Stopping by Amarillo

I was born and grew up in Amarillo, Texas. Other than my deceased father’s wife, Linda, I don’t know anyone who still lives there. And technically, she doesn’t live in Amarillo; she lives half an hour east, in Washburn, a flat grid composed of dirt roads and small houses in weedy lots.

As the drive from Colorado to Marble Falls will take us through the panhandle, David and I decide that we’ll stop in Amarillo and revisit our old hangouts. Also, Linda is in possession of my father’s photo albums, which hold his favorite memories—pictures from his childhood, report cards from his school days, and the article in the paper announcing his US citizenship. Daddy led an interesting life and I’d like to ask for copies of a few of these things, which I’ll gladly pay for.

I put a signed copy of my latest novel in the back seat, thinking that I’ll be seeing Linda and that she might appreciate it.

“I can’t get hold of her,” I tell David the night before we leave Steamboat Springs. “The number I have for her has been disconnected. I messaged her through Facebook, but she never got back to me. And I don’t have her email.”

“We’ll figure something out when we get there,” he says.

“My cousin said her daughters have been asking for thoughts and prayers on Facebook. Maybe something’s wrong.” How will I ever know if I have no way to reach her? We pack up that night and leave early the next morning.

As we’re getting closer to Amarillo we see things that take us back—Boys’ Ranch, Vega, Cadillac Ranch. The wind farms stretch from the highway to every horizon. Because of the wind that never ceases, the stench from the cattle yard outside of Bushland pushes us eastward.

I haven’t spoken to Linda since Daddy’s funeral. Bad of me, I suppose, but we moved to Kuwait, came back to Houston, moved to Singapore, then came back to Houston. Then we moved to Marble Falls. Being an ex-pat was a self-involved lifestyle and I tended to think only of the person or situation in front of me.  

“I want to drive by Charles Street,” David says. He always refers to his childhood home by the street name, as though he had the run of the whole block instead of just the one house—though I guess this is understandable because, from what he’s told me, he and his neighborhood pals were in and out of each other’s houses constantly.

“And we’ll drive by the house on Fannin, too.” And just saying the street name brings the recollection of a game my sister and I, and all the neighborhood kids played in our front yard on summer evenings. When headlights turned on to the street there was a complex list of tasks to perform and bases to touch before the car reached us; and if we didn’t get it all done in time, we were DEAD.

We spend the night in a hotel on I-40, with a plan to get up and take a nostalgic tour before heading back to Marble Falls. I still haven’t been able to get hold of Linda. I call the hospice care place where her profile says she works, but it no longer exists.

“You want to go out there?” David’s talking about Washburn.

“Getting home is a long drive,” I tell him. “And we don’t know if she’ll even be there. She might have moved.”

So we settle on the plan of going by his house, then my house, then hitting the Canyon Expressway and heading south.

Charles Street has aged elegantly. The trees cast a pleasant shade and every house has flowers in the window boxes and green grass, which is a phenomenon in this part of the world.

“It looks a lot better than when we lived here.” David gets out to take pictures to show his sister and brother.

The route to the house where I grew up becomes rougher and more derelict the closer we get, until, when we turn on to Fannin, I’m appalled.

“It’s like the Third Ward.” It never was the richest part of town, but it’s become a slum. Every house has a lopsided couch in the front yard, or a couple of rusty cars in the driveway, or a refrigerator on the porch. Old broken stuff is everywhere. Hoarders occupy every house on the block, which is profoundly disturbing. I have zero tolerance for clutter.

Our house. My father who, by himself, bricked it in and added a three-story addition, would be horrified to see a truck parked across the front yard, weeds in the raised beds, and foil on the windows. The trim is in awful shape. The garage door doesn’t fully close. There’s a tilting refrigerator over by the fence.

David stops across the street and gets out to take some pictures.

“What kind of people just let things go like this?” I ask him when he gets back in.

“Poor people.”

“People who have meth labs in the basement.” So I’ve taken two hits today. The house I grew up in has become a slum. And I don’t have, and apparently never will have, a single picture of my father.

David sighs. He doesn’t like it when I’m unhappy and he can’t fix it.

“Let’s get back to a civilized land,” I tell him. “Where the HOA doesn’t allow people to throw their ugly old junk in their front yards.”

We head home knowing we’ll probably never see Amarillo again.

My childhood home. Can you see the refrigerator on the left? The truck is nice. 

My sister, Trina, was once friends with the girl who lived in this house. 

David was right. His childhood home looks a lot better now than it did thirty-five years ago. 

A plea. Please, if you've ordered and read Why Stuff Matters, would you post a review on amazon.co.uk? It'll only take a few minutes and it'll support my book. Thanks. 

