she’s a w-o-m-a-n, say it again.
Have you seen this huge print H&M ad?
Jerry Hall and her daughter, Georgia May Jagger
What catches your eye in this ad? I’ll tell you what catches mine, and it’s not the hottie daughter. I think she’s meant to catch your eye (and she does catch mine, secondarily, making me note her daddy Mick’s thick lips, and the pout that’s surely meant to exude sexiness), but it’s Jerry Hall — 55-year-old Jerry Hall — who catches mine. When I look at her face, she’s saying to me, “That’s right, I made this gorgeous girl, she’s mine, I did that. Me.” For my money, she completely trumps her daughter, who appears unformed and like a pupae. Maybe that’s just 53-year old me gravitating to my own, but I don’t think so. I think Jerry Hall is one of those Big Women, the kind that exudes herself, the kind whose confidence is a thing unto itself, the kind of woman who feels like a Professional Woman, while I feel like I’m still in amateur standing, wondering when I’m going to feel like a grown-up, and wondering when I’ll feel comfortable with the word woman for myself.
And she’s a Texan, too, that Jerry Hall. Born in Gonzales, a dusty little town in the south of Texas, she grew up in Mesquite, a suburb of Dallas-Ft. Worth, which explains her particular twangy accent, and her big blond hair. I really love this ad, and love what I see in her face.
Me, I’m sporting quite a huge blister from my Sunday night boiling soup on my hand episode.
and it's worse than it looks
Here’s my public service announcement message just for you: Never pour boiling tomato soup on your hand. It will hurt you, a lot.
You who live your lives in cities or among peaceful ways cannot always tell whether your friends are the kind who would go through fire for you. But on the Plains, one’s friends have an opportunity to prove their mettle. ~Buffalo Bill
can't you just b-r-e-a-t-h-e?
So the thing is, I always know I love big old skies, big blue skies with clouds as far as the eye can see (and the eye can see pretty dang far; the old joke about the far north plains, the panhandle, is that you can see for 10 miles, unless you stand on a tuna can and then you can see for 20 miles). I always know and remember this, and I quite often miss big skies in Manhattan, even though I dearly love everything about Manhattan including the very tall buildings.
The thing I hadn’t remembered, though, was the loneliness of the plains. There’s a way it’s the loneliest feeling in the world, being on the plains. Maybe it’s the feeling of exposure, of being small in a bald landscape, the vastness of all that land and all that sky and just you, pinned in between. And it’s all kind of burned-up and scorched, here, after this brutal summer, so it’s even more barren. I expect one of Beckett’s characters to be standing just over there, trying to figure out the point of it all.
But it’s kind of heartbreaking, the loneliness of this landscape, and I forgot how much I love that. I was telling Katie that it’s safe to love it, since I’m anything but alone in this world, and I wonder how it would seem if I were really alone — maybe not so great.
The other thing I forgot was the incredible friendliness of people. New Yorkers are friendly (yes they/we are!) as anyone who’s been there knows; there is a stereotype that we aren’t, but it’s just that we’re very busy, and we’re friendly to you if you ask us something but we’re not that stop-you-on-the-street-and-chat kind of friendly. Katie and I had to make a grocery store run, and we finished checking out and I was headed for the door; I turned around and she was still at the cash register talking with the cashier and the woman bagging the groceries. The way they were talking, the ease and what they were saying (and how much there was of it!), made me think they all knew each other but they didn’t. They were just friendly. And what goes with that is a different sense of time — that the next customer is fine with waiting….as she was.
Katie has two adorable dogs — terrier mixes, Oscar and Penny — and they’re sweet and precious little beings, adding such a feeling of home to her already-homey home. Oscar is a little old soul for such a young dog. He loves to lay his head on a pillow, and he loves to be covered with a blanket. LOVE.
In the early 1800s, people would find the initials G.T.T. carved on the doors of family’s and friends’ houses — Gone To Texas. Texas was the place to go, a sanctuary for outlaws, a place to start all over again, a place to begin for the first time. For me, it’s just home.
The boogie-ing part, not the sleeping at the wheel part. (Though, side note: Once I was driving up IH-35, from Austin to Dallas, and stopped to get gas. There was a giant tour bus there, the kind that bands use. Austin being the official Live Music Capital of the World [oh, you bragging Texans you], it’s entirely common to see them so I didn’t give it a thought. As I passed the bus, I saw it was Asleep At The Wheel, and as I glanced in the open door, I saw the bus driver seemed to be asleep at the wheel. It made the inner kindergartner in me giggle.)
