Collards and Anxiety Dreams

My hotel is the Embassy Suites. Its located in the what the tourist brochures always refer to as the “fashionable Buckhead Neighborhood.” The hotel is a bit of a puzzlement. to me, and makes me wonder if the Aminzade scale needs revision. It offers a fluffy 46″ towel, but a combination conditioner and shampoo. There are no extra amenities (damn, I really felt like a shoe mitt tonight!), and the shampoo and hand lotion are served not in a basket but on an intricately-folded washcloth. I’m not sure there’s a word for the artistic folding of washcloths. Is it a variety of Orgami, or would it be called a branch of the art of napery? At any rate, it’s a pleasant change from wicker.

I’m teaching an evening class this day, so we have a little time to do some exploring. Jeff is kind and gracious enough to indulge my desire to find Son’s Place. It’s a “soul food” establishment that my sources (that’s you, Chris!) claim has the finest peach cobbler known to humanity. I generated a map and directions from the Internet (http://www.mapsonus.com), but the results aren’t proving very useful. After several wrong turns we stop a gas station for help. I climb up the side of an Atlanta Parks Department truck to ask the occupants for directions. They haven’t heard of Son’s, but get us on the right street.

Son’s is everything we hoped it would be, despite one upsetting note. Perhaps because I’ve spent so many years as a student I have a real aversion to eating off of a cafeteria tray. Son’s serves their food in the worst incarnation of a tray, the “trate” which replaces rather than holds bowls, saucers, and plates. It has molded recesses for the main dish, and three side dishes, and a well to hold a beverage glass. Despite this off-putting setting, the food is ambrosial. No ribs today (too bad), but fried chicken and catfish, black-eyed peas, and by far the tastiest collard greens I have ever had. These do, however, have an unfortunate side effect. I generate collard burps all day and into the evening, popping Altoids and hoping my students don’t notice. The peach cobbler lives up to its reputation.

As we leave, Son himself arrives. I introduce myself to him and he shakes my hand warmly and asks where I’m from. As Jeff and I pay and leave, Son walks over to the cash register and rings a gigantic bell to get the attention of all the diners. “Ladies and Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to Russell and Jeff, here all the way from Vermont.” Extrovert that I am, I’m still surprised and embarrassed as everyone looks up from their trays of chicken and catfish to give us a hearty round of applause. Jeff is a remarkable travelling companion — he seems to not only tolerate my desire to look for unusual eating establishments, but to share my enthusiasm.

That night I teach the evening class, and head back to the hotel for a fitful attempt at sleep. As I lie in bed half-awake, I hear thunder behind the curtains. I’ve been good about avoiding TV even though the Embassy suites provides me with two of the monsters, but there’s no avoiding the images in the newspapers and the airport CNN screens. They have been filled with pictures of NATO bombing in Kosovo and tornado destruction in Oklahoma. I don’t feel anxiety or fear, but my I half-dream images of the hotel being destroyed by a terrible storm or earthquake.

After the thunder rolls through, I have less catastrophic but far more realistic anxiety dream. I am teaching a class, but the students are chatting and ignoring me. I clear my throat and say “OK” to no avail. I then try my most potent weapon — a long, silent pause. It doesn’t work. They chat away. This nightmare more or less comes true the following day, and the earlier, more ominous one wasn’t entirely off the mark either.

On the flight from Boston to Atlanta I sat next to a black woman. I found her demeanor strange — she was both chatty and distant. She was, it turned out, the ex-wife of a genuine celebrity (at least in the world of academia), Harvard philosophy professor Cornell West. Her son was at Harvard, too, and she was returning from a visit with him.

