DIED 2012
MY TEXAS-SIZED CRUSH ON the state of Texas, founded in Austin circa 1977, got its spacious western annex in 1988, when a good friend took The Skater and me and our six-month-old baby out to visit her mother in Odessa, a six-hour drive that took four in her BMW. They were a family of cattle ranchers, her mother the sixth generation, and they still owned a nice-sized piece of the Permian Basin, though they’d given a chunk away to build the university. My friend’s childhood residence was a beautiful, relaxed family home, not overly formal as such a place might be up in Yankeeland. There was a mezzanine that ran around the second floor, and I could picture her three older brothers racing around it with their chaps and pop-guns.
We couldn’t wait to strip off our infant son’s diaper and put him in the hot tub, a plan my friend’s mother—perfectly coiffed and dressed, yet somehow slightly, endearingly gawky—at first found alarming. But when she came out to check on us, she was tickled to death. Why, look at that! she said, blinking her big brown eyes. He’s practically swimming! And every time that boy’s name came up for the next twenty years, my friend’s mother would proudly recall that he was the smartest baby she had ever seen.
As much as I loved anything about the Lone Star State, I loved this family, their stories, their accents, their cooking, their generosity, their incredibly good taste in clothes and furnishings and art. For years, my greatest joy was to be invited to the birthday party my friend and her mother threw themselves every other year at the Gage Hotel, out in the great nowhere bordering Big Bend National Park, where we would drink margaritas and eat Mexican food and dance under the stars for two days.
I’m having such a hard time getting to the sad part—maybe that’s her doing. To bury two sons in two years, to struggle so long with that damn disease taking everything you have left—Shh, y’all hush now, she says. Come over here and look at this sunset. Is that not the most beautiful sky you’ve ever seen?