ANYWAY. Yeah. My flight leaves NYC at 6am, so do you realize what time I need to get up in the morning? I haven’t done the backwards math yet, but I’m grateful I am still in the jetlag state of reliably waking up at 2am. I can’t wait to spend time with my daughter Katie…..a whole week, so luscious. We’ll bake (and eat, including pinto beans and cornbread, a delicious treat I don’t get in NYC) and knit and talk and watch movies and shop and be homebodies together. We both love that.
Everyone rags on Texas — and I’ll be honest, Texas politicians make that so so easy — but Texas is so much more than its idiotic politicians. Really. (And remember, it was historically a hard-core Democratic state. YES IT WAS! It took a bad turn in the 80s, like much of the south did, but I have hope that someday it’ll return to its Democratic roots.) Anyway, there’s so much that’s great about Texas, and Austin. I loved this article 50 Reasons Texas is the Best State in America. It was compiled in response to a piece written by Manhattan-based Gawker listing states by their worst-ness (Texas came in at 13), and the Gawker writer says:
The Texan ego is as big as the state, and no matter how much you point out to them that, uh, hey what about all this extremely terrible stuff, they will not listen. If you guys would just shut up about it for a while, the rest of us might like you a little more.
The funny thing is — and I say this all the time to New Yorkers — you could say that very thing about New Yorkers, who think the sun rises and sets on Manhattan, and that just outside the Manhattan borders, ignorance, evil, and chaos reign. Hrmph.
Anyway. Boogie back to Texas! Whee! GTT! Whee!
we clearly need to overthrow the Weather Czar. this is crazy.
Good grief — we’re in the midst of days and days, after days and days, looking ahead to days and days, of rain. Gray skies, cool temperatures (60 yesterday), drenching downpours, what happened! It was just very very hot, what happened here? And, of course, my beloved central Texas is going up in flames. My beloved oldest daughter is packed and ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice, and nearly had to do so. A place I’ve loved a lot, Bastrop, is mostly just gone, burned up (that fire, which is still burning, is visible from space). They haven’t had rain in months and months (and before that, just a whisper of rain), and they broke all the heat records this summer, and well, that’s just a recipe for the disaster that’s unfolding there.
yeah. terrifying.
If only I could be involved in the redistribution channels — it’s obvious, redirect all of our rain and cold weather down to the scorched, killing, devastation and destruction going on. I don’t believe this, but there’s a way it feels like the Biblical end times these days. Earthquakes and hurricanes, raging out of control fires and deadly drought, and don’t get me started on things of a politically-induced nature.
Sunday I finished my adorable little red number, my featherweight cardigan. I keep thinking I can surely get a photo tomorrow, surely tomorrow it won’t be so gray and gloomy and shadowy, but tomorrow hasn’t come yet. It’s fabulous, I couldn’t be happier with it. The color is great, cheery, powerful, the fit is wonderful, and the fact that I love wearing a cropped sweater that ends at my waist is priceless.
While I wait for the yarn to arrive for my three new sweaters (me! knitting three new sweaters!), I’m spending my knitting time powering through the blanket I’m making. It’s Anne Hanson’s Totally Autumn pattern, in a rich chocolate brown Cascade 220 Heathers. This is the project that went through the trauma in Turkey of my having to pull out the needles at the Istanbul airport, so I’ve kind of recovered from that disaster and now see the end in sight. The work will come to a standstill when my sweater yarns arrive, but maybe I’ll just try to put in X number of rows per day on the blanket so it’ll eventually get done, instead of languishing.
Busy busy busy times for me — appointments this afternoon, seeing a play tonight, breakfast tomorrow with my oldest friend from Alabama, writing group tomorrow night, fly off to Chicago early Friday morning to visit Marnie, home on Monday, poetry group Tuesday night. AND I’m trying to finish the details for my trip back to Vietnam and over to Borneo, during the first two weeks of October. Which is just three weeks away. Yikes. Busy busy busy.
do you know what “lead poisoning” means? depends on where and when you’re from, i gues.
I just saw this on the facebook page for the small Texas town I’m from:
Deputy Sheriff Sam R. Murphee was shot in the back as he ran down the jail stairs on Sunday morning, January 1, 1882 when three inmates escaped from the county jail. The three inmates made it to the street in front of the jail when a group of citizens blocked their escape. All three inmates were killed and the inquest lists their cause of death as “lead poisoning.” Murphee was 27 years old.
LEAD POISONING. They don’t tell stories like that any more. 
i wouldn’t be bragging about that if i were you.
This was posted on the facebook page for the little town of Graham, TX, where I was born. There was no other information posted with it, so I don’t know the date, but geez Louise. My stomach clenched when I saw it.
