One word

DON'T. Do not revisit the past. Rumination is bad for your health. This is the end of this blog.

Somehow things seem smaller

Larry and I trolled around "old" Lubbock the other day. "Old" Lubbock is just about anything north of 82ND Street. The duplex we lived in from the time I was three until I turned eight was at 1911 B Thirteenth Street. And my grandmother's house was several blocks away on Fifteenth Street. Both places seemed HUGE to me, my grandmother's in particular. There were big trees out by the street, a front porch with a swing hidden behind honeysuckle vines, and a side yard obscured by an amazing trumpet vine. It's amazing both houses are still standing. So much of "old" Lubbock has been levelled -- in 1972 by a tornado, and then more recently by a real estate developer's bulldozers. He's putting up block after block of apartment buildings to accommodate the student population of Texas Tech.

But there they were, considerably less imposing than I had them in my mind's eye. And here I'll put them....just to remember and be glad: I'm not there any more.

Falling off the grid

Roads around here are straight. Houses sit on square lots. There's an awful lot of asphalt.

I met Larry Cobb in the Christian Science church parking lot in August, 1967. I'd just graduated from high school. He was in the Air Force, stationed at Reese, an Air Training Command base. Lots of guys stationed at Reese attended church in town, but they usually were first lieutenants, pilots in training, college grads with a career path in mind. Larry, by contrast, was a jet engine mechanic, no particular aim in life, who had enlisted as an airman to avoid the draft. He'd been in college, but it really wasn't his thing. He didn't really support the war, but his grades made him a prime prospect for a future on the ground in Vietnam.

He was nowhere near what Mom and Dad had in mind for a future husband for their first-born. Mom asked him home for Sunday dinner anyhow. Two years later we were married.

It was probably the most rebellious act of my young life. Even at that, we waited until I'd had my twentieth birthday in July. You know, teenage marriages never last. I'm sure that that three weeks we waited made all the difference in our life together.

It took a long time for Mom and Dad to warm up to Larry. The ideals we have for others are the hardest to die. So fiercely did they want what was "best" for me.

"Your family," my husband said to me, "either loves or hates. Nothing's in the middle." This from a man who was greeting every meal his bride presented with a pleasant expression, a perfunctory nod, and "It's OK!"

"OK??!!" I'd rail. "Just OK???!!!!" I wanted kudos, bravos, over-the-top appreciation. I wanted him to LOVE what I cooked. "OK" just seemed wishy-washy -- wimping out because you didn't want to express an opinion. And my opinion would be the one which I'd prefer to hear from him.

Maybe it's the long straight horizon with razor straight rows of cotton that surrounds the town, the implacable grid of section line roads turned into urban commerce zones with houses lined up straight and orderly on the avenues and streets in between. You always know where you stand around here. Which side of the road you're on. "Fer us or agin us." That stripe down the middle of the road is yeller. And God help you if you ever get on the wrong side of that stripe. Just ask Dixie Chick Natalie Maines. Hometown girl that she is, her name around here might as well be Jane Fonda.

It's been thirty-five years since I left Lubbock, twenty-five since I got totally out of West Texas. Our marriage has lasted, probably because I eventually learned to say, "You know, you could be right. I'm really not sure. Let me think about that."

Sometimes the greatest freedom isn't to have an opinion, but the freedom NOT to have one. And the greatest gift: to love the other in spite of his.

It was thirty years ago today...

....Elvis died. When Larry and I cruise around the Lubbock grid in Hummercita, we listen to 105.7 KRBL . It just sort of goes with Lubbock. They play "country greats from five decades." Today Ernest Tubbs, Loretta Lynn, Bob Wills, Mickey Gilley, gave way to a lot of cuts from the King.



There's a big tribute concert tonight with a premiere Elvis impersonator. It’s being held at the Lubbock Memorial Auditorium -- the one with the statue of Buddy Holly out front -- on Mac Davis Lane. I stopped by United Supermarket to see if there were any tickets left. Nosebleed section only. Secretly glad. I’m really not up for it.

See, that’s why I wonder if I even have a right to blog about Lubbock. I just never was part of the scene here – unless you count Spanish Club at Coronado High School. I didn’t go to out of town football games, never took one of those famous road trips down to the White River to drink a lot of beer. In high school I didn’t sing in the Baptist Choir, play in any school band, or cruise the Hi-D-Ho after midnight. Heck, my parents wouldn’t let me join the Teen Timers dance club in the seventh grade, thereby deep-sixing any hope of a social life I might ever have had.

So the whole music ethos around Lubbock that you hear about on Prairie Home Companion, or learn about in that DVD Lubbock Lights just passed me by. I kept telling my parents all through school: When you have to be in by 11:00 p.m. you miss stuff. Even now, looking through the local entertainment section, there's a lot of live music going on every night. But Cobbo and I turn into pumpkins if we're out much after sunset.



The fact is that Dad was a music snob. The first LP I ever bought with my own money was an act of rebellion. (It was Meet the Beatles and I was forced to play it at a volume that did NOT do it justice.) When Dad was driving, a twangy guitar didn't have a breath of a chance for air time on our family car radio. Same for rock and roll. I remember sitting in the garage with Mom , back from the grocery store, surreptiously listening to Jerry Lee Lewis singing "Great Balls of Fire," -- hoping that Dad wouldn't come out and find us. He mercilessly ridiculed those who were partial to the "acordeen," and what he had to say about gospel certainly didn't belong in a church.



So last Christmas week, when I found him sitting in the living room with Johnetta, one of the caregivers from Comfort Keepers, gleefully and unabashedly enjoying a black gospel choir on TV, I was somewhat taken aback. One of his favorite things to do, now that he's in the Alzheimer's Unit at Carillon, the senior life care facility not far from here, is listen to the gospel music tape they play most every afternoon. I'm glad he's not afraid any more to let loose a little. Just sorry he never learned the words.

There's a link to more about Lubbock music over there on the side.

Diving In

I'm six years old and I'm standing at the end of a diving board. The swimming pool is at Uncle Bob and Aunt Ann's house. As long as I can remember, we've spent summer Sunday afternoons swimming in their pool. It's not a big pool, maybe fifteen feet by ten. The deep end is less than eight. The house itself isn't large. It's one of those post WWII tract homes south of the Texas Tech campus built to accomodate young families on the GI bill.

"Just jump in," Dad urges me. "Be a big girl. You're not coming back this way. The only way out is off the end of that board."

It was a test of wills. I'd stand at the end of the board shivering and wet -- and then, as I became sun-dried and toasty, the dread of sudden cold wet water was even more unappealing than the distance down to that water. I had a double reason not to jump.

I don't remember happy endings to these stand-offs. There were usually tears. Mine. Sometimes I suppose I jumped. Other times Mom would intervene. "The steaks are ready, Sam. Let her come down." There was never a feeling of triumph either way. If I did jump, I'd taken too long to do it. If I didn't...well, someday I'd just have to "grow up."

I'm standing on the end of that diving board right now. I don't know that I really want to do this. Jumping into past history -- that water can be pretty cold. There may be tears. Maybe I can come off the board and just start by sticking my toes in gradually? Let's see.