Beginnings

After I type the last sentence of a manuscript, I have no idea what to do next. So I return to the beginning of the project I just completed and toy with it. I run a spell and grammar check. I fiddle with the chapter titles. And, in fussy mode, I review my characters to make sure I haven’t inadvertently used too many names that start with the same letter. Though this seems superficial, having a cast consisting of Donald, Daisy, Dick, and Drew can be a distraction.

But eventually, though I will long for the familiarity of the finished book and the friends I made there, I must say good-bye and move on.

I tuck the finished work into a file and pull up a white screen. I stare at it for a while, then play a few games of solitaire. For the next few writing sessions, I allow myself to mourn the loss. Solitaire, blank page, solitaire, blank page.

After a few days of this wasteful floundering, I apply a rule, a game of sorts, in which I’m not allowed to push away from the computer until I’ve written something. If I produce no more than a single sentence, at least I’ll have something to get me started the next morning.

Here is an opening that started that way—no story, simply a description of a room that came clearly to mind. I wrote it up and left the computer. Then I spent the day looking forward to returning to it because it wasn’t only about the setting; it was also about the main character, Karen:

Saturday morning, ten o’clock. The strategy room on the DA’s floor of the Caprock Tri-County Courthouse, a corner chamber made inharmonious by the sort of imperfections that make me squirm—a landscape hanging crookedly, a bank of cabinets with two drawers not quite closed, a set of blinds with an uneven slat.

The fact that a few wrongly situated items caused Karen to squirm told me that this was a character I could work with. I imagined a woman with OCD, under constant assault as she navigated her way through a day. To what degree did her OCD affect her relationships and her work? How did she react when she came upon a filthy counter or a misplaced item at the super market? Also, there was the inevitable question—why is Karen at the DA’s office on a Saturday morning? I had to continue writing to find out. 

A time or two, while fretting over getting a new project off the ground, a character has leapt, fully formed, onto the blank screen. A rare gift, this occurrence renders a plot in which the character calls the shots. From the opening of Old Buildings in North Texas, meet Olivia:

Before they’d let me out of rehab someone had to agree to act as my legal custodian. There it is, the snappy truth about why, at the age of thirty-two, I live with my mother. She now has control over every aspect of my life, from my finances to my laundry. One little cocaine-induced heart attack and it’s back to my childhood to start over.

From the moment of her arrival, Olivia pleased me. I knew the color of her hair, her build, and her background. She was furious with herself over her mistakes, and she was admirably devious. She was resourceful and witty. She was arrogant, bitter, and empathetic. She lived with me for a year, and I miss her.

When a starter idea simply isn’t there, I often rely on the most universal topic there is—the weather. This first paragraph is set in Sugar Land, southwest of Houston:

It’s so humid outside that the air molecules are sweating. The sky is churning and burdened, filled with smudged shades of gray. I didn’t realize it was so stormy. I’ll be racing the rain throughout my entire run.   

Is a stormy day interesting enough to pull a reader in? I’m not sure. But an interesting facet of the narrator’s character is found in the last sentence: she is such a slave to her exercise routine that she’s willing to go for a run in a storm. In fact, this discipline eventually reveals a well-meaning martinet, a woman so obsessed with propriety and procedures that she’s unable to communicate with people who aren’t as exacting as she is.

Here’s another kickoff containing weather:

Eddie steps outside the store when the rain begins. There isn’t a cloud in sight, hasn’t been all day. In fact, the sky is so bright and clear that just looking at it causes his eyes to water. The downfall stops as suddenly as it started and, to his delight, the eastern sky presents a double rainbow. You don’t see that every day and he takes it as a sign that something good is about to happen.

But the next thing that happens is the opposite of good—Eddie’s ex-wife shows up.

In Why Stuff Matters, I opened using both factors—the capricious weather and a strong, fully defined personality, Jessica, a grieving widow in charge of the elderly concessionaires in an antique mall. Here’s her voice:

My antique mall is the only building in this part of town that has a basement, so as soon as our county is included in the tornado warning that streams across the bottom of the television screen, I tromp down to the main floor from my third floor living quarters, unlock the front door, and prepare to be overrun for the fourth time this month.

The first chapter ends with Jessica, the main character, standing just inside her glass storefront as she watches a tornado destroy the apartment complex across the street. It’s a dramatic opening that morphs elegantly, unexpectedly, and humorously into a microcosmic revelation concerning humankind’s grasping nature.

It was a pleasure to write about and come to know Jessica. Why Stuff Matters is an unusual and entertaining read, which I think you’ll enjoy.

A sunny day in Albuquerque.

I've been looking at this book cover a lot this week. It's very attractive. 

Taken in Vega, TX. This stuff is of no use whatsoever, but somebody loves it.

This is where I went to elementary school. Look at the flags. The only reason for this picture is to show that the wind blows all the time in Amarillo, Texas. 

I know this blog tour is supposed to be about WHY STUFF MATTERS, but this old house speaks to anyone who's read  OLD BUILDINGS IN NORTH TEXAS. 

