Clothes washed,
Bloodroot selects a white shirt and tan shorts for today’s adventures. Keith calls him a Boy Scout, feeling the old
scouting uniform best describes Bloodroot’s attire.
Our first stop
today, the San Antonio Missions, consists of five separate missions spread
around town. (The Alamo Mission,
yesterday’s destination, is one of the San Antonio missions.) We choose to visit the San José Mission. Exiting Pearl, Bloodroot, in his Boy Scout
regalia, complains of cold. Keith begins
jumping around, gyrating as one stricken with St Vitus’ Dance, shouting like a
small child, “Oooh, I’m cold! I’m cold!”
I can hear the unspoken, “Man up, boy!”
I simply watch, amused by the spectacle.
The Spanish built
five missions along the San Antonio River, intending to create an indigenous
medieval peasant society, loyal to Spain, of course. The park service has restored the San José
Mission. In the early 1700s,
gathering-hunting Indians, harassed by the Apache and drought, voluntarily
sought sanctuary in the mission. The
price - conversion to Catholicism, loss of traditional lifestyles, and labor as
yeomen farmers. The choices were hard
yet acceptable. Unfortunately, most of
the new converts died of disease.
The mission itself
consists of a large walled compound. We enjoy the stonework. Inside we
find workshops, chapels and living spaces for both the Indians and the
Spaniards. Gravity-fed irrigation
systems watered the fields. Initially
successful, the missions began to fade around 1780, undermined by disease and
lack of military support. The missions
finally closed their doors in the early 1800s.
We leave the
mission heading for Houston and Aunt Minnie.
Bear guides Pearl
up I-10 from San Antonio to Houston, four lanes all the way. I curse this stupid state’s obligatory
transit on lousy freeways. As consumers
loyal to big oil, we spend hours on the road, consuming lots of petrol while
stuck in traffic on a Sunday. We ride
forever, enmeshed in major congestion all the way between the two cities,
observing stranger behavior than we find in Denver, where we have the
legitimate excuses of thin air and legal marijuana. We’re accustomed to aggressive, clueless
behavior. Back home we watch people
randomly changing lanes, or crossing five lanes of road to turn only a block
later. On this freeway, totally
self-absorbed slow drivers block the left lane, meandering along, because
naturally, no one else counts but them.
Mad hornets dash about determined to get around the slowpokes, providing
some frightening entertainment. Our
tough trip, full of complete stops, makes me appreciate living in
Colorado. And Houston, East Texas in
general, has the population to support mass transit! We see no public transit, no light rail, no
subway – just an interminable stream of vehicles.
For our
edification and distraction, we listen to Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. Russell describes Plato’s Republic as a combination of Brave New World and Sparta. Logically separated into three classes,
governed by philosopher kings, everyone works tirelessly for the common good,
eliminating poverty. Russell’s audiobook
could accompany you through four or five cross-country trips; I don’t think
that you’d hear it all even then! I
doubt that we’ll ever get beyond Greece.
As we travel from
west Texas to the east, I find myself liking the state less and less, my
distaste rising with the humidity.
Houston smells like Florida, wet and moldy. Have I become such an habitué of the high
plain desert that I feel uncomfortable in the lowlands? Already I thoroughly miss the thin arid air
and find myself choking and gasping from the humidity, as though trying to
breathe through a bowl of chicken soup.
As we near the
city, Keith calls Aunt Minnie, asking her what restaurant we could treat her
to. She suggests Dead Lobster. “No!” we cry in panic. Keith calls Minnie’s son Vic. Since we’re near the Gulf, we hope for good
seafood. Vic suggests the Aquarium at
Kemah. Keith forgets to specify quiet
and small.
We pick up Aunt
Minnie at her apartment. Six years ago,
Minnie visited us in Denver. What a
difference a few years can make! She’s
gone downhill a good bit since then. Me
too. In 2008, I walked and worked
fulltime. Minnie doesn’t look good. Her hair askew, she’s missed her facial
features when applying make-up.
Encumbered by cheap flip-flops, she walks unsteadily to the car. She’s doused herself in cheap, foul-smelling,
headache-inducing perfume attempting to cover her self-perceived sin of smoking.
We find Kemah,
which turns out to be an amusement park, loud, overpriced and definitely not
for us. We eat at the Aquarium
Restaurant, an extension of the amusement park.
In search of a table, we pass numerous fish tanks and brightly painted
concrete molded ceilings. I fear yet
another expensive, lousy meal. The host
shows us to our table. We order. Minnie happily eats shrimp. I enjoy my snapper, ignoring the price. The Bunny orders tilapia in pineapple salsa,
which he later announces tastes like someone poured corn syrup over a piece of
fish. Keith also expresses disgust with
his meal. But Minnie dreams a heavenly
shrimp-filled dream. For $160, we have
been taken yet again.
Over dinner, Minnie
tells us that she’s dropped out of her church, her sole social support, because
the Lutherans marry gays and Leviticus 18 calls homosexuality an abomination. I
respond that Leviticus 11[1]
calls eating shrimp an abomination. My
comment elicits a blank deer-in-headlights stare. Ah Minnie, the central point of Christianity
is love. How can you not see that? When asked the greatest commandment, Jesus
reportedly said (as documented in Mark 12, Matthew 22 and Luke 10), “The first of all the commandments is, Hear,
O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with
all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like,
namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other
commandment greater than these.”[2]
Loneliness rolls
off Minnie like a miasma, a palpable sadness you can see and touch. I so pity her. She was very good to Keith when he was young.
We drop Minnie off
at her apartment. Exiting Pearl, she
again complains of lonesomeness. Our
visit has brightened her world, temporarily diffusing the melancholy which rebounds
tackling her as we leave. We promise to
return tomorrow to take her to the pharmacy.
On our way to our
very tiny Airbnb flat, we encounter yet more traffic at 8PM on a Sunday. As Sven enters the flat, I’m stopped dead in
my tracks by yet more overpowering cologne reek. Oblivious to any safety concerns, we fling
all the windows and doors wide open.
Bloodroot begins a seek-and-destroy mission, using his nose to save his
mother. Finally, he finds the odor’s
source, a plug-in room stench machine.
He unplugs the machine, setting it outside in the grass to perform an
appropriate function, like annihilating mosquitos or other unpleasant
arthropods. Mission accomplished, the
boys dispel any remaining stink by creating tomorrow’s lunch, a tempeh stir-fry. We settle in for our well-deserved sleep.
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