from abroad, you will ask. And you’re right. Quality inevitably deteriorates. A better question, though, may be: why stock it? At Thanksgiving several years ago the same supermarket had bins of young green beans that were outstanding. Unprocessed. Truly fresh and they tasted that way. I’d been hoping to find those this year, but maybe bad weather ruined the crop.

The question of flavor in food brings me to the annual New Year’s diet. Why do I overeat when the food is nothing special?

Can it be that I’m remembering how the dish is supposed to taste? And I keep eating in the hope of finding that satisfaction in the next bite?

Or, more generally, can it be that deeply satisfying food has become more difficult to find? What I’m talking about is a meal when what we eat feels good throughout our being. When it satisfies a hunger of the body for real nutrition combined with flavor. (A little like that “deep down body thirst” we hear about in commercials.)

Instead, we seem to be training our palates, if not our bodies, to desire processed fakery like chips embedded with flavor enhancers.

Here’s a choice we’re asked to make all too often: On one hand, a packaged snack that explodes with carefully tested lab-created flavors developed to make us want more; on the other, a plate of tasteless vegetables from far away whose colors have been preserved to withstand shipping.

I know which one I’d choose, doggone it.

Visiting the Vet

If you don’t like dogs, go read something else. I’m breaking the rules here.

You’re not supposed to write about your dog. It’s amateurish. Yup.

But I’m not writing about how darling she is, or how adorable her predecessors undoubtedly were. Only Marley gets to be a bad dog in retrospect, and we all loved him, right?

I’m writing about her vet. Their vets.

We’ve had four Labrador retrievers over the years and one Labration. All have enjoyed intimate associations with veterinary medicine.

We are responsible pet owners. We follow the requirements on pets as carefully as we tend to our vehicles. They get their vaccinations, their spaying, neutering, nail clips, that kind of thing.

Over the lifetimes of five big dogs, however, the vet experience has changed.

Take smell, for example.

The vets of the past worked in an olfactory soup, day-old cooked liver competing with a warm cornflake smell. No doubt, urine was a part of this.

The new, up-to-date vet has an office that impresses the visitor with its cleanliness. Bright and cheery, staffed with equally bright and cheery people behind the latest in computer equipment. If there’s a smell it’s the pleasant one of high quality dry dog food, for sale as required.

In the redolent past, our first Lab’s vet greeted her in person and gave her the necessary shots. We shook hands, paid the fee, and that was that.

Now we have levels to pass through.

One delightful person checks us in. Another takes us to a pristine cubicle. We wait.

A woman enters and takes vital signs, hears the reason for the visit and so on. This person is not the vet.

She departs and, again, we wait.

A new person enters, and all the explanations are repeated. I’m not sure she’s the vet until her assistant comes through the door. Together they take my dog into the back where they do whatever is necessary.

I wait.

If we are lucky, the vet returns with the dog to discuss treatments in the latest medical language.

This is a significant change.

Old style vets spoke common, everyday English. Now doctors enjoy displaying the therapeutic Latin they have acquired, no doubt at considerable expense. I understand a lot of it, but does everyone?

If we are unlucky, she recommends testing.

Your dog can now be tested in every way available to you, without the assistance or obstacle of Obamacare, Medicare or just plain insurance. Unless you’ve bought health coverage for your pet, a monthly expense we’ve resisted, so far. The upward effect of insurance on the cost of human medical care is bad enough.

The fact that these tests exist seems to encourage their use.

An old style vet might take a wait-and-see approach. Or just apply the art of diagnosis he or she has developed over years of experience. The new style vet, freshly burnished by A&M or its equivalent, morphs into a duplicate of your very own human internist, offering the certainty of ultrasound and CT scanning. Or MRI.

It seems almost un-American not to pay joyfully for whatever the vet suggests is necessary to the health of the dog you love so much.

Doesn't it?                                                                                                                                                                    

Small is not Trivial

For me, country living provides an alternative to the manufactured stresses of daily life--the global disasters that leap to the surface of all our screens at the tap or slide of a finger. Or push of a button. Something new to fear or deplore every few minutes.

Even fun comes with its jolt of adrenaline. Pop concerts ramp up the bass, fire off lasers and smoke bombs. Apocalyptic movies compete with each other in the race to scare us silly. Visiting Houston, we see the immediate daily result in the rage that simmers on traffic-snarled streets.

People are not meant to live in conditions of sustained alert. When constantly elevated, the major stress hormone, cortisol, harms every process of the human body.

In the country, though, I can tune it all out.

I can measure a day by the passage of the sun across my yard.

Outside the window where I write, I see close-up the bark of a tree, and a nuthatch inching down, headfirst. I see the russet leaves of the loropetalum bush I should have pruned last spring. An atole steals across the window sill; a wasp bumps the pane, wanting cooler air. The slope of sun-cast shadows on the grass tells me it’s fall. Abundant life--and occasional death--are never far away. 

