The saxophonist played to grim faces. In spite of the store's effort to infuse a few moments of festivity among shoppers who would, in normal circumstances, be celebrating Fiesta, wearing flowers in their hair and Fiesta medals on their shirts, nobody was moving to the music, not even a little, as they did a week ago.
Had I gotten there earlier, I'd planned to go into the empty post office and mail a Happy Mail to Day, but I decided to drive to a more isolated post office, go in with gloves and mask, and use the machine. The box--UPS was going to charge me $75 to mail it by the way--cost only $11 to mail from the post office.
Driving down McCollough, I passed the three streets we'd lived on in our first two years in Texas, three tree-named streets: Magnolia, Mistletoe, and Huisache. I wanted to take a look at my three former houses, returning in memory to a different life when we were young and hopeful and the future stretched out decades ahead of us. I tried to imagine the girl I was in 1967, 1968, back when the backdrop of that neighborhood included the new Hemisfair Tower. Back when my then-husband and his SAC students made a float for the Fiesta parade.
I remember making candy-cane striped curtains for the wide upstairs bedroom window in the two-story Huisache house, a quarter of a yard of fabric at a time all I could afford at Winn's as I walked home from my classes at SAC. I remember being sunburned in that bedroom after falling asleep on a Spring Break trip; my teenaged brother visiting and our German Shepherd Tony growling at him as if he were an intruder; my parents visiting and a robbery in our house while we were at Canyon Lake with Tony.
At 18 and 19, I never paid attention to the houses next door to ours, the trees on each street. An old person to my then-young eyes would have probably--let's be honest--been virtually invisible. Even my parents who came to visit were young, in their early forties.Young people tend to see what's close at hand, not the bigger picture.
At this stage of my life, I not only love and recognize grand old trees whose names I know, I pull my car over to look at a few of them in morning light, the budding of baby leaves on their branches. I notice the houses surrounding the houses we lived in. I notice old people sitting at bus stops, young men running, parents pushing strollers.
Back then, I might have wondered if I'd have babies; today I long to see my grandchildren in real life but was happy to get glimpses of the Texas ones on a text.
Driving home, I pulled into the parking lot of Julian Gold, an upscale clothing store, and snapped a few iPhone pictures of their window displays, seeming now like relics of another life:
In just one month, so many things we barely even noticed before look like anachronisms.
I watch movies and see people moving about freely, hugging, eating in restaurants dressed casually or glamorously, drinking and eating and laughing. I drive past churches on a Sunday morning and remember seeing people on lawns dressed in Easter colors. I think, wistfully, Oh yeah, I remember that world! Those were such good times!
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