Category: Uncategorized

And Jesus said to them, Yes; have you never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings you have perfected praise? — Matthew 21:16 (American King James Bible)

Two weeks ago tonight Carolann and I drove to Tracy’s and Martha’s house in McKinney to join their semi-weekly Bible study group. This will come as a surprise to our family and friends in California because we’re not church-goers but we’re not heathens, either. We’re quiet believers.

And frankly, more to the point, we’re new to Texas and have no social life. We need to meet people.

So, there we were, eight or ten of us having snacked and socialized, now seated together in our friends’ living room engrossed in the book of Daniel and sharing The Word.

Tracy and Martha’s eight-year-old daughter Sadie was upstairs in her room, unseen and forgotten.

The Good Book is passed to our new friend, Mike.

A dog barks in the backyard. Sadie yells at the dog through her upstairs window, telling him to be quiet.

Mike reads.

MIKE: “Ezekiel describes his vision of God…

The dog begins baying outside.

MIKE:  “A voice came from above…”

Upstairs, to the dog:

SADIE: “SHUT UP YOU RETARD!!!”

We’ll try to pick it up at that point tonight. I’m praying that Sadie is there.

Yesterday I took my first official Texas road trip, not counting the one that got me here in the first place. I drove a hundred miles from our new home just north of Dallas to visit a friend in Waco and I left early enough to stop and see a place I’ve wanted to see for years: Abbott, Texas. It’s a town of 356 people and just one sad little remnant of an old general store as its only operating business establishment. In that, Abbott is like a million other far-flung places in this huge and proud state with one distinction:

Abbott is the birthplace and childhood home of Willie Nelson.

The most striking thing about Willie’s hometown is that unlike similarly distinguished small towns in America it doesn’t display one single word about its famous son. There are no statues or museums or souvenir stores and not a single sign proudly proclaiming, “Birthplace of Willie Nelson!” Not a word. You either know it or you don’t. I suppose the quiet, hard-working Texans who live here prefer not to have their few streets choked with tourists taking pictures of local kids playing in  the streets and fields without asking permission. In that respect Abbott maintains its charm and dignity. It certainly looks the same now as it did eighty some years ago when Willie and his piano playing sister Bobbie were born there.

The Depression-era Abbott Methodist Church*, where Willie and Bobbie sang hymns when they were both just knee-high to a June bug, sits directly across the street from the Abbott Baptist Church. These are by far the best-kept buildings in town. They are postcard-perfect visions of Americana brought to life, old yet gleaming white buildings with gloriously pious steeples and neatly trimmed lawns.

I took my pictures surreptitiously, not wanting to draw attention. My self-consciousness was unnecessary. I never saw a person on the street nor outside of the scattered handful of homes in the neighborhood.

It was Saturday and 109 degrees. Cicadas sang love songs.

I went into the Abbott Cash Grocery Market to buy a cold soda pop and just to be able to say I had been there. The store was sad. Most of the shelves were empty. What few items it did carry were all packaged goods crammed together: toilet paper and dishwashing detergent right next to the canned okra and lima beans. No meat or produce. They did carry soft drinks and snacks and a few staples such as sugar and flour that a local woman fixing Sunday dinner might need in a rush. No doubt folks there drive to Waco supermarkets and Walmart for real groceries.

Inside the store I was again struck by the lack of highly conspicuous Willie business. Yes, the word, “Willie’s” hangs discreetly above the awning outside but if you didn’t know differently you’d assume it was the owner’s name, not THE Willie. Fact is, I have no idea what it means*. His voice wasn’t floating out of any overhead speakers. Nothing was. There were no lifesize cardboard cutouts where I might have the lone clerk snap a cute picture of me smiling alongside the Redheaded Stranger. They did have a very short shelf stacked with Willie Nelson t-shirts and video tapes but again, no signs to draw your attention and no explanation as to why the stuff was there if you didn’t already know.

I’m ashamed to admit that I wanted a shirt or a ballcap from this secretly famous old store but was too embarrassed to reveal myself as the tourist I was to give that nice lady some money, which she surely needed. Today I’m sorry about that.

But as Willie sings it in one of his best, lesser-known songs:

“Regret is just a memory written on my brow, and there’s nothing I can do about it now.”

UPDATE: (*In 1976 Willie and sister Bobbie bought the Abbott Methodist Church – shown here – to preserve and maintain it, which he has surely done. At the same time they purchased the General Store and turned it over to the church. That explains the relatively inconspicuous name, “Willie’s” above the awning.)

Or as we call it in Texas, Wednesay.

Late spring sits on North Texas warm, wet and heavy. Sometimes the sky is postcard blue, other times dull and benign.

Sometimes it’s black as dread and just as still.