Yeah. See what I mean? Graham’s terrible history is much more focused on slaughtering the resident Native Americans; in fact, I don’t remember seeing any black people in Graham. Then again, maybe that’s due to meetings like the one advertised above.
“Realm of Texas.” I don’t know if that’s a Klan thing, or a Texas thing. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s a Texas thing; we do like to think of ourselves in a grandiose way.
If you’ve never heard of the Austin Lounge Lizards, I highly recommend that you listen to this song – it’s so hilarious.
do i dare to eat a peach?
No one likes to be a stereotype. I can probably state that unequivocally. But let’s talk about me: I don’t like to be such a stereotype, but there you go. I am. I wasn’t as sophisticated as Prufrock, wondering if I dare to eat a peach; when I moved back to Austin TX in 1998, to begin graduate school (I’d lived there from 1964-1971, then 1977-1985), I was one of ‘those’ people, one of the old Austinites. I’m sure they have the local version in your town. Everywhere I went, it was like this:
Over there, that used to be X.
That restaurant? Oh, that used to be Y.
This whole area used to be considered out in the country.
Even I got tired of hearing myself say those things! I couldn’t seem to stop myself, though. Used to be used to be used to be. I guess it’s a hazard of aging.
So I just realized that two of my favorite places on Facebook are Does you ‘member when? Austin, TX version and Young County, Texas History. The Austin link makes me feel kind of pathetic, like I should just get over my aging self. But the Young County history link is amazing! I was born in Young County, which is in north Texas. Some of that history is really fascinating…. from long before I came along, in 1958. For example, recent posts:
L.P. “Uncle Pink” Brooks took the job as second Sheriff of Young County in 1876 when the first Sheriff, Richard Kirk was killed. Since Graham didn’t have a jail at that time, “Uncle Pink” would take the prisoners home. Sheriff Brooks never had a prisoner escape.
”The White Man” was a newspaper published in 1858 at Jacksboro and 1860 at Weatherford, Texas by John R. Baylor and H.A. Hamner. The newspaper led the anti-Indian movement for three years inciting local settlers against all natives, even attacking peaceful Indians. The papers are incredibly scarce, but can be found in the area.
Wild, right? Those stories don’t make me an old fart trying to relive some vague “glory days”…..right?
announcement to texans and new yorkers: nobody likes you if you think you’re the best.
Maybe, in your life, you once had a relationship that was unsatisfying, but there wasn’t really anything wrong with the person. Everyone said Oh, s/he’s so great, such a nice person, funny, etc. I did once, and I agreed with them! Still, “perfect” as he seemed to be, it was not a good relationship for me. Around that time, I heard Joan Baez sing a song that included the line I used as this blog post title: a saint is hard to live with at home. It cracked me up, it felt very familiar and personally true, and obviously it stayed with me.
This line came to mind this morning when I saw the following article in the NYTimes:
we're perfect
Yep – that’s what it says. More city preschoolers are perfect. Test scores show. To me, that suggests that the tests are imperfect, or imperfect for assessing what they need to assess. Had I seen those data, I’d have written an article pointing out the problems with the test. But New Yorkers – you know how they are – instead say that we’re just perfect.
As a Texan, I really get that, and it’s one thing I find dear about New Yorkers. Well, dear and really irritating. Just like people get irritated (or worse) with Texans for their/our grandiose views of themselves (ourselves). NYers and Texans should either get over ourselves, or at least keep our mouths shut a little more often.
And look at this – what do we see in my gigantic knitting bag next to my place on the couch:
peasy and mondo, mixing it up together in the bag
That’s my Peasy sweater (I’m knitting a sleeve right now) and my Mondo Cable Cardigan (also on a sleeve). Two sweaters! But lost in sleeveland, the seemingly endless land of stockinette tubes. Yesterday I did a little Peasy sleeve knitting, then a little Mondo sleeve knitting, then back to Peasy. It didn’t feel like too much of a break, switching to the other. I don’t have a purse knitting project going right now, and I keep thinking I ought to cast on something small and quickly-finishable, but then I know I’d just do that instead of sleeves, and the sleeve-knitting elf hasn’t found my apartment yet so if it’s going to be done, I’ll have to do it.
Everything there is to do in this world has a bit that’s less fun than the others. I read an article by Jane Patrick in one of the first issues of Handwoven, where she talked about how much she hated sleying the reed (I think that was the detail). Then she realized that’s a necessary task, she’s always going to have to do it when she weaves, so she tried to reorient herself to the idea. That happened to me when I took my intro stats course as an undergrad – at first I hated it, but I realized it would be my essential tool so I found another way to think about it, and now I adore stats. So my mission is to find another way to conceptualize the endlessness of sleeves.