Conversations with strangers are a strange pas-de-deux. Each person tries to steer the talk to subjects they find interesting, while keeping the other person interested enough to continue the talk. She was about my age, and my fascination with place and history had me guide the conversation to how it felt growing up in Atlanta during the civil rights movement. She didn’t go with my tack, but grabbed the rudder and steered things over to where she could discuss what it was like being a child in the middle to upper middle class Atlanta community where she was raised. Her father was a home builder, and she seemed a little defensive about these humble beginnings, explaining that black people a generation ago couldn’t get decent jobs in white-owned businesses, and that the most ambitious and talented ones went into business for themselves.

She seemed to place a lot of importance on class differences among people of color, something I hadn’t thought about much. The great rift in America had always seemed to me to be to be along racial lines. She really surprised me by saying that an unexpected consequence of the civil rights movement was a loss of business for many independent black business people. Apparently, once blacks were free to do business with white establishments the fortunes of many black professionals declined. It made me wonder what Martin Luther King might have had to overcome to organize the movement that transformed our nation in the 1960s. He didn’t just have to get over his own class prejudices, but he had to organize people in the black community who didn’t have a lot to gain and something to lose.

She did remember growing up near in a neighborhood where members of Martin Luther King’s family lived. More poignantly, she remembered viewing King’s body at the Ebeneezer Baptist Church. Telling this story she somehow managed to make it clear that a) she wasn’t Baptist, and b) this was one of the only times she had visited “Sweet Auburn,” Atlanta’s traditional black community.

Like all parents, she fretted about her son. He was, she said, brilliant (she stated his IQ number) but not willing to work hard. She contrasted this with his father who had an incredible drive and determination. The son was very interested in theater, and doing a lot of acting at Harvard. She seemed upset that he was unwilling to use his fathers connections and influence to get ahead in his chosen career.

Like Cornell West, she had studied philosophy, but, left on her own to raise his child, she became a broadcast technician of some sort. She needed to make ends meet, and there wasn’t money to be made in philosophy. I answered with a joke that “..Yes, there haven’t been a lot of new philosophy factories hiring in the last few decades.” She obviously missed the joke and answered that she would never work in a factory.

Our talk danced over to the subject of absent fathers. It’s hard to judge how good or bad the famed Mr. West was as a parent. The testimony of ex-spouses, like that of ex-employees, is not an unbiased source, and she did mention the son having travelled a lot with dad. Without making any judgments, I brought up the issue of people with very successful public lives who were not particularly great parents — I mentioned Mahatma Gandhi’s less than stellar performance as a father. She had heard the story, too.

She great a bit more animated when I mentioned a high-school friend of mine (Dave Weinberg) who worked with director Spike Lee. In the 1970s and 1980s when Dave wasn’t teaching at the high-school we had both attended, he picked up some extra money playing minor roles in “blaxploitation” movies like “Son of Superfly.” David specialized in playing a mean white cop. This led to an opportunity to work with Spike Lee. You may recall him as one of the two officers who killed Radio Raheem in “Do the Right Thing.”

Her interest picked up when I talked about my mother. Mom was never able to make a career out of acting, but she attended the New School in New York city and worked with the famous method-acting instructor Lee Strassberg. One of her classmates had been Marlon Brando. My seatmate idolized Brando, so I didn’t mention that I’d hardly ever seen any of his movies.

I’m traveling to Atlanta with a business colleague, and he’s adventurous enough to try and track down a great soul-food place that wasn’t open last time I was in Atlanta. Details in my next missive.

The Professor and the Madman

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I read interesting books, and some of my friends and “Journeys” subscribers don’t read nonfiction, so I thought it might be fun to tell you about what I’ve been reading lately. Besides, the business trips seem to be getting more boring and I’d like to keep writing between trips . I realize you signed up for “Journeys of a Business Traveller,” so I’ll rationalize this by calling it “what I’m reading in flight” even though I’ve read some of these books on the ground. Honestly, though, in-flight reading is a big part of my business travel. Drop me a line and let me know if you’d like more of this or if you’re just hitting the “delete” key.