They require no reporter, no headline. No artificially induced fear.

In the country, I find pleasure in small things: The seed head of that old farmer’s bane, Johnson grass, beautifully fringed in the spotlight of an autumn afternoon; the loud silence of a Sunday morning torn by a hawk’s cry; the six white petals on an unknown flower sprouting leafless in the center of our gravel driveway.

Walking the dog, I’m surprised by the rustle of leaves nearby, then a sudden whoosh…whoosh and the hawk’s big dark shadow passes close overhead. In the woods a distance away, a commotion of fussing birds expresses palpable distress. Is it a snake that threatens them, or perhaps that hawk, again? These small occurrences are scarcely noticeable in the middle of our busy routines unless we look. But not one of them is trivial.

So I think of it like this.

I can look outward from myself, at the uncontrollable world, at unimaginable space where even geologic time loses all meaning. I can live from shock to shock on the screen of my computer, smartphone, television and tablet.

Or I can turn away from the anxiety that creates and look down at the ground I'm standing on. And allow myself to resonate in harmony with the ordinary universe I'm part of.

(Under a different title, this column appeared today in the Fayette County Record.)

Goodbye to a Voice

John Graves became an icon for Texas writers on account of one book, Goodbye to a River, which addressed what is eternal about Texas, and ever threatened. Our current dialogues, economic and political, fasten upon the superficial, and perhaps that is no surprise for a species that dwells in the tiny strip of earth and atmosphere that is habitable. We dwell there, still, despite our yearning to punch holes both ways, up and down, and we would do well to remember it.

Graves knew that from the beginning. It’s one reason his book has endured, still in print as a hardback from Knopf (Random House) after more than fifty years.

I celebrate this reality, but the aspect of Graves’s work that has stayed with me is his voice, his presence on the page. I read a blogger today who called that sonorous, supple voice “antiquated.” That River book, he said, might not be published today.

What a reductive comment--reductive, not of the book, but of the human spirit that animates publishing. Of our spirit as readers.

Great writing unrolls across the page according to a rhythm that resounds in a place far older and deeper than the thin layer of dopamine receptors activated by one’s most recent Twitter fix. Great writing allows time for the meaning of the words to strike the heart. It allows time for thought that’s contemplative, not reactive--the type of thought that forms character.

John’s writing does this. It also confirms that you are the kind of person capable of both thought and character. If writing can have gravitas, John’s does, as he did in person along with a leonine grace. My husband says that everyone wanted to be John’s friend, and moreover, known to be his friend. Being his friend felt like an accolade, a confirmation of some profound quality in one’s own self. 

That opportunity is now gone, but his voice rolls on. His voice is the river.

Journaling

The great Paris Review interview series instructs writers by example to keep a journal. Dutifully, I attempt to comply. Again and again, I strive for the daily entry, the recapitulation, the musing, all of it. Every time, the dailyness defeats me.

I do write every day, but I have never managed to put it in journal form for an extended period. No doubt this contributes to the sporadic frequency of posts to this blog. (And we all know what that means: few followers.)

Yet I have kept trying out of the belief that keeping a journal is central to the writing process.

During the writing of ABSENT, I began to find myself wondering what might have happened to Camille’s twin, swallowed up by the Holocaust, at that point. I have read numerous books on the concentration camps of Germany and Eastern Europe. I knew I couldn’t live inside one of these places for the three or four years it takes to write a novel. I would drown.

The story, however, kept pulling me toward itself. Scraps of narrative, dialogue, interior monologue kept arriving and I wrote them down. I picked one of these little black, book-size notebooks, the kind with a rubber band that can be used to hold your place. I carried it everywhere, scribbling bits into it when they came to me. No dates, no dailyness. If I thought of something and the notebook was temporarily unavailable, I wrote on whatever scrap of paper was handy--receipts, envelopes--and copied them into the notebook later. The process was completely random except for the fact that I used the pages in order. Voila: a journal.

It taught me that keeping a written repository of one’s thoughts is even more intensely personal than I’d suspected. The form, that is, as well as the content. As we know, blogs and social media tend to blur the boundary between personal and public. We’re encouraged to share the minutiae of our day, but regardless of how many people actually read what you write, all these posts must be written for the illimitable audience of strangers.

Thus, a blog is truly not a journal--not kept as a record of one’s undigested interior reflections. A blog is a piece of work for publication. A journal is source material.

I know that there are wonderful visual and tactile artworks created from journaling, too. In Santa Fe, an artist named Gail Rieke keeps journals of her travels, comprising numerous and varied objects and scraps. Her form of the journal varies with the experience, but eventually many of the objects she collects in this fashion find their way into compelling collages.  

When she teaches a journaling class, she shows her students how to let loose their preconceptions of what a journal can be. In the loosening of expectation, creativity has room to breathe. A lesson, there, for writers, too.