God and Rain

It's raining tonight, breaking a long hot and dry streak that has threatened to turn the hills of west Austin into so much tender ready to explode in flames. We've had a record-hot June, and summer's just getting started. So a nice, slow rain is a gift from God.

Some thunderstorms scare me: the ones that rage and howl and threaten to blow the house down. Others are beautiful, like the one tonight, as it rolls and gently bumps its way across the night sky. It comforts rather than frightens.

And as I'm slogging through the left-overs tomorrow morning, I hope that I remember God's infinite goodness. How he lulled me to sleep with sound of sweet rain and gentle thunder bouncing through the night on acrobat feet.

God is good, when you let him be.

The Daddy Chronicles

When I was growing up, I never imagined a world without Daddy in it. He was always there, a quiet-spoken man of steel. One who said what he thought, whether anyone else agreed with him or not. But, even then, only if someone asked him what he thought.

A lot of people under-estimated him on the intellectual front because he wasn't an obvious intellectual. I doubt if he ever knew he was.

But he was.

I don't remember many conversations that didn't make me think about something other than as I would have before.

It’s been almost a year now, and part of me still doesn’t believe what happened in that hospital room in Memphis was real. I helped pick out the coffin and the grave stone, as well as help make the decision to turn off life support.

As I told Mama when she was faced with the possibility of having to cut off life support, “You’ll know what to do when it’s right. It’ll be the easiest thing and the hardest thing you’ve ever done. All at once. Easy, because you know it’s right, but hard because it’s the last thing in the world that you want to do.”

I know it all happened: I was there. I saw it with my own eyes.

And yet I don’t believe, on some level, that it did.

Grief is a strange animal: it shifts and twists and takes on forms you would not recognize until it bites you on the nose. It creeps up in the night while you’re sleeping and makes you sit straight up in bed. It waits around the corner where an old car that pulls into a parking lot makes you think of him.

“He would love this”, I think to myself.

And then I remember that he’s not here anymore.

I remember everything, but I still don’t believe any of it.

Such is the nature of mourning and grief.

I know what happened, and in time belief will follow.

The Accidental Enviromentalists

We moved to where we live now for a couple of reasons: we needed more space and our neighborhood was being invaded by drug dealers.

I was afraid to walk down the street at night (and in the winter, it was dark when I got home from work). I didn't know if the people in the car pulled over on the side of the road where no one would pull over for legitimate reasons or if the someone from the car that pulled up next to them to do the deal might take offense and shoot me.

And we needed more space. Two middle-aged men with a lifetime's worth of accumulated stuff in a one-bedroom apartment doesn't work real well. Especially when there's only one bathroom.

So we moved.

I wanted to be close to work, because I was taking the bus at the time. I wanted at least two bedrooms and two toilets. And I didn't want obvious drug activity on the streets outside.

I got it all (with an extra tub and bathroom sink thrown in). And it was the best deal at the time.

We live in a nice neighborhood within walking distance of my office. In fact, I can walk to the grocery, drug store, dry cleaner, pet store, hair cut store and Steinmart (who pays retail any more?), as well as any number of restaurants and other businesses.

Convenient, and no drug dealers.

But it gets better.

When I went to buy a car a year and a half ago, I only wanted to pay a certain amount and I wanted something that wasn’t going to kill us at the pump. After being jerked around by dealers who wouldn't even tell me how much one cost ("How much do you want to pay a month?" instead), I lucked out with a nicely appointed Ford Focus that gets 30-40 mpg on the highway. I walked in at the right time and talked to the right person.

And it was the best deal I could find.

A very good deal, actually.

I got it for 30% off of sticker price. At that time, small, fuel-efficient Fords weren’t selling real well. Which means I got all sorts of stuff I would have never paid for otherwise. Lots of bells and whistles that I don’t need, but certainly enjoy.

Because of where we live, me and Shannon almost never leave our neighborhood. We use the car for running short errands, usually a few blocks. And if I’m not going to be lugging stuff home, I still usually walk.

Unless the weather is icky. As I told my boss, I didn’t go in debt to be walking around in the rain.

A year and a half later, we have 7,500 miles on it. And 2,500 of those came when I went to Tennessee in July when Daddy was sick and died.

We are model environmentalists, although that was never the goal of moving or buying a car. The car has almost no emissions (I'm guessing that's what all those plastic things under the hood do), and we live a very short distance from just about everything we need. I walk to work (it's good for me, both physically and mentally).

We used 4.75 gallons of gas over the last two weeks, even though we had a couple of longer trips rolled in there. Shannon’s doctors are in far-South Austin, so it’s a 30 minute drive, no matter how you get there. And my dentist is five miles northwest.

And there are other accidental ways we’ve gone green: Shannon has been using a canvas shopping bag for a while now because he can sling it over his shoulder. It’s easier for him to do than carrying any kind of bag. We keep several in the back of the car for when we need them.

And we (me, actually) finally badgered our apartment managers into replacing our AC unit. It works so well that I have to keep it around 75 degrees to keep it from getting too cold inside.

All of these things are also quality of life issues. I don’t sit in traffic two hours a day getting to and from work. If I lollygag and take my time, it still only takes 15 minutes to walk it. The money I could be spending on a car and gas can be dedicated to other uses.

We made decisions based on quality of life, but it turns out that quality of life often turns green. And not in a bad way.

War and Peace

Where's George Orwell when you really need him?

Days Like This

Some things we do because we want to, and other because we know we must. That we have moral and ethical obligations to do so. That if we don’t do them, no one else will. That it’s left to us to do the right thing.

The latter category comprises the easiest and the hardest of them. Decisions that are self-evidently the right ones, so they’re easy, but also the most painful, so they are, likewise, infinitely hard.

