Journey to the Edge of Texas Chapter 27

Doing Sixty

IT is AUTUMN, AND IT is DUSK for the fortunate until the hard cold drives in.
The wind chimes for me today, on the hearth of my writing, the patio. As is habit I let the outside in — the trees, they play a chord from childhood.
I still feel the East Texas forest at Lake Cherokee when I was eight. We had one of the first weekend houses there with a cypress dock and wooden boat propelled by a five-horsepower motor. But I roamed a sandy path in the woods more than the water's edge. What was burned in my soul was a stand of sweet gums, their colors splashed to brilliance by fall sunshine. Now they may not have been sweet gums; no matter. It is the feel that stays with me, as strong today as that wire and pipe fence that my dad erected around our place a half-century ago.
A couple of years passed, and the boyhood was out at Kountze, nearer the coast. A red-haired lad drove me out a sandy road into the heart of the Big Thicket in a jeep, the top off. It was a joyous ride into adulthood.

IN MY EARLY T E E N s , visiting my maternal grandparents (the George W. Porters) in the Central Texas town of Troy, I hiked to the early family farmhouse and to a nearby creek with limestone banks. The shade likely came from elms — the creek was Little Elm, and I felt on the loose. Thereafter, a spiritual awakening occurred on a path through brooding cypress and white oak. They stood between a church camp and Village Creek, part of the Big Thicket. The shadows of the thick woods emitted as much or more power than a man possessed. To walk there was to mature.
Some say the Saratoga Light shines from railroad days in that tunnel of trees. They can see it as I see a light at the end of my line, at the end of my tunnel.
1 have grown to appreciate, to like and to love a former high school classmate, Beaumont South Park, '59. We are doing sixty with entertainment madness—from Willie Nelson to James Taylor. The pace, I find, is just right.
The woman with whom I have shared so much fun and happiness is Judy Cunningham (her real name). She was mixing cornbread to go with a pot of gourmet beans and sausage last night, and she showed her skill in the kitchen, heating the eggs so they would blend.
After reading my manuscript, she concluded that our strongest common interest would be nature. And I embraced all that that said, all the promise of that bond.
She doesn't know it, but we share a fondness of hotels. She lives in a tower overlooking the striking Houston skyline, the next closest thing to a hotel one can find. For years I have sought out when traveling a Driskill in Austin or a La Mansion in San Antonio. It is a certain elegance that soothes. And with someone you care it is the fireworks on the Fourth of July.
Judy can turn up her intellect in a conversation, impressively. She dug right in to the sexist religious right the other night in a next-door conversation with other tower dwellers. She phrased our sentiments well, and I just sat there pleased to be on her side of the fence.
Commitment. Judy agreed in the early days of our relation to three months hence visit the Vowells in Los Angeles for a golfing weekend. It was a promise unbroken until the terrorists struck the World Trade Center two days before our departure. The promising friendship has stayed intact.
Is there more than friendship? There have been rumblings of attending a marriage course at Rice University. It would satisfy the goals of both even if we went our separate ways. I cannot dally longer, do not want to, and would immediately become a partner to this engaging friend. We reason together, embrace similar tastes, have compatible energy (mine less than hers), and yes, love.
"I love you, too," she said.
But she may not want a union because of past missteps. Or me.
"Just keep doing what you are doing," I would reply.