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My first introduction to the Oxford English Dictionary was at my friend Harris’s house. He owned a two-volume set printed in minuscule type and equipped with a massive magnifying glass. It was a come-on offer from a book club, and though Harris was a good poet, I think he used the OED largely to cheat at Scrabble. I’ll never forget the time he used “ka” to get two triple word scores and the bonus for using up all his tiles. It turns out that the “ka” is one aspect of the human spirit worshipped by the ancient Egyptians. It’s in the OED, and sometimes it seemed to me that any combination of letters that can be pronounced is in there, too.

Whatever Harris’s motives for purchasing the dictionary, I spent many hours perusing it. I was awed by it, but I never knew what a remarkable book it was until I read “The Professor and the Madman” by Simon Winchester. At the height of the Victorian era, a bunch of Brits filled with the hubris of empire decided that they could write a definitive dictionary that would define and provide citations for every word in the English language. The editors relied on thousands of volunteers, who sent in slips of paper, each with a “target” word and a citation. Boiled down to its essence, the job of these readers was to read every book written in English since 1250 and find a quotation for every word in that book. Yes, every word. It sounds like something out of the fantastic stories of Borges but they did it. It took more than 70 years and several tons of paper slips, and resulted in twelve volumes, almost two million quotes, and 178 miles of hand-set type. The last word, Winchester tells us, was “zyxt,” a Kentish-argot tense of the word “to see.”

But this book isn’t about the OED, it’s about two men: Professor James Murray who was the editor of the OED, and Dr. William Chester Minor, an American, a Civil War veteran, and one of most learned and prolific contributors the the project. Minor was also completely insane, probably a mixture of schizophrenia and what we now call post-traumatic shock syndrome. During one of his delusional states he had killed a man, and all the time he contributed to the book he lived in an asylum for the criminally insane. He constantly complained of Irishmen conspiring to poison him, people hiding under the floorboards who came out at night to molest him and others who would abduct him by airplane, whisk him off the the Middle East, and make him perform unspeakable acts with young girls.

It’s too good a story for me to give away much more, and Winchester tells it like a pro, while also debunking a mythologized version of the story that was circulated in many American newspapers. I learned a lot from the book: The bravery of the Irish Brigade in our Civil War and how so many of them hoped to return to Ireland and continue fighting, how the cheeks of Civil War deserters were branded and the technique used by Dr. Minor to successfully perform on himself (while incarcerated) the operation that Lorena Bobbit tried to perform to her husband.

Sleep Inne

There’s a joke circulating on the internet that goes something like this: A business traveller’s plane crashes, and he’s marooned on a desert island. He builds a crude lean-to and survives by eating coconuts and drinking coconut milk. Months later, tired of his monotonous diet and nearly insane with boredom, he decides to explore the island. After a long and tiring hike he meets a beautiful woman. Sure enough, she had been in the same plane crash. It turns out that she was an engineer before the plane crash, and she invites him to the attractive palm-thatched home she has built. “Would you like something to eat?” she asks. “Not if it’s coconuts. I’m really sick of them.” The woman explains how she has trapped the wild boars that roam the island and cured their haunches into ham. She’s also made bread made from the starchy breadfruit that grew nearby. She brings him a ham sandwich. “And how about a drink?” she asks. “No thanks, I’m really sick of coconut milk.” The woman explains that she can make him a Pina Colada; she has built a small still to make rum, and found a small grove of pineapple trees.

He sits on her porch in a hammock she wove from palm fronds, eating the sandwich, drinking the Pina Colada and watching a glorious tropical sunset. She joins him in the hammock, leans close, and whispers in his ear “I bet there’s something else you’ve been missing, too.” The business traveller’s heart is thumping. He looks her in the eye and says “You mean…I can check my email from here?”

