We made it!
The plane adventure was easier than I expected but nothing like it used to be (cue the violin).
I am a traveler. I love sipping coffee in the airport, having a meaningful and unexpected conversation with a fellow passenger, and then sinking into a good book for hours. None of those things happened.
We scarfed a fast bagel, the monkey throwing most of it in my hair. Our fellow passenger conversations went something like:
Honey, do you need help? (pink haired older lady watching me struggle with my bag, the kid, the stroller, the works).
I have some fruit loops if you get desperate (fellow harried mother).
Doesn’t that baby have a pacifier (irritated flight attendant as the monkey howls)?
And reading a book? Well, actually I did get a few pages of Eat, Pray, Love in while he snoozed in his Ergo.
So, here we are staying in a groovy B&B in the heart of Austin, walking distance to a Whole Foods so big you need a map to find the diaper section. Which, by the way, feels strange to me because almost 20 years ago when I moved to Austin to go to University of Texas, there was only one tiny Whole Foods over on Lamar Blvd and it was a mom and pop natural foods grocery.
I always forget how big the trucks are here. I am driving down the highway in my little rental car, flanked by trucks so big their shadows loom over us. I feel threatened until I remind myself that I am ranch-born Texan, with red meat and Willie Nelson coursing through my veins.
I see my grandfathers sitting proudly beside me.
My Tito, all five-foot-seven of him, wearing his long-sleeved wool western shirt and stained cowboy hat. I remember him driving his big truck with as much grace on the highway as he did on the dirt packed roads of his ranch. He was proud the day, at 75, that he got stampeded by cattle and didn’t have a scratch on him. Finally we could understand why he wore those heavy wool shirts even in the 100 degree summer heat.
And my Grandpa Bum, the “old SOB” (as he liked to say). He was a college football coach (does anything get more Texas than that?). He liked to brag about spanking (yes, you read that right, spanking) his college players when they got out of line. I don’t know if he really did that but he was loved and feared equally. And he worshiped my Grandmother with a tenderness that was my earliest model for romance.
I miss them both.
Oh, and the stomach virus is gone. How do I know? Um, I ate chicken fried steak.
