Reminiscing and Saying Goodbye
It's been a little over a year and a couple of months since I really started dating. I was in a relationship right after my marriage ended, but it started, to my great surprise, so quickly after the end, that I wouldn't really say I was dating. One of my earliest first dates was with a woman who has since become a very close friend, though romance wasn't in the cards for us. Last night, we returned to the scene of our first date, and it was odd and satisfying to reflect on the last year, how much has changed, how much we have changed. And to say goodbye. She is going on an extended road trip next week, and when she returns, she'll be moving far away. I will miss her and feel that empty space deeply.
I have a hard time letting go of relationships, you know. If you and I become close, and it comes times to part ways, please tell me to fuck off, repeatedly, with as much venom as you can muster. It makes it much easier for me.
Walking from work to the restaurant, I saw on the sidewalk, apparently drizzled in tar in cursive script, "give up." I thought at first that it was unusual to see discouraging graffiti in this town famous for graffiti that says, "Hi, how are you?" and "I love you so much." But I decided as I walked on that it was calling instead for Buddhist non-grasping, of giving up on the illusion of control and living in the moment. I choose to give up and move on, knowing that what I need will come to me. But I'll miss her.
Our nostalgia date started and lingered at the restaurant that's been here longer than either of us and has endured through decades. We each talked about our current relationships and adventures in love. She was my self-proclaimed dating mentor for a time, showing a man who'd been married for 20 years and hadn't really dated at all before those 20 years what the modern dating scene is like, helping me with my online marketing and educating me in the ways of courting. I remembered her, at a table about 10 feet away from where we were sitting last night, telling me what I was doing well for a first date. I'm good at eye contact, it seems. I very much appreciated the positive feedback.
After our dinner date redux, we went to the capitol and wandered around inside, which I'd never done at night. She demonstrated the unique acoustics of the spot on the first floor directly under the rotunda, where even a quietly spoken word seems amplified. She says it's designed that way for speech making. It was disorienting hearing my own voice from all directions in synchronous echo. I'd never experienced that before, because I'd only ever been inside during the day, when it's crowded with people and that spot is filled with tourists taking pictures straight up, capturing the star at the center of the rotunda, and kids looking up and spinning and spinning and spinning just as they do under the giant metaphorical tree at the Trail of Lights each year.
From the third or fourth floor up, we heard faintly from below the melancholy sounds of voices singing softly in harmony. "We are singing," they said sadly. "We are singing for our lives." It was a quiet, solemn sound in a building I was not accustomed to seeing so empty, so quiet. When we looked down, we saw 3 people in wheelchairs surrounding the central spot where I heard my voice turned back on itself, facing each other and singing to no one in particular. I don't know specifically what they were protesting, but I have no doubt they were making their own stand against my state's legislative agenda, which seems these days even more than days past to be running as fast as it can from compassion. So they were singing. They were singing for their lives.
We wandered the grounds outside, too, which I've done so many times over the years with kids and friends and strangers. I'd never noticed the historical markers, though, only the statues and monuments that reside among the trees, so I decided to collect a few while we were there. We also played Pokémon GO, spinning all the stops and catching all the little beasties and laughing at the image of a giant cartoon snail standing on the floor of the historic building, surrounded by painted portraits of famous and consequential men and women. I used to tell myself I only had the app on my phone for the amusement of my 9-year-old son, but he lost interest some time ago, and still I'm catching and collecting and powering up and evolving, and so is my friend, though her own kids are grown. We laughed at what a pair of nerds we were, collecting Pokémon and historical markers with equal enthusiasm.
So here they are, our collection of historical markers and not Pokémon, a dense grouping over a very small geographic area. I'm sure we would have found more if we'd wandered over to the west side. She suggested I download an app. There is an app for that, she showed me. There really is an app for everything. With the app, I could have a map on my phone with historical marker locations on it and a tiny GPS-based representation of myself and my relative location, just like hunting Pokémon, but I think that would detract from what I enjoy about it. I like the spontaneity of finding them where I am, of stumbling across a little story that I may or may not have heard before, without intention.
16 in one night! Only around 6,000 more to go...
In the order we found them, they are #12685 (Confederate Texas Legislatures), #15486 (St. Martin's Evangelical Lutheran Church), #12693 (Secession Convention), #14722 (The Archive War), #13935 (The First Classes of the University of Texas Law School), #17408 (Texas State Capitol of 1880s), #13929 (African Americans in the Texas Revolution), #15101 (Governor Andrew Jackson Hamilton), #13934 (Governor Edmund Jackson Davis), #15055 (Henry Smith), #14797 (Governor James Edward Ferguson, Governor Miram A. Ferguson), #14643 (Governor Elisha Marshall Pease), #15026 (The Woman Suffrage Movement in Texas), #15063 (Second Travis County Courthouse and Walton Building), #14150 (Texas State Capitol), and #14676 (St. Mary's Cathedral).
The stories they tell are predictably shot through with the troubled racial history of Texas, with words like Secession and Confederacy standing in for the deeply flawed understanding of morality and piety on which the state and the various nations it was part of over the years were built. They are also peopled with eccentric and independent thinkers, a wheelbarrow full of cash, and even Republicans and Unionists back when Republican was the party of Lincoln.
We lingered so long at dinner, it was dark before we made our way to the "noted innkeeper." She looks a raucous sort.
There are also stories of women bucking the patriarchy and doing their own thing, like "Ma" Ferguson who ran for the governorship in 1924 and won against the Ku Klux Klan candidate after her husband's impeachment, then ran again and won a second term. Or the story of 5 decades of women working ceaselessly for the right to vote, and ultimately succeeding in registering 386,000 women to vote in just 17 days. My favorite of these stories of strong women was the one in front of the State Archives building, describing "The Archives War." It's the tale of how the archives and the state capital itself were nearly whisked away from Austin to Washington-on-the-Brazos one fateful night, and how Angelina Eberly fired the city cannon and changed the course of Texas history. I had seen the statue of Mrs. Eberly that stands at 6th and Congress where she fired the cannon, but I only heard the story after working as an usher at an Austin Aztex soccer game several years ago and seeing for the first time "Eberly's Army," a diehard group of drum-beating Aztex fans named for her. I'm not sure how the spirit of Austin soccer came to be embodied in the name of a woman who in 1842 stood up to resist the quite reasonable plan of the venerated Sam Houston, but there it is.
My date last night was one of these strong Texas women. She has a history that has shaped her, a darkness that has made her a light, "a decay that has fed her bloom," as her son might say of her. I'm drawn to strong women, or perhaps I draw them to me, those that have survived and thrived, rising like phoenixes out of the ashes of circumstances that I'm sure I would not have made it through intact had it been me. She is one of them. She has helped me to shape my response to my recent history. She was part of me becoming the phoenix rising from the ashes of my marriage, from the life I thought I would be living right now. She has been a part of me seeing that this life is better in so many ways than the one that would have been. Thank you, you women of strength. Thank you for being a part of my life, each of you, even if saying goodbye is hard.