I know exactly how he felt. For technical reasons most of you don’t want to know about, I am unable to check my email (for the rest of you, installing VPN software probably trashed my IP stack and the dongle on my PCMCIA card is flaky, too). To compound my stress, the day I decide to leave coincides with an elaborate April Fools hoax that I’m playing on my entire division at work. This involves an announcement about a new system for ordering lunch online at our corporate headquarters. It includes a notice of training sessions in the lunch-ordering module, and is followed by a set of instructions including several screen shots. All of this was to have delivered by email. I suspected my laptop might fail me, and have arranged for a co-conspirator to help with the scheme, but I’m forced to wait a full week before I check my mail for the various replies. Throughout the entire trip to New York and Minnesota I’m imagining my mailbox filling up, and have the terrible sense of helplessness and forboding I usually get only when I think I might have left the bathtub running at home.

The Minnesota trip itself was short and dull. I arrived late in the evening. The Raddison Metrodome (on the University of Minnesota campus) is hard to classify on the Aminzade scale. A 46-inch towel, but the soap products are lower-to-dead middle (Raddison brand shampoo-conditioner combo), and there’s no wicker basket, shoe mitt, or sewing kit. The lobby is filled with award plaques from various travel-rating companies, but none of them is less than a decade old. I had a nice dinner with my brother and his family at a casual but very classy restaurant.

I was looking forward to a peaceful return trip — first class upgrades all the way, hurrah. Instead, my flight was delayed over an hour, and I missed the last plane to Vermont that night. USAIR gave me a voucher for some place called the Sleep Inne. I arrived there at 11:30, fell asleep about an hour later, and got a computerized wake-up call at 5:30 AM so I could catch the first flight in Vermont.

It was a strange experience. The hotel stay felt like part of the trip, and I felt as if I’d never left the airport. My only hint that I was in Pittsburgh was the distinctive Appalachian contour of the land visible just beyond the headlights of the Sleep Inne van as it drove me from the airport and back. The Inne shares a West Pennsylvania hilltop with a Super-K-Mart.

The Sleep Inne itself is a cut above the Motel 6 but exhibits all the telltale signs of lower-middle hotelhood — one bar of white soap, combo nanobottle, towels something less than 44″. But very clean. The van driver tells me this as he shuttles me there. “The airline crews stay here a lot because it’s cheap and very clean.” And clean it is. Excruciatingly clean, depressingly clean, insomnia-inducing clean. I miss my personal dust bunnies and the smell of yesterdays dinner wafting from the trash. Mr. Van driver also recommends the complimentary continental breakfast. Jelly donuts, Froot Loops and nondairy creamer.

Every flight I take to anyplace in the nation seems to be routed through Pittsburgh, but to get to Burlington from Pittsburgh involves changing planes in Albany and riding a very small and noisy plane up the Champlain valley and across the lake. It’ an overcast day and we ride just below the clouds for most of the trip. Bumpy but beautiful.

That evening, sleep-deprived, I got a call from my mother. To my surprise, she had been tracking my every move. Before I left New York, she asked for my outgoing flight number, so I handed her a copy of my itinerary. She has been tenaciously calling the airline and tracking every step of my journey — missed connection, hotel stay, connection in Albany and return to Vermont.

Elephants and Stealth Bombers

It’s been a few weeks since my last trip. I took a few notes then, but haven’t been able to sit down and put together a story until tonight. As I warned you, it was a boring trip, and I’m hoping that’s why I’ve been so slow the write it up. At least I hope it’s not a case of the dreaded writers block or a sign that my procrastination is becoming terminal. Anyway, here’s part 1 of 2.

A strange caprice of airline pricing allowed me to take a triangle flight from Laguardia in New York to Minneapolis and then to back to Vermont at no extra cost, so after a Passover trip to New York I send Isabel back to Vermont with her mother and headed to Minnesota.