Wonderful News!

My new novel, Why Stuff Matters, will be released in the UK on October nineteenth. I’m currently involved in a blog tour, where I write essays and do Q&A’s for different British blogs. I’ve noticed that a few of these blogs have won awards for being stars in literary critique circles, so I have high hopes for good reviews and good sales.

Why Stuff Matters is about a grieving widow, Jessica, who inherits an antique mall from her mother. The elderly people who have booths in the mall are eccentric, cynical, and so acquisitive that they undercut one another, scheme over the possessions of the dead, and, in one case, kill in order to hang on to their stuff. When Lizzie, Jessica’s precocious and larcenous twelve-year-old stepdaughter, is dumped on Jessica’s doorstep, the dynamic between old and young is hilarious. I had so much fun writing it!

And more good news is that my publisher, Arcadia, has such faith in my novels that they’re getting a foot in the door of the American publishing industry by distributing Old Buildings in North Texas in the US starting in April. It’s a bit overwhelming, but also an honor, to be their flagship.

So, as you can see, I’m quite excited by how things are going.

Though I’m busy writing, I’m also traveling.

We are in Albuquerque for the International Balloon Fiesta, which attracts “hundreds of thousands” (quoted from their website) from all over the world, and provides the lion’s share of the annual income for the town and its tourist industry. The weather is gorgeous, the people are nice, and the restaurants, shops, and galleries are interesting. The main event is the Mass Ascension, a designation that holds cultish undertones and rings oddly to the ear. The Mass Ascension takes place on opening morning, when over six hundred balloons float upward from a grassy field at sunrise. It sounds like a magnificent sight.

But Albuquerque messed up.

We get on the hotel shuttle at five-thirty in the morning, which takes us to a park-and-ride in a mall parking lot, where buses will pick us up to take us to the balloon park. When we arrive at the mall our driver is shocked to see a line of two thousand people, three quarters of a mile long.

“This doesn’t look good,” she says, concerned. “I’ve been driving this shuttle for six years and I’ve never seen a crowd like this.”

It’s dark outside, and very cold. Getting to the end of the line is a hike, but spirits are high. Kids still in their pajamas scamper around. Old women huddle beneath blankets. As usual, I haven’t dressed appropriately. Freezing, I tuck myself between David and a man I’ve just met, hoping for vicarious warmth. All around us, strangers talk and laugh with one another. In our conversations with the neighbors in front and back, it’s evident that many have paid for airline tickets and expensive hotels rooms in order to see this one event.

The line is so long and circuitous that the buses we are supposed to board aren’t in sight. The sky grows lighter. We shuffle forward at a pace of twenty yards every five minutes.

At sunrise, seven o'clock, the event that we traveled so far to behold, and got up so early for, takes place twenty minutes away. Twelve hundred people still wait for rides in the mall parking lot. Fury flies through the air.

There is no apology, no acknowledgement that a mistake was made, no explanation, no refund. Speculation abounds among the frustrated and enraged people.

“How did this happen?” Freezing feet stomp hard into the tarmac.

“My ticket’s right here.” Waves the ticket so all can see.

“What do we do now?” A disbelieving whine. This question is applicable. We have been dropped here and have no transportation back to the hotel until nine-thirty.

A common speculation makes its way through the line. This massive error is being blamed on “the computer”. The weak-ass excuse is that “the computer” sent everyone who bought their ticket online to this particular parking lot instead of evenly dividing them between the five other pick-up points. 

I pull out my phone and search for the nearest breakfast place. There’s an Egg and I just up the street. David and I leave the line and head toward the restaurant.

Anyway, the whole situation is rotten, rotten, rotten. It’s left me feeling sour and vindictive toward Albuquerque. Twelve hundred people. Fifteen dollars per prepaid ticket. Eighteen thousand dollars. I hope Albuquerque chokes on it.

This morning we’re on our way to Steamboat Springs in Colorado. 

Isn't it beautiful? I have a few advance copies and, as the supply lasts, I'll send a signed copy to any friend who promises to post a review on amazon.co.uk.

As you can see from the similar cover design, Why Stuff Matters is a partner book to Old Buildings in North Texas. They both take place in the same town--Caprock, which is the setting of many of my novels, and is based on my hometown, Amarillo, Texas.  

I was happy on the day before the fiasco.  

The Glacier Experience

David wants to go to Glacier National Park, so that’s what we do.

On our first morning in Glacier we take a Red Bus Tour, thinking it’ll be a good way to learn about the park and get a feel for the various hikes. Hiking is basically all there is to do here. Having done no research, I packed cold weather clothes. To my dismay, the temperature is in the eighties; but honestly, the word glacier is in the name of the place, so cold weather is a given. Yet I smolder in my sweaters, jeans, thick socks, and hiking boots while everyone else runs around sleeveless and in shorts and sandals. It’s not the first time I've been inappropriately clothed and it won’t be the last.