Sometimes multi-streaked lightning bolts rifle baseball-size hailstones at us. Birds are struck dead in flight by wondrous ice ball cannonade crashing through windshields and 90 degree heat.

Sometimes funnel clouds move around like giant old men shuffling aimlessly through corn fields oblivious to the commotion they cause.

All these times will occur in a single day. Excitement is quite literally in the air.

We check the weather radar before going to bed and then sleep warily, warning gadgets next to our heads.

A few hours later it begins again. Peacefully. Quiet with promise, and just a tiny smirk.

© 2012 DL WILLIAMS. All rights reserved.

I’ve lived in Texas for almost three months now and it’s true what they say, Texans are friendly.

Total strangers strike up conversations with Carolann and me everywhere we go. This is a sharp contrast to living in California where strangers don’t generally speak to each other except rarely and briefly to request and impart some specific information such as directions to a particular street. These exchanges are always short and businesslike. They rarely blossom into conversation.

Texans don’t need any such pretense to launch into idle and often very personal chit-chat. You can be standing in a line at the supermarket and suddenly find yourself swapping family secrets with three or four people, all of you strangers to each other. By the time you leave the checkstand you’ve exchanged names and maybe pie recipes.

Texans also have a great and dry sense of humor, intentional or not.

I had only been here a couple of weeks when I went for a haircut and mentioned all of this to the very young woman cutting my hair.

“I really like Texas and the people I’ve met here,” I told her.

As she snipped around the edges of my head she gave me the following words of greenhorn wisdom in a cute and perky Southern accent:

“People say Texans are friendly,” she began, “and it’s true, we are friendly but we expect y’all to take care of y’alls own bidness.”

Then, with a drawl so sweet and thick you could pour it on a waffle, she explained, “Texans will give you the shirt off their backs or a meal and bed at the drop of a hat but if ya’ll step into the street without lookin’ we will run you over!”

© D.L. Williams 2012

The other day I Googled my RV/Camping blog, Thataway Road, searching for inspiration. Here’s what I found:

Smack dab in the middle of Arkansas there is a tiny town called Yellville, where you’ll find the intersection of Thataway Rd. and Thisaway Rd., just about a quarter mile from Whichaway Rd. Wouldn’t you love to hear somebody out there giving directions to a lost RV family? Shades of Abbott and Costello.

Thataway and Thisaway isn’t the only funny intersection you may come to. In an Arizona retirement community residents undoubtedly get a thousand laughs a day from living, as they do, at the corner of Stroke and Acoma Streets.

If you’re bored and depressed in Albany, Georgia, you can always go hang out at the corner of Lonesome and Hardup.

Presidents are apparently tempting fodder for local street namers. Folks in Houston, Texas, are keeping true to their largely conservative perspective and their well-deserved reputation for being facetious by naming converging streets Clinton and Fidelity. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, people engaged in brief political commentary by creating the intersection of Nixon and Bluett.

You have to love Americans. We don’t get as much credit as we deserve for having a national sense of humor. Just look at some of the street names scattered across our fruited plain:

There are several streets in the U.S. called Psycho Path.

In Story, Arkansas, the only way to get your truck camper to Constipation Ridge is to drive up Farfrompoopen Road.

And, while we’re on that unfortunate topic…

Folks in Central Pennsylvania can direct you to Cowshit Ln. if you will kindly refrain from stealing the street sign. It seems to happen a lot. In fact, that’s why the merchants of Amador City, California, years ago began selling copies of their iconic Pig Turd Alley sign, hoping that it would stop thefts of the actual sign. That must have worked. I bought one.

Some street namers seem to be completely baffled and give up…

Lambs Terrace, NJ

…while others just seem to lack interest.

Vallejo, CA

There are some streets you should steer clear of…

And the famous road less traveled.

Wherever your adventures take you, keep smiling. We live in a very funny country.

CarolAnn and I recently got Netflix.

As a writer of dialogue myself I’m a slobbering fan of Aaron Sorkin for his creation of The West Wing and Studio 60. With Netflix I was anxious to get another look at Sorkin’s Sports Night for the first time in a dozen years. I immediately fell in love with the show again and settled down to watch all 45 episodes in three days.

Here’s what I discovered:

I don’t care if you’re watching Sorkin or Neil Simon or William-Fricking-Shakespeare, stylized dialogue gets appallingly self-caricatured if you watch too much in one sitting. Also, like picking up a Southern drawl after spending a weekend in Atlanta it’s highly contagious.

I’ve started speaking Sorkinese.

This morning as CarolAnn was leaving for work we had the following conversation:

Me: What do you want for dinner?

CA: What?

Me: Dinner. What do you want?

CA: Tonight?

Me: Yes, tonight. What do you want?

CA: For dinner…

Me: Right.

