"My family isn't really all that different from anyone else's. Well, maybe they're a bit more entertaining."
Saturday the 8th:
For the first time in five weeks, I crawl behind the controls of the Mighty Columbia, bound for Arlington and the plane's annual inspection. It's a glorious day with few clouds and almost no wind. I watch the world drift by from 12,000 feet, nap (never tell the FAA), and read a book on my tablet explaining the history of quantum physics. I've viewed this trip with a measure of dread, but so far so good.
Landing for fuel in Monroe, Louisiana, I walk into the FBO where the nice young lady tells me my card is on file from the last time, when Mom was dying and I made this flight pretty regularly. I peer into the freezer case in the pilot lounge and ponder the frozen confections. The last couple times I was here, P stood next to me and I feigned disinterest unless I could find some arugula based treat. This time it was just me, and a combination of stress and a feeling of triumph over a miraculously clean colonoscopy the day before led me to dig into the case for a drumstick similar to what we once called a Nutty Buddy, but this crowned with KitKat bar coating. It was truly delightful. Don't judge me.
The flight into Arlington proved equally uneventful and nappy, at least until the descent into the crowded chaos of DFW airspace. The controller cleared me into KGKY at the last minute, plunging from too high and too fast into a pattern filled with student pilots like so many electrons (remember I've been reading about quantum physics), then slicing down onto the runway for a rather aggressive arrival over the numbers. The wind was howling. A line tech had to come help me get the cover over the airplane because it kept whipping out of my hands like a sail in need of reefing.
Then Uber to DFW Airport behind a serial killer driver with great taste in 80s classic rock. You've got to take the good with the bad. Then a wait with the great unwashed at the rental car counter, none of whom seemed prepared for this most basic of transactions. What's to explain? As I ponder whether I could wrap the shepherding rope around my neck and end it all, a nice young man from the next counter summons me over and apologizes for the delay. Soon I am striding back out into the heat to find a car.
I choose a black Audi SUV. Why black, on a hundred degree Texas afternoon? Hell if I know.
I drive 80 miles an hour up the George W. Bush tollway (Texans almost uniformly pay to drive on the people's interstates, in lieu of paying state income taxes. They also pay shocking property taxes. Teaching math must seem an act of sedition here), and in a few minutes pull in front of the house Dad and Johnnie have inhabited since the mid-90s. I slip through the front door. Dad is lying on the couch under a blanket, mouth hanging open in what P calls the "Q sign" while my sister and stepmom smoke cigarettes out on the back porch. My stepsister's son is blowing up a pool float, the only one seeming to recognize a means of escaping the infernal heat.
I pour myself a drink. It's going to be a long evening.
Sis has discovered mushrooms as a means of taking less Xanax, washing the hallucinogenic fungus down with plastic jug vodka, tomato juice and water because she's counting calories. She tells me not to worry because she's "microdosing", but appears to have eaten the entire bag.
Johnnie smokes, sips a beer and ponders with me the transformation as Sis asks if we can see the trees leaning into to each other behind the pool to talk about us. At some point she falls into the pool fully clothed trying to crawl onto the pool float Brett had briefly abandoned. He fishes her out of the pool, and she stumbles back into the house drenched and giggling. Later she claims he gets his revenge by going through her purse and absconding with her Xanax because he's had sort of a tough week, but later she finds the bottle. Shrooms make one forgetful, it seems.
I demand to go find takeout for the household, an excuse to get away for a few minutes. I order online from a barbeque place I find is attached to a huge, Texas sized grocery store: you could fit three Boston grocers inside the endless expanse. At the counter of the barbeque place, an enormous black guy named Marcus laughs and smiles as he serves the fat white people in line for their supper. I make it to the front, and announce I have an order for carryout.
"Did you use DoorDash or GrubHub or [some other service I don't recall]?"
"I don't know. I just ordered off your webpage. I'm from New York and don't use those services."
I immediately realize how ridiculous this sounds. He laughs, finds a bag on the counter behind him with my name scratched on the front, and hands it to me. "Well, I reckon this'd be your first time. Congrats."
Walking across the parking lot to the car I have this strong sense that I need to go to church. At that very moment, I look down and see a shiny new, face up penny. I never pick up a face down penny, being a superstitious fighter pilot. I also don't tempt fate by ignoring the universe when it's speaking. I'll go to church.
Arriving home Sis is laughing hysterically at something on the back porch. She's by herself. Usually she sits in the kitchen and watches slasher videos, so I count this as progress. Dad stirs awake and we wheel him into the kitchen to eat with the family. So far he's on his best behavior, not forcing me to watch Fox News as his usual demand for penitence for who the hell knows what.
The barbeque is solidly okay. Sis ghosts off to bed.
We start watching Lincoln in the family room, and I'm nodding off after an hour or so of that truly fabulous film. I take my leave.
Sunday the 9th:
The next morning I'm up at six and driving around looking for coffee. Plano is asleep at that time on a Sunday, the only moment when the traffic isn't manic and relentlessly clattering over the concrete roads. My favorite coffee bar in old Plano doesn't open for a while, so I wander East Plano, once the bad side of town but now a vibrant business district, killing time before they start brewing coffee.
Along the way I notice an Arab sounding coffee place that's shiny and new and open, and decide to have a cup there while I'm waiting for the other. The experience is amazing, transformational, the best coffee I've ever had. It turns out to be a chain started by a Michigan Yemeni immigrant and featuring Yemeni coffee and Arab confections. I begin texting P photos of the menu and of my delightful first then second cups, pledging that we'll figure out how to recreate this experience when we get home. I am the only non-Arab in the place, a bald old fighter pilot reading the NYT on his tablet. I feel totally comfortable.
Over an hour into this moment of Zen, it's time to respond to the universe and drive the George W. Bush to St. Phillip's Episcopal Church in Frisco. I hadn't planned to travel so far for a service, but Plano features something like four "Anglican" churches, one of which proudly tells the story of how they banded together as a diocese and tossed the ECUSA over the "apostacy" of having openly gay clergy. Not the sort of place I'd want to spend a Pride Month Sunday morning.
St. Phillip's feels like every evangelical protestant church in this moment in this country--giant screens left and right to display the lyrics to the praise music and the BCP passages so you don't really need the book. Or you can just follow the script in the bulletin that's as massive as the menu at a New York Italian restaurant, flopping around in my hands while I'm trying to pray. I pull out the book as an act of defiance.
The homily hops all over Paul's letters, and is extra long because they've dropped most of the readings to free up time for, well, I don't really know. The homilist wants us to focus on the afterlife, and how fleeting this shitty earthly existence is. I have to agree, if I lived in the greater DFW Metroplex I'd be pining for the Sweet By and By myself, rather than eating oneself into a diabetic coma in one of the thousands of chain restaurants or shopping one's way into penury in the sea of retail. No wonder they long for heaven--they've built themselves a genuine hell, complete with the heat.
Sherman once said if he had a choice between hell and Texas, he'd rent out Texas and live in hell. Sherman had a point.
There's more to this dysfunctional family travelogue, but it's late and I have an early wakeup for a full day of work and family time on what may be my last visit with Dad. So goodnight for now.
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