Happy Thursday, y’all.
.
on accents
Although I can quash it with a great deal of focused effort, I have a pretty thick Texas accent. People in NY usually say “oh, you have such a great southern accent” which would horrify southerners and Texans, equally. But that’s ok, I can’t tell the difference between Staten Island, Long Island, Bronx, and NJ accents. I don’t blame them. People who are well-versed in Texas accents would immediately identify mine as the north Texas/west Texas/hick version. It really is awl, not oil, frah not fry, and if I’m very tarred (not tired), it can even be aint not ant (with a nod to this brilliant poster by a wonderful artist I know). But anyway, over the years I’ve loved and hated my accent, accepted it and tried to eliminate it – mainly because Yankees tend to think you’re stupid if you sound like me. My ear is so finely tuned, I can hear the residual Texas accent underneath the voices of actors who have undoubtedly trained for hours and hours to eliminate it. Ha – gotcha.
No surprise, when I’m tired or when I talk about Texas or when I talk to other Texans, my accent …. well, it expands. That’s a nice way to say it. It deepens. It gets thicker. And the muscles in my face that form words feel familiar again, and something clicks in my deepest self. Ah, I’m back to me. I actually think my very self changes a little when I talk to a Texan; when I dropped the last daughter off at college, I started talking to a Texan and the people with me kind of stood back in surprise, and told me that I’d changed while talking to her.
So today, in a desperate quest to locate my GRE scores, since ETS only keeps them for 5 years, I decided to try my former graduate program to see if they kept them as part of my application package. I emailed the generic Graduate Office Person, described my request as a likely wild goose chase, and clicked send. Within a few minutes I got a call from Chris, who said she did indeed have my scores. And she was a Texan (no surprise, since I was calling the University of Texas at Austin). And I felt happier than you can imagine, like I’d returned to the groove of my familiar. It’s such a funny thing, the way we can feel at home with sound, and smell, and the rhythm of an accent. I didn’t want to let her go, and stretched the conversation out as much as possible.
bah y’all (translation: goodbye everyone!)
flashing back to the great year of 1977 via photos
I graduated from high school in Wichita Falls, TX, in 1977. The local radio station, KTRN, did this thing where randomly, at the end of a popular song, they’d play “KTRN flash….back!” and then play the song again. I remember driving to my job at Treasure City one afternoon, listening to the Captain and Tennille singing Love Will Keep Us Together on the radio, and as the song neared the last few notes, I said out loud the KTRN flashback deal, and then that’s what happened. I was so thrilled by my anticipation, mostly because boy did I love that song.
The day after I graduated, I moved to Austin (which is really the only place to be, in Texas, if you’re a thinking person). I’d lived there a number of times before, and loved the hippie vibe, the weirdness of Austin – immortalized for the last many years in t-shirts saying “Keep Austin Weird” – and the strange characters like Leslie, the cross-dressing homeless guy who looked damn good in his bikini and high heels (from the back, anyway). When I’d lived there three years earlier at age 14, my dad would take me to the Armadillo (Armadillo World Headquarters, if you weren’t a regular) where we heard live music by Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks, Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, Willie Nelson (duh), and Linda Ronstadt. When I’d lived there even earlier, around age 9, my mother would take me to The Broken Spoke with her, a dive-y saloon where Janis Joplin got her start. Armadillo is gone, but the Broken Spoke is still there, and it still looks like the same dive-y saloon.
So this morning, when I saw this idea to search flickr for a particular year and post my favorite photo, of course I immediately thought of 1977 and Austin. I can feel it on my skin and in my bones, I can smell it, I hear it in my mind’s ear as clearly as the traffic below on Madison Ave. I couldn’t limit myself to one favorite photo, I found two that captured a couple ways of being a Texan.
This one is from a chili cookoff in San Marcos, a small town just south of Austin (now, it’s more like a far-flung suburb). What’s more Texas than a chili cook-off! This one isn’t at all self-conscious, like the fancy ones in Terlingua. The cowboy hats, those make my heart race. The very un-PC (now) “Indians,” what were they about and what did they have to do with chili? Whatever. I know just how it felt to be there, even though I wasn’t there. Thanks, Don Hudson, for sharing.
chili cook-offs should all be like this
And these, from Austin in the summer of 1977. Every year since 1963, there has been a party celebrating Eeyore’s birthday, on the last Saturday of April. It’s something of a free-for-all, a big costume party, a day to eat and drink and play silly games like sack races and egg toss (adults attend, by the way, it’s not an event for kids brought by their parents). There is a photo set on flickr of the 1977 party, courtesy of digitalmovie. I went to the party that year, but didn’t see myself.
What year would you pick?
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