Purple Cows on Parade

It was, as they say, a ritual. Sunday meant church, a change of clothes and a relaxed dinner.  Sometimes it meant football and other times a bit of yard work but always, if the weather allowed, it meant a drive in the country.

Even without a visit to nearby grandparents, there were excuses to be out and about. There was growing corn that needed checking, bittersweet to be cut from the ditches, fresh gravel to be tested. In spring, we looked for the first robin. In autumn, the last leaves swirled and scudded like vast, colorful clouds while we counted the bundles of snow fence waiting along the shoulders of the road. “They’ve got more fence out than usual,” my dad would say. “Must be expecting a hard winter.”

On the rare afternoons when corn, cattails or bittersweet failed to entertain, we’d read the Burma Shave signs or “collect” out-of-state license plates. There went “Minnesota”, a common enough sight. Here came “Illinois”, a reminder of far-away relatives.  “But look!” I squealed from the back seat. “Montana!”  We might as well have discovered a Bedouin galumphing through Iowa on his camel.

The Joys of Imperfection

It started with the left arm.  There was a dropped stitch, a slight irregularity in the smooth, sweet rhythm of the yarn.  The sweater-in-process, lovely and green, the color of wild asparagus, lay in pieces across the dining room table – its back, two arms and cabled front the eventual shape of loving, hand-knit warmth.

Still, that dropped stitch was causing consternation. Halfway up one sleeve,  it would have nestled into the bend of an elbow, barely detectable and probably unseen to even a well-trained eye until it began to pull apart.  But the knitter – proficient, quick, given to knitting argyles and Arans in darkened movie theatres – spotted it and felt it looming like an accusation.  “I’ll just unravel that sleeve and do it over,” she said. “It’ll take a little more time than picking up the stitch but after all – we want it to be perfect.”

With the sleeve unraveled and the yarn gently re-wound, she began to knit again. This time there were no dropped stitches, no errors, but a more subtle issue soon emerged. Intent on re-doing the sleeve perfectly, she may have been a little tense. While she knit, the tension worked its way through her hands, down the needles and into the yarn, making the stitches in the repaired sleeve noticeably tighter.  On a completed sweater the separation of the sleeves might have negated the difference in appearance. Side-by-side on the dining table, the variation was obvious. “Humph,” said the knitter, who had plenty of time and a tendency toward obsession. “I’ll just do that sleeve again.”

Doorways to the Past

A recent lazy-afternoon stroll through Galveston left me marveling over the heaps and piles of merchandise that overflow the shelves of souvenir shops along Seawall Boulevard and the Strand. 

The souvenir business is interesting, and if my afternoon browse is any indication, it hasn’t changed much over the decades.  Asked about her top products, the proprietess of one shop acknowledged that tee shirts, coffee mugs, salt and pepper shakers, risqué shot glasses, refrigerator magnets and beach towels are her most dependable sellers.  ”They move a lot faster than my candles and iPod covers,” she said. “People like the high-end stuff, but once you get home you can’t tell the difference between the soap you bought here and soap you’d buy at Dillards. People want to prove they’ve been on The Island, not in a Houston department store. If you put “Galveston” on it, it’ll sell – that’s the name of the game.”

Shops do carry quality items that reflect Galveston’s life - there are books filled with Island history, chronicles of storms, photographs and tropical art – but most souvenirs are, to put it charitably, generic. They could be sold anywhere. There’s nothing unique about a Galveston kite or Galveston Koozie apart from the name.  If you purchase a tee shirt emblazoned with the phrase Genuine Galveston Souvenir Tee Shirt it comes with a guarantee you’ll someday meet someone wearing a Genuine (Pick Your City) Souvenir Tee Shirt . 

Even the sand dollars, sundials and lightning whelks filling the baskets by the cash registers are identical to those found in shops from Port Isabel to Key West. Shelling on Texas beaches is erratic at best, and no retailer would dare depend on local sources to stock the shelves. So, Wholesale-SeaShells-R-Us steps in, ready and able to supply the souvenir needs of an entire city.

An End to Cutting and Choosing

img src=http://www.varnishgal.com/wpdrivesmecrazy.jpg

I never believed the old family story that my first word was “Why?”  Still, there’s no doubt I was an early questioner, indiscriminate in my curiosity. ”Where do clouds go when they aren’t here?” “Is it dark inside an egg? Are the baby birds afraid?” ”Why don’t you like  Mrs. Wilster?”  “Did God make his nose funny like that?” “Why can’t I have cake for breakfast?”

I was full of questions – about the world, about adults and even about the cloud of secrets I sensed floating across my sunny young life.  Given my willingness to question everything in sight, it seems strange I never asked about my lack of sisters and brothers. Even though my friends had them, siblings still reminded me of woolly worms, walking sticks and puff balls. Some of them were creepy and mysterious. Others appeared to be harmless but capable of annoying mischief. When little kids need help from someone bigger, taller or stronger siblings can be useful, but in the end my friends and I were happiest when they decided to leave us alone.

The Birthday Girl

I never expected my mother to live to be 80, let alone 92.  As a matter of fact, my mother never expected to live much beyond 70.  But here we are – mother turning 92 in a day or so, daughter 63 for a while yet – looking at one another cautiously over the dinner table, trying to understand how such a thing could have happened.

Luck played a role, of course.  My maternal grandmother died when my own mother was only 16 and all but one of her sisters died young. The odds appeared to be against her from the start.  But when the scourges of increasing age arrived and attempted to take their toll, they were beaten back. The surgeries healed. The heart attack responded to the stent and the congestive heart failure was remedied by the pacemaker.  At 70, things were looking good.  At 75, we were amazed.  At 80, we sat at the dinner table with friends and laughingly agreed it was a good year for the extravagance of jewelry and gold. After all, as my mother herself pointed out with great realism and without embarassment, it might be the last year for gifts.