CA: I don’t care.

Me: Maybe not now but you will. If it was dinner time right now, what would you want?

CA: Where are my keys? Hey, can you please do some laundry today?

Me: Laundry, yes, but first I want to figure out dinner. And, how would I know?

CA: What?

Me: What, what?

CA: How would you know what?

Me: Where your keys are. How would I know?

CA: Found ’em! Gotta go. Surprise me. Chicken fried steak.

(She gives him a peck on the cheek and goes out the back door.)

Me: Which? Surprise you or chicken fried steak?!

I haven’t written much about my brief time in Chicago. I’ve wanted to but have always been too busy, too tired or just too overwhelmed to make sense enough of it all that could be put into words. Being away from home and family is like that. You’re never whole. You’re always alone on a fool’s errand, or so it can seem.

Adventures almost never end as well as we dream, though there is wisdom to be plucked from every day.

So, tomorrow I’m going home to my family and tomorrow can’t come soon enough. Home and my loved ones are just about all I can think about.

But I have also thought about this a lot over the past couple of weeks and it is suddenly desperately important to me that I share it with my sons.

When I was fourteen or fifteen my dad was in Vietnam. He knew I was having trouble coming to grips with his absence, junior high, being a teenager and having the creeping suspicion that boys and girls are different and that it might be important to me someday. I was half-child, half-Martian. Life was confusing and difficult for me and I didn’t even know why.

Dad sent me a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s “If…” and these words became the guiding light of my life.

I pass it on here to my sons and theirs. Works for daughters, too.

Read it from time to time, take it to heart and walk tall. It’s a powerful philosophy that can allow you to have your head in the stars with your feet always safely on the ground.

IF you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream – and not make dreams your master; If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools: If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’ If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And – which is more – you’ll be a man, my son.

I’m a native Californian. Until two months ago when I arrived in Chicago with no car I have never ridden a bus or train except as a rare lark. Now public transportation is my only means of getting from here to there. Fortunately, the Chicago Transit Authority is rightly celebrated as being one of the best transit systems in the world. You can get anywhere, from here to there… and then from there to there further, on to there elsely and, eventually, your destination… if you just have a map, a transit schedule, a compass, an Eagle Scout badge and a the patience of Job. Through a simple yet sometimes confusing series of transfers and queries for direction you will eventually arrive for just $2.25, total plus a quarter for unlimited transfers.

You just have think of it as an adventure.

On the CTA you can set out for a Sunday farmers market and return home nine hours later with two fully ripened avocados.

You can haul a package to the post office and have it arrive at grandma’s house in Des Moines before you reach your front porch.

One day I didn’t feel like walking the two blocks to the train station so I took another train to get there even though it took half an hour and I had to stand the entire way, crushingly, intimately close to a bunch of people to whom I had not been introduced.

I’m sure this all sounds terrible to my California friends and family but I am saving several hundred dollars a month by not buying gas. And frankly, being alone in the big city I have nothing but time on my hands. I’ve read two full books while riding trains and buses. Plus, I’ve met some — shall we say interesting? — people.

More on that later. I have to be at work in three hours and it’s twelve miles away. I must run to catch my rides!

Copyright 2011, David L. Williams

Sixteen days after my arrival in the town that Carl Sandburg dubbed the “City of the Big Shoulders” I am still fascinated; still excited.

It’s July and Chicagoans are just adorable. The blistering, humid heat makes everybody on foot soak through their shirts in less than a block, though it’s only 8 a.m.

Most of us lug computer bags and backpacks as we walk the streets of Chicago. Most of us wear loose cotton shirts and pants to work. A lot of men wear shorts. You see very few suits, sport coats and ties. That’s smart. After just sixteen days even I know those suit-and-tie guys are business travelers trying to earn their freedom, comfort and confidence.

Mid-Westerners are smart and practical. We dress as comfortably as we wish while still looking respectable; neat, clean and simple.

My wild West-Coast Hawaiian prints have no place here except in a box.

Staggering through beautiful streets in the steamy heat we mostly keep our heads down so the perspiration doesn’t drip onto our shirts and blouses. Occasionally we look up, nod, and give a pained but encouraging smile to our brothers and sisters who pass us on the sidewalk. We’re all in this together.

We have many destinations but one common goal: to just get where we’re going.

Chicagoans don’t complain.

The City of the Big Shoulders doesn’t suffer weather, it wears it with a shrug, a wink and a wry grin.

Everybody here  loves to warn me about the coming brutal winter. They tease and bait me. I think they’re trying to goad the guy from Southern California into whining about the heat and humidity; they want me to worry about snowfall and the coming icy Arctic wind.

I’m having no part of it. I have big shoulders

I’m a Chicagoan.