Return from Texas

Krissa and I flew into Newark last night mostly ignorant of the fact, as the cloud was low and thick and all we could see of the outside world from our seats was the grey-curtailed flashing of navigation lights and the vortices in the cloud made by the moving wing. We only saw the lights of New Jersey and the snow on the ground a minute or so before landing.

Texas.
Well.
Where to start?
As Krissa's Poppa told me, Houston isn't Texas. It's IN Texas, but that's not what Texas is like. My reactions to Houston and Texas are different things.

Let's start in London. I've been there, I've lived a little away from it, I've been there a lot. And anyone who'se been to both places will know that it's not New York, but it's one hell of a city, big, bustling, busy and swarming with activity and motion and pressure. London is a great city, and because of my familiarity with it, New York didn't come as so much of a change of gear to me as it would have done if I had lived all my life on the Yorkshire Moor.
Which I haven't.

Now I'm not saying that New York is bigger or better than London, but it is in a different country and the bulk of it is stacked higher than most of London. It looms more - there are extra dimensions - of information and motion to take in and cope with.
Now it also happens that I know New York better, or at least more intimately, than I know London. I live in New York, and I haven't lived in London. That's just the way it is.
So you could say that I'm more attuned to the sensory assault that the city launches at you every time you climb to the top of the subway station steps in Manhattan. I'm used to it.

So from New York let's go to Houston. It takes about four hours normally, and even when we're only considering cities in words and impressions it's still a bit of a jaunt from where we're standing, so while we're en route let me talk to you about another couple of things.

Have you ever worked in a restaurant? A supermarket? A theatre? Have you ever worked in a place where a curtain or veneer is drawn across part of what happens? It could be the cooking, dishwashing and ingredients in a cafe or restaurant, the stacking of the goods in the warehouse of a supermarket, or behind the scenes at a theatre. Yes? So you know what it is like to see and understand what makes something work beyond what you are presented with as a regular customer or client. It's almost like a privilege, even if you are in the lowliest of jobs, to get to know where the trick is, what the duck's feet are doing under the water...how it all ticks. It's a privilege and the privilege it gives is knowledge. You understand.
I've been lucky enough to study at university and had a few jobs, and all of the experiences attached to those times have shown me one thing - there's always something you miss if you take everything at face value.

Anything from what goes on in the kitchen (Why is there dirt on my bread roll, waiter? Oh, chef likes to serve them freshly harvested, sir.) to the amount of work, effort, planning and design it takes to keep a modern motorway up and running, there are always things to miss if you accept them for what they are. Ignorance is bliss and knowledge is privilege, and a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. For example, this little penchant I have for trying to understand what I am seeing made my brain fold in half on Friday.
Because of Houston.

Krissa and I landed in Houston after a four hour flight next to a very polite Texan West Point Freshman to find the weather pleasantly relaxing in comparison to New York. Today's temperatures are rattling around just above freezing, but in Texas it was humid and balmy. Not hot, but comfortable. Krissa's parents greeted us at the baggage claim (WARNING. This baggage conveyor will start without warning. When the conveyor is about to start, the alarm will sound.) and took us out into the a night which was bright with the lights of cars. We eased out of the airport and onto a freeway and ate at a roadside restaurant called iHOP - International House of Pancakes. More freeway, and our roadside hotel, and sleep between starched sheets in a comfortably characterless room.

In the morning we went out and into Houston to rent a car...more freeway. And along the freeway the roadside shops and cafes and stores and churches and restaurants which kept coming and coming and repeated in their catchment placement formulae and the roads were often clogged to the gunnels and on that Friday there didn't seem to be any actual TOWN, just roads, and the town was on either side of them, catching the passing traffic which was en route to...well, if this was Houston...where?

Krissa knows the city; she went to High School there, and the conversations with her parents were sprinkled with the names, numbers and titles of roads of how to get to one place or another, short cuts, traffic dodges...I tried to follow the road names to get to know my way around and figure out the way the city lay, but I failed.
I tried to figure it all out, and we went too far by freeway, through too many areas, with so many names and numbers and chain stores which all looked the same but different enough, as chain stores do, with flashing neon and billboards and church signs ("You'll fit in.", "Come Worship With Us.", "In Pain? Jesus Has Been There." "The Rockets' Stadium - soon to become Lakewood Church")...drive-through banks, all the time my mind was needling at it all wondering how, what, why, how can all of this keep going? Themes of names 'Memorial something', the most memorable of which was the seemingly inappropriately named optician, 'Memorial Eye'...and so much was new and moving past quickly and this was Krissa's old stomping ground that she had told me so much about and I was trying to reconcile what had been in my mind's eye with what I was seeing and after a day in the car my brain shut down and refused to take in any more stimulation.

I found myself being noncommunicative and staring at the dashboard as Krissa drove. I realised what was happening and tried to relax, and after a while it got better. I started to take things at face value, to enjoy the patterns made by the passing lights, the sensation of travel, without trying to understand it all. It was too much to take in, so I didn't take it all in, and I began to enjoy myself a lot more.

I've gone on about it a lot, but it's never happened to me before. It was a very odd feeling.
Parts of Houston were lovely - the water wall, the bayou-side parks, the atmosphere of quiet reassurance, the ease with with disparity and variation move around you as you travel through the city. It is a harlequin patchwork.

Meeting Krissa's Poppa and Deedee and their family was marvellous. A group of more welcoming and friendly people you could not hope to meet. Some of Krissa's High School friends were in Houston at the same time, so I was introduced to Erin and Rachel and Matt and Liz and we had a hell of a time.

One of the highlights of the weekend, for me, was getting to eat at Krissa's favourite restaurant in the world, which she and her parents have raved about ever since I met them - a Tex-Mex restaurant called Lupe's - and finally understanding why.

And on Sunday, Krissa and I took the rental car (itself worthy of an epic post) out of Houston. I have no idea if the route we took would have satisfied Poppa's definition of 'real' Texas, but we drove off the freeway across a great flat plain under enormous, glorious skies, a horse grazing on the roadside, past farms with slowly spinning many-bladed windmills, through towns whose entry signs gave populations in the hundreds, over a river, wide and with orange mud banks, and where everyone at the roadside or in a garden raised a hand in greeting as we passed.

And there is something about a warm climate which relaxes you in a way that you just can't get from being warm inside.
I feel good.

And I love travelling with Krissa.