While we were there Isabel and I got to see the Bronx Zoo again. I’ve become a big fan of zoos since she was born, and the Bronx Zoo is one of the largest as well as one of my favorites. In particular, I adore the older buildings arranged around Astor Court (near the Sea Lions). These buildings made up the original Zoological Gardens. The Great Hall is the winter home for the elephants and year-round home of the tapirs. My friend Pat, who has worked at other zoos, describes a baby tapir as “a watermelon with legs.” But I digress. The building is an amazing three-domed gilded-age confection that looks like a Mosque from Oz decked out in rhino and elephant gargoyles. It’s one of my very favorite architectural spaces. If I were Bill Gates or the Sultan of Brunei or for that matter John Jacob Astor, I would build a replica of this place and live in it.

It’s a shame that today we enter the zoo from the main parking lot near the Bronx parkway, past the Bison and Pére David deer. A stroll around the grounds or a look at a map of the zoo (http://www.wcs.org/zoos/bronxzoo/bxzoomap/) makes me wonder what it would have been like to arrive here at the turn of the century when the zoo was new. I would have driven my carriage through the formal gate off Fordham Road. A short formal driveway would have brought me to the magnificent fountain decorated with all manner of fauna. From there it would have been a few steps up to Astor Court, a stroll through the court to the wonderful Great Hall and its resident pachyderms.

Behind the Great Hall there are two giant bronze rhinoceroses. I was dismayed to find a “no climbing” sign and a low chain fence around my old friends the Rhinos (“kid lost a finger last summer” said a guard). I have a fond memory of climbing up there with my stepdaughter some years back. I knew they were dangerous — about 8-10 feet high at the shoulder, cold, slippery and scary to climb, but it seems to me that a sense of fear and adventure are totally appropriate to an encounter with a rhino. I’m sad that the thousands of children who polished the rhinos’ backs won’t be able to watch in trepidation as their children do the same.

Back in the great hall a woman behind a desk explained that the Bronx Zoological Garden was started by Teddy Roosevelt and some of his rich friends (including Astor). They wanted a place to keep a herd of buffalo which they knew would soon to be driven to the edge of extinction. This information desk is smack in the middle of the main dome of the Great Hall. What a great workplace it must be, notwithstanding the smell of elephant and tapir poop.

The flight to Minneapolis involved one leg on a noisy puddle-jumper and one on a jet with a free first-class upgrade. I don’t often get to talk to people on airplanes, but on this flight I had a fascinating discussion with a young guy who winged around the country consulting with clients on the visual display of quantitative information. I’ve long been a big fan of Edward R. Tufte’s works (“The Visual Display of Quantitative Information,” “Envisioning Information” and others) and this fellow was a sort of disciple of Tufte. He’s met Tufte, taken his seminars, and gotten some client referrals from him.

It was fun to talk to him about his work. Part artist and part scientist, he does a lot of consulting for lawyers and prosecutors who must boil down complex information into simple but accurate charts for use in courtrooms. Lately he’s been working on a humongous lawsuit for the federal government against some “Stealth Bomber” contractors. Seems the planes were too heavy to do the job, so the government backed out. But defining “too heavy” isn’t as simple as you might think, and now it’s a lawsuit. He talked about the frustration of working with engineers who have worked all their life in secrecy — they call it a “black box” environment. It hasn’t been easy to get the neccesary information from them, much less to translate it into simple graphs that a jury could understand.

A Roots Trip

Houston rush-hour traffic is monstrous, but I have a few good reasons not to care: my car, the Exxon Valdez II, is a joy to drive, I’m revitalized by some tree-hugging at the Arboretum, and I’m heading for a Persian restaurant. The concierge at the Sheraton Astrodome couldn’t find a Persian place on my last visit, but I knew that Houston has a large enough Iranian community to support several (he also had a very bad toupee). With a little Internet research I find two white-tablecloth estabishments, and a styrofoam-plate class kebab joint. These are all located in a corner of the city filled with strip malls that showcase Indian restaurants, Asian groceries, Jewelry and Sari shops.