The air smells of smoke. And the sky, which should be a blinding blue is, instead, a hazy gray. Our bus driver/guide tells about the Sprague Fire, which has closed a portion of the park. The fire started a couple of months ago when a tree was struck by lightning. So far it’s taken out thirteen thousand acres. 

“It’s what nature does,” our guide merrily informs. “The fire renews the forest.” He sounds like he’s in love with fire.

The tour takes us up the Going to the Sun Highway, a motorway made up of switchbacks overlooking steep cliffs, filling me with the horrifying knowledge that we’re going to fall over the edge and die. But instead of dying we arrive at Logan’s Lodge, which marks the Continental Divide. Above us, smoke. Below us, smoke. There’s much talk of bears, moose, and mountain-climbing goats, but a goat could cross a hundred feet in front of us and we’d be unable to see it. 

“No one seems concerned about this fire at all,” I tell David.

“Part of the experience,” he says.

The first day the smoke is bearable. The second day it’s less so. By the third day the sun isn’t visible and our fellow hikers wear filter masks. Our rental car is covered in ash. People doggedly go about the business of enjoying their vacations. There are mountains all around us, but we can’t see them.

As advised by friends, we spend four nights in West Glacier in Apgar village, and three nights in East Glacier, at St. Mary’s Lodge. Both cost as much as a four star hotel room, but they definitely aren’t that.

In Apgar the cabin we stay in has a ceiling so low that we can touch it—and we are not tall people. The shower is so tight that I bump my elbows every time I turn. The toilet paper is like wax paper. The sheets are clean, but the fabric is pilled. There is a one-person-at-a-time kitchen. Taped to one of the cabinets is a note asking us to please wash the dishes. I don’t give this much thought until it’s time to go and I run tepid water over the cups and silverware and stick them in the drainer.

“I hope the last tenant did a better job washing the dishes than I did,” I say.

“I don’t think expecting the paying customers to be responsible for cleaning the dishes for the next people is a wise policy,” is David’s response.

When it’s time to move from Apgar to St. Mary’s we stop for a hike at Two Medicine. As I’m standing in the restroom line, the woman in front of me mentions that she’s been staying at St. Mary’s and is now on her way to Apgar.

“How was St. Mary’s?” I ask. “We’re going to be there tonight.”

“They charge way too much for what it is,” she says.

I like the room at St. Mary’s Lodge better than the cabin in Apgar. It has a television and a comfortable shower and the sheets are softer. With no kitchen, though, and only a couple of restaurants in the area . . . oh well, we didn’t come here for the cuisine. This part of the park, too, is full of smoke. I’ve begun to cough, my nose is bleeding, and my eyes are red and burning.

When David asks at the front desk where the nearest liquor store is, the man tells us that the Canadian border is only twenty minutes away.

“Let’s go to the duty free and get some Grey Goose for the room,” David suggests. So that’s what we do.

“Why are you coming to Canada?” the border guard asks as she examines our passports.

“We’re going to the Duty Free,” David tells her, pointing across the street to the white square building with signage that declares Beer! Souvenirs! Cigarettes! Duty Free!

The woman grunts acknowledgement and returns the passports.

We drive across the street, park, go in and find our Grey Goose. The clerk, a woman in her early twenties, is the only other person in the shop. After David pays, he grabs the bottle to carry it out, but the clerk stops him.

“I have to deliver it to you,” she explains as she takes a choking grasp of the neck of  our Grey Goose. “Just drive over there and wait beneath those trees.” She points to a cluster of thin trees thirty yards away, just beyond the border station. Though we’re familiar with the procedures involved in buying duty free, this seems unnecessarily clandestine.

We get in our car. She follows us out and, clutching our bottle, clambers into a van. We drive across the street with the van following close behind. She has left the shop unattended, which goes against every known retail directive; but, as nobody but the border guard is in sight, I guess the shop is safe from marauders. But still, what would she have done if there had been other customers in the store? We circle behind the Canadian border office and come to a stop beside the three scrawny trees. There’s a sign posted on one of the trees that says DUTY FREE PICKUP AREA. The clerk gets out, approaches David’s window, hands him the Grey Goose, and tells us to have a nice evening. She gets in her van and drives back across the street.

Sometimes rules force people to act in absurd ways. Bewildered, we chuckle all the way back to our room in St. Mary’s, where we sip Grey Goose from plastic cups and watch the coverage of Hurricane Irma.

Smokey!

This cute little bar was forty miles from anything. We ate a really nice lunch here. 

In taking this picture, David slipped on the rocks and scraped his arm pretty badly. 

Every once in a while the air would clear for a few minutes. 

Everybody on the hiking trail was offering to take pictures of everybody else on the trail.