There’s something just weird about getting out of a new Hummer at the Midland-Odessa airport, scrambling to put down my notes while I’m still awake, then hopping a flight home.
Once home? Grab the bus into town and walk from the bus stop, planning on detouring by the bank to make a deposit, and then, as I passed one bus stop, I saw an old friend.
Eddy, the Taurus with no legs.
“No man, don’t do a story about me,” he once asked. Always friendly. Always upbeat. One of the people who fell through the cracks, basically living in wheelchair.
Before I made it to the bank to drop off an envelope full of money, I fished around in my shoulder bag and fetched out a twenty. I was only going to slip him a five, but the easiest cash to get to was my deposit, and I’ll have to remember an adjust the books.
Eddy doesn’t beg. Doesn’t ask for money, doesn’t have a “will work for food” sign. Last time I asked, he had a locker at the Salvation Army, and that was it.
After productive weekend, I didn’t begrudge him a bit. No way to take this off the taxes as he doesn’t give receipts; I doubt he’s a legitimate charity, anyway.
I certainly wasn’t motivated by guilt. I try not to give out money to panhandlers, but he’s different. And he was smiling when he saw me. A friendly face in the sea of unknowns on a Sunday night in Austin. I was toting my shoulder bag and rolling my little suitcase, empty of paper, printer cartridges and tapes.
Slipped him $20. Because he didn’t ask. And I’m sure he needs it more than me.
It’s a little more than a tithe, but what goes around is surely going to come back around.
Did I mention the funny picture I got at the airport, just as I was leaving?
Happy Aries time!
Spring has sprung?
Act I, part the first:That’s a whole lot of Texas that I’ve seen. It’s like a love letter to the Permian Basin. Non-natives? Frequently, they just don’t get it.
A couple of years ago, I was driving from El Paso to Ft. Worth, and the midway point, a decent stopping point, was the Midland-Odessa area. As I pulled over, I looked at the cell phone, and the carrier I had at that time? No coverage in the Permian Basin.
This modern world shifts fast. Not only is there complete digital coverage, but there’s a cell phone in every pocket, or on every hip. It’s not the backward “jerkwater” town it used to be – not by any stretch of the imagination. Even using such a description does it great disservice. I’m sure some of this feeling is due to the broadest of “TV influences” wherein every aspect of life is homogenized and spit out to look the same with regional differences sanded off like little burrs that needed to be removed.
But removing those regional burrs might not be a good idea.
An oil client on Sunday reminded me of the weirdness quotient of the Permian Basin, the seat of the Texas Oil Patch, “Yeah, there really was a sign, up in Lee County, ‘Dear Lord, please send us another oil boom and we’ll promise not to fuck it up this time.’ For real.” Oil was, what? $57 last time I looked. Overheard? “One guy says it’s going to $100 in the next two years.” The Permian Basin, from the air? Looks like a junkie’s arm, full of holes. Flying out? Active drilling rigs with lights – means they were working – on Sunday night.
Part dos:
Another idea cropped up and for years, I’ve been fascinated with the Trans-Pecos Region, c.f., “Zone Tail Hawk.” One of Sunday’s freebies reminded me of that. International art museum, down in Marfa. A chain of hotels from Marathon, through Alpine, up to Ft. Davis, Marfa, and reaching almost to Presidio, with world-class accommodations. On the letterhead of a number of the places I’ve stayed, I always enjoyed the tag line, “The finest hotel between San Antonio and El Paso….”
Like everyone uses that line.
Maybe I should include that in my press material, “In its time, astrofish.net was the best hotel between between San Antonio and El Paso.”
(Minor detail: astrofish.net wasn’t designed by the El Paso architects of Trott &c.)
Act III, part one:
I was thinking about this one, as I’d booked myself out for the last Sunday night flight back to Austin. I’ve done variations on a theme, a number of times, but one of the loneliest flights I ever made was one Sunday night, similar to last night, and the first third of the Southwest flight was unaccompanied minors, children of divorced parents, getting shuttled back and forth, between parents. Pre-Y2K, or whatever. Still a sight that spoke of a quiet desperation of children being freighted like court-mandated cargo, back and forth betwixt towns. Some sort of a sad statement about how relationships were going at the time. Not nearly as many on last night’s flight.
Act III, part dos:
Some of these fragments are a result of Mercury being backwards, the start of Aries, or a quick Midland-Odessa dash for business.
I distinctly recall this one, as it was the old terminal at MAF, and it was me, as well as a couple other readers, wrapping up and dashing for that last Austin flight on a Sunday night. One of the women had her, I’m trying to recall, 12-year old son? Palm reader? Sounds about right. Because he was with us, we got to pre-board, back when the rules were a little looser. Since it was a crowded flight? Rankled that kid that we all got to board early on his ticket. Which, in retrospect, was one of the reasons why the rules have all been screwed down a little tighter.
Intermission?
I count five or six gates at the “new” Midland International Airport. Or the Midland-Odessa airport, or, as I call, by the three-letter FAA tag, MAF. Five gates, officially, with one gate divided into gate 1 and gate 1A. Whatever. It’s an exceedingly nice building, with delightful access and covered parking, but I never did figure out why they built a new aiport. The old one was just fine. I suppose, they could’ve changed the carept. And, in fact, I think the new airport terminal building has fewer gates than the older, now gone, building.
There will be no act IV:
I’m back in Austin. That was weird flight – Gemini and Taurus seated next to me.