My father was born in Iran, but I know next to nothing of Persian language or culture. Ben Aminzade wandered through Egypt, India, Mexico, Texas, and finally New Jersey putting as much planet as possible between him and his domineering father. My mother told me he had “cut his family ties” long before I knew what that meant. Still, I can recall a few visits to distant aunts and uncles: large houses with beautiful rugs on the walls, steaming dishes of rice and meat, glasses of sweet tea and the rituals and strictures of Orthodox Judaism. Coloring books were forbidden on Saturday. I sat in a balcony with the women at Sabbath services and heard prayers that were different from the ones in our New Jersey synagogue.

I’ve never eaten Persian food in a restaurant, and especially wanted to do so this week, the week of the vernal equinox. The equinox marks the Persian New Year, No Ruz (or Now Ruz, or No Rooz…the English spelling varies), literally “New Day.” Moslems, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians in Iran all celebrate it. The mysterious and beautiful traditions and practices of No Ruz predate Mohammed and even Zoroaster.

I arrive at the restaurant to find a table in the entryway with an odd collection. There are what appear to be circles of lawn decorated with yellow ribbons, glasses of liquid, a miniature plastic fountain, and gaily cellophane-wrapped plates of some kind of sweet treat. It seems to be a shrine or altar of some sort, and reminds me of the offerings to ancestors I sometimes see in Chinese restaurants. It occurs to me that, Aminzade or not, I am a stranger and a foreigner here.

I later learn (from http://www.persianoutpost.com/htdocs/nowrooz.html) that the items on the table are the “haft sin” or “seven S’s” , seven things whose names begin with the letter ‘S’ in Farsi. The little lawns are sabzi, sprouts of wheat or lentil. Other items on the table are coins, vinegar, garlic, and some kind of flower. The treats are a sweet snack made of flour and sugar called Samanu. Like the Jewish Seder plate, each of these items has many and complex layers of meanings. I also learn that, true to my intuition, the “haft sin” began as an offering to dead ancestors, who, on the thirteenth day of the year (“sizde be-dar”), would enter the house and enjoy them. The family would (wisely) spend the thirteenth day on a picnic in the country. They’d take the Sabzi (sprouts) with them, and at the end of the day hurl it, along with it all the bad luck, illness, and pain waiting for the family.

I enter the restaurant. Sitting at a corner table are two bald men in their mid thirties who bear an astonishing resemblance to old pictures of my father. The waitress, who looks just like one of my Persian cousins, takes my order. She seems to be simultaneously surprised and bored to find out that my father was born in Iran and that I know not a single word of Farsi.

I order “dough” which is not a baked product, but a yogurt drink like the Indian Lassi or the hippy-cuisine smoothie — not sweet, but spiced with parsley and dill, a bit of pepper, and a pinch of salt and served on ice. I’ve heard of it, and, being a great fan of Lassis and Smoothies, I’m eager to try it. The waitress, without a hint of amusement, corrects my pronunciation. It rhymes with “shoe,” not “show.”

Before I order, I’m delivered a plate of feta cheese, radishes, fresh basil, parsley, and dill. As I start to nibble on a radish, a heavenly round flatbread fresh from the oven appears. I dine on an appetizer that is the crusty bottom part of a pot of Persian-style rice, a dish of rice with sour cherries (actually quite sweet) and tender lamb on a skewer. The “dough” is a perfect complement. I pass up the rosewater-scented baklava.

As I eat, I ponder time, change, and the twists and turns of fate. I wouldn’t have expected this business trip to Houston to be a “roots” trip, but it’s become one. And why not? I was almost a Texas boy. Ben and Dorothy and my two brothers lived in Laredo before I was born, until a Peso devaluation doomed my father’s border-trade clothing store and they moved to New Jersey.

Minnesota is coming up next, though it’s a short trip, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to write much about it.

Driving the Exxon Valdez II

I’m headed back to Houston. I board a very full and cramped flight from Vermont to Philadelphia. I’ve got a middle seat, an affliction for the wide-of-girth that I can usually avoid. We circle Philly for about 45 minutes. Fearful that I’ll miss my connection, I dash to the counter and forgo a decent sandwich at Bain’s Deli. Dinner will be airline food tonight. A restless crowd waits impatiently for the Houston flight. A half hour ticks by, though the departure time on the board doesn’t change. I know that if I make a run for the deli, the plane will board and I will miss my flight.

