Senior Moments Read online

  “Whah, that’s so nahs. What’ll yew be teachin’?”

  “I’ll be in the English department.”

  “Yew’ve cum down heah to teach us English? Whah, yew don’t even talk lahk us!”

  Even today, more than four decades and two Bush presidencies later, the Lone Star State seems more exotic and alien to many Yankees than Nepal or Bora-Bora. And I certainly know people who have traveled around the world but not across the Red River. Remember: Texas was an independent republic for an entire decade, from 1836 to 1845. And if some of its citizens get their way, it may yet again secede from the Union. As a longtime resident, I always assure my skeptical friends and relatives that they are both correct (it is strange) and wrong. As with speech, so with other customs and habits: America, like the rest of the world, has become smaller, and most places mirror one another. Anyone whose image of Dallas and Texas comes from the Bushes and Rick Perry, or from television’s J. R. Ewing and his large, dysfunctional family, all of them living in a single house at Southfork despite their wealth, will be disappointed, or perhaps relieved, by the reality. Ditto anyone who has seen Robert Altman’s Dr. T and the Women, in which I know that I saw more fancy society women wearing hats (hats!) in the first thirty minutes than I have in more than forty years in this city.

  Although it occurred to me on that August morning long ago to rush back to the tarmac to see whether I could reboard the plane for its return flight to Boston, I gamely stuck it out. I acclimated myself, in many ways, to life in Texas, if never as a Texan.

  When I finally arrived at my tiny apartment near the university, the temperature outside was 104 degrees; the air-conditioning inside was set at 68 degrees. Six days later, my rented car having been returned and my determination to live as a pedestrian (“It’s a city … Who needs a car?” I asked myself) having got the better of me, I decided to take the bus to the suburban branch of Neiman Marcus.

  Before my arrival, I knew exactly three facts about Dallas. The first, of course, was that President Kennedy had been shot there almost eight years before. The place, to a northerner’s eyes, was a bastion of reaction, a spawning ground for hatred, America’s city of shame. Like everyone else of my generation, I had spent the weekend of November 22 to 25, 1963, glued to a black-and-white television set. Second, I knew that Greer Garson, that noble Mrs. Miniver and a feisty Elizabeth Bennet to Laurence Olivier’s Mr. Darcy, had settled down there with an oilman. She lived in the same glamorous high-rise apartment building, a rarity in a city of single-family houses, as the soprano Lily Pons.

  And I understood that Neiman Marcus was the mother church in a city that took both religion and commerce very seriously. Some years later, an older woman of my acquaintance took great comfort in the final stages of dementia from the knowledge that she would be buried right across from the same Neiman Marcus store that was my destination. She had lost almost everything else from her life, including the details of her own identity, but she remembered shopping at Neiman’s. She remembered glamour.

  My landlord pointed me in the direction of the bus stop, two short blocks away. I walked there at 9:30. He had neglected or forgotten to mention that buses ran infrequently on weekends. At 10:30, the mercury already at 97 degrees and still rising, the bus arrived to take me less than two miles to the stylish shopping mall. Having spent an hour in the heat, and another in the super-cold indoor environment, I—nothing daunted—decided to walk home. The next day, I came down with laryngitis and a fever.

  One adjusts to climate after a while, or tries or pretends to. In Dallas, one estivates, staying under cover as much as possible from May until the third week of September, when, always on schedule at the equinox, a norther comes through and breaks the back of summer. People in the North suffer from one kind of seasonal affective disorder. Too little light produces too little serotonin. Vitamins and artificial illumination may alleviate the condition. Summer in the South comes with its own seasonal disorders: fatigue and irritability are the principal effects. For much of the year, the sun becomes an enemy; one is grateful for window shades and sunscreen. Bright light oppresses; it neither animates nor inspires. The old song “Home on the Range” has it right: the skies are not cloudy all day. Day after day. I have never found a cloudless day something to hope for. Someone who reads from afar the newspaper weather report learns that in Dallas the high one day in July is 99 degrees, and the low is 75. What he does not learn is that the low temperature is struck for about ninety seconds right before sunup; by 9:00 a.m., the mercury has resettled comfortably into the high eighties, and it doesn’t begin to drop until well after midnight. When I moved to Dallas, everyone assured me that we had “dry heat.” That might have been true a century ago, but Dallas is not Phoenix, Albuquerque, or El Paso. Over the decades, not only has the air become more humid, as a result of population growth and the attendant vegetation, lawn watering, backyard swimming pools, and other man-made bodies of water; it has also become more unbreathable. Industrial pollutants, sometimes blown north from Mexico, sometimes of more local origin, can hang over the city like a miasma for days, even weeks, at a time.

  Scientists now have data on those of us who might say, along with T. S. Eliot’s speaker in The Waste Land, “Winter kept us warm.” These include people who fear the sun, who quickly develop skin cancers, whose bodies adjust badly to humidity, who perspire easily, who become resentful, cranky, and hard to live with in the heat. Summer depression strikes fewer people than the