But they are also as infinitely important.

The natural by-products of making those decisions are self-doubt, second-guessing and guilt. “Could anything else have been done?” “Should I have given it another day?” “Did I do the right thing?”

Objectively, I know that when someone’s blood has thinned to the point that he’s bleeding from his eyes, that his blood pressure is being artificially maintained at 50/20 and that he has cascading organ failure, it’s time to do the right thing. We knew what Daddy wanted, and that’s what we did.

Emotionally, I still can’t accept it. The “what if’s” hound me to this day.

What if, what if, what if.

I suppose I’ll live through them, as I did when Rich died 13 years ago this Friday.

It’ll take time.

Time to heal, time to gain confidence in my own decisions.

Nobody told me there’d be days like this, but I guess it’s just part of life’s rich pageant. I only hope that it doesn’t get richer any time soon.

Not sure I can afford it.

Chain of Fools

That Sadaam Hussein was in cahoots with Al Qaida remains absurd. Like most dictators, he was too ego-centric to allow any outside influence to influence him. And Islamic fundamentalism would be a direct threat to his power.

It was absurd the first time I heard the allegation, and it’s absurd still.

Sadaam would not have put up with some cleric stealing his spotlight. And that’s all Osama Bin Laden is: a cleric. And one whose agenda directly opposed Sadaam’s.

To suggest a tie between the two would mean accepting that Sadaam was open to a theocratic state. That one’s like trying to swallow an ostrich egg: it can’t get stuck in your craw because it’s such a whopper that you just can’t get it there.

These facts were self-evident when lies were being tossed around like so much salad, dressed with half-truths and deception.

Why intelligent legislators and other leaders did not see this, or see it and choose not to act on it, befuddles me. The entire proposition was nothing other than absurd. A bad fairy tale.

And if one piece of the chain is false, one has to doubt the veracity of all that follow.

I saw all this as it was happening, but nobody said a thing like it. No one questioned the total absurdity of a megalomaniacal dictator even acknowledging a radical cleric who, if established in his country, would undermine his absolute power.

Sadaam was not a nice man, but he didn’t have room for competition. In fact, he gained power by having his competition taken out back and shot.

History can be a good teacher, but only if you listen. Is everyone else deaf?

Fasten Your Seat Belts

Please take the necessary precautions to not fall out of chair when you read what's below. Trays in an upright position, seat belts fastened and cell phones off.

Ready, set, go...

Sunday, Sunday . . .

Usually when I get an email from one of the local TV station’s about breaking news, it’s not very important. Most of the time, it’s about a conviction or acquittal in a trial I don’t really care about. That, or another UT football player got arrested for drugs, assault or DUI. But I keep it because, occasionally, something important happens, and I want to know right away.

I’m an inveterate news junkie. I spend hours most days reading news and opinion from all over the world about a wide variety of topics that range from politics to tech-geek to architecture. So when I got the “breaking news” email at work this afternoon, my heart just about fell out of me.

Tim Russert is dead. No if, ands or buts. He’s gone.

It felt like losing a favorite uncle, the one who talks to me like an adult, even though I might be still learning how to be one. The one who tells great stories, but is ultimately more interested in what I have to say.

I looked forward to our weekly visits: I didn’t miss one unless I was really sick. As in “I-can’t-get-out-of-bed” sick.

I don’t know what I’ll do on Sunday mornings at 10:00 any more.

He never knew, I think, the impact he had on such a large scale. And not just on admitted news-junkies like me. He asked the same hard questions with everyone, always in a way the did not belie his own political positions. In fact, I’m not sure what his political positions are after years of watching him on TV.

What they were, that is.

I will miss him sorely, but he was not ours to keep.

Burning Down the House

Somebody done went and burned down the Governor's mansion. And a part of me died when I found out.

Back in the days when I was downtown a bunch, I walked by it almost every day. It's a grand old building that's, very often, bigger than the governor who happens to live there at any particular time. It's only a few feet from the street on all sides, and if the governor happens to be leaving, get ready for traffic to stand still for a bit on Lavaca St.

Lavaca is Spanish for "the cow", by the way. The Governor's mansion backs up to it, and that's where the driveway connects. Right across the street from the Travis County tax office. Or at least where it used to be. I'm not sure any more.

Austin has changed so much in the 15 years I've lived here, and especially in the last 5, that I get lost. I don't get out of my neighborhood very often, so when I go places I used to know, they always look different. There are buildings where they didn't used to to be, and the roads don't always go where they used to.

The two landmarks that haven't moved or changed much from the outside are the Capitol and the Governor's mansion, right across the street from each other.


The Capitol had an extensive renovation, restoration and extension that ended several years ago. And as a lover of buildings for their own sakes, it's a gem. A fire 20 years ago made the need for renovation clear. What had been a grand building of pink granite blocks with walnut doors had become a warren of tiny offices, many in the basement. As the state grew, the building that housed its government had not.

The state appropriated money for additional office space in a unique under-ground office building with a sort of inverted dome. It's a brilliant piece of architecture that never lets you know you're actually 2 stories underground. Private money paid for most of the restoration to the original building.

The Governor's mansion had suffered similar neglect. It's older than the Capitol by a few years, over 150 years old. So when the $10 million restoration began, I was pleased. Plaster was falling off the ceilings, and the roof leaked. It was time for some work.

That's all moot now. All the money that's been spent to date went up in smoke, along with most of everything else. All of the detailed woodwork, the windows with their dripping glass, the grand stairway. All gone.

My guess is that they'll try to stabilize the exterior walls and rebuild inside them. It will probably end up looking similar to what it used to on the outside. But you can't restore what goes up in smoke. When it's gone, it's gone.