Finally the flight is called. Someone decides to board all passengers at once, rather than starting with the rear seats. The crowd is stressed out, tense and not very polite as they scramble on. I have no energy to scramble, and when I get to my seat, the luggage bins are all filled and I’m forced to check my bag. I get to my seat, and there is something wrong with the chair. The seat bottom is collapsed and tilts forward. Of course there’s no chance to move to another seat — this flight is 100% occupied. The plane spends an hour and a half on the tarmac before we take off.

I am not in a good mood when we arrive in Houston, some miserable chicken concoction in my stomach. I stress about the poor signage at the airport, the crowds, the way that USAir hides the baggage carousel, the half-hour wait for a bag that I should have carried on. A bag that arrives wet. I board an Avis shuttle bus packed chockablock with mean, ugly idiots, and I’m deposited at my car. My mood immediately turns 180 degrees. Though the gods of airline seating were cruel, the gods of car rental have decided to amuse me. They have given me a immense, red Caddilac Coupe DeVille.

To appreciate the humor in this situation, you must realize that at home I drive a Honda Civic which could easily fit in the trunk of this leviathan. I decide to give it a name before I turn the key. I reject “Cruella,” “Hindenberg II,” and “Moby” and settle on “Exxon Valdez II”

I enter the EVII. It has leather seats the color of freshly-slaughtered filet mignon. It is enormous. Its hood extends to the horizon. I sit on the sensuous perch, which adjusts in ways I have never seen a car seat adjust and I feel small, like a child in Daddy’s chair. All displays are luminous and digital. When I step on the gas, the hulking tanker moves like Dumbo on benzedrine.

I’m ashamed of myself for loving this car. It goes against so much that I believe in — small is beautiful, love the earth, conspicuous consumption is foolish and vulgar. But I can’t help myself. I am tickled pink as I drive this ecological nightmare. Maybe because it’s the perfect Texas car, or maybe I’m getting in touch with my innner Old Jewish Man. Did I mention that, when you turn off the ignition, the radio stays on until you open the door? I learn this when I stop for directions. I overshot my exit, got lost in Houston and didn’t get to my hotel till almost midnight. But it was a joy to drive. MY CADILLAC!

The class I’m teaching this Monday ends early (the students must attend a farewell party for a coworker), and I have a rare opportunity to visit something in town that might be closed at 5:00. I choose the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center. I’ve always loved urban wild spaces, having spent some of my happiest hours of youth hanging in Central Park and Fort Tyron Park and climbing up and down the cliffs of the Palisades. The arboretum is an odd place, a sliver of wilderness tucked into the middle of a very large park which sits in the middle of a city of crystal towers, cement and asphalt. It has some beautiful ponds and wetlands, and a lot of trees whose names I don’t know. They’re not unlike the trees I know in New England, but many are draped with sinister southern parasitic vines and mosses. The sound of Houstonšs teeming freeways ranges from a roar to a distant sussuration, depending on where in the park I hike. It’s really spring and warm and full of interesting smells. Some of the trails are well maintained and wide, while others wind through muddy pine tangles and feel like backcountry hiking trails. Flowers are blooming, there are mosquitoes in the air, mud underfoot, and great smells. I walk for about an hour, until I’m tired and sweaty, then head for the EV2, pressing the tiny remote control that unlocks the doors as I approach it from the woods. I smell the leather. Life is good. I’m headed for a Persian restaurant.

Riding the Bull

The Texas sun seems to be helping my cold. Rather than losing my voice, I’ve seemed to get better as the second day of class progressed. The weatherman says it may hit 80 degrees here. It’s 9 degrees in Vermont. I eat lunch by myself at a taco joint with outside tables.

In the evening I decide to hit the Rodeo. Sick or not, I couldn’t resist an event that describes itself (at http://www.hlsr.com/) as “Houston’s version of Mardi Gras, the Super Bowl and the running of the bulls in Spain, all in one.”

I walk there, and I’m glad I did, despite the fearsome tumult of the cars. The warm air seems to reopen my sense of smell, or maybe it’s just that there’s not much to smell in a Vermont winter and I had forgotten what it was to use that sense. I revel in the smells as I walk. The odor of earth and rotting vegetation from the hotel lawn seems unimaginably sensuous. My heightened sense continues inside the gates. The popcorn and cotton candy smells from the midway are bright and nostalgic. The smell of goat urine and cow manure in the agricultural exhibits adds an air of authenticity to this man-made environement. I may be losing my mind, but I take pleasure even in the second-hand cigarette smoke from the hatted, booted walking Marlboro ads.

I stroll the rodeo, a tiny bit depressed because I realize that I’ll never be able to find words to describe it. To get a sense of the scale of this thing you must first understand that I had no intention of attending any actual rodeo events. For many people the Rodeo is a chance to see Country Music superstars perform. Others come for the crafts fair, or for a trade fair that includes local radio stations, cell phone companies and others. For me there was plenty to see in the crowds (over 300,000 last weekend), the 4-H exhibits, the midway, the concessions, and the food booths. Think of a Vermont country fair writ large. Very large. Think of a shopping mall the size of a metropolitan airport displaying and selling every imaginable aspect of the cowboy lifestyle from the most practical and authentic agricultural tools to the silliest urban cowboy frippery

I spent some time watching and smelling Longhorn and Brahma cattle, the likes of which you won’t find in Vermont. I made an attempt to eat a barbecued turkey leg of ridiculous size. It was tasty, but too darned big. It could have come from an ostrich (which, by the way, the 4-H kids had here, too, though I didn’t find them). Thoroughly defeated by this attempt, and worn out by my week’s studies in comparative barbeque, I began to consider a return to vegetarianism. Rodeo prices were outrageously inflated. I was on an expense account for the Turkey leg, but couldn’t bring myself to pay $6 of someones else’s money for a bag of peanuts.

I watched the mechanical bull for quite a while. I was fascinated by the way the operator handled his customers. If it was a young child, he gave a gentle ride that wouldn’t throw the rider, then stepped onto the airbag and gently lifted the little one off. Boys between about 8 and 14 got long yet challenging rides, especially if they looked like they were serious about the business. Any beer- or testosterone-crazed male got a few quick spins and an ignominious buck that sent him flying to the airbag after a few seconds. If he had a cheering section, it was even quicker. Middle-aged folks got a ride that was short but not very humiliating. Attractive young women, of course, tended to get more time than they wanted, since they drew a crowd. Texas men are, in general, not your sensitive New Age guys, and there was a lot of whooping and hollering from the audience. I watched two of these young ladies, and it was quite a sight. Both were gracious about the noise from the peanut gallery, smiling through the whole thing, though one must have wanted a more challenging ride. She yelled to the operator “I’m falling asleep here!” as she rocked back and forth.

It took an impressive mix of psychology, mechanical aptitude, seat-of-the-pants marketing skills, and kinesthetic sense to operate the hydraulics in a way that handled each customer appropriately, and I was quite impressed by the man’s skills. He was also one of the few people at the rodeo self-assured enough to be wearing a feed cap rather than the ten-gallon standard.

I grabbed a glove, paid $2, penned my name to the bottom of a full page (small print) of legal mumbo-jumbo which waived the entire US Constitution and Uniform Commercial Code if I got hurt, and had my 15 seconds of fame. The spins and the bucks (comparatively mild ones, I suspect) were no problem, but when the hydraulic bull bucked foward and then stopped for what seemed like a few seconds, I lost my firm seat. The next spin sent me flying.

Perhaps I could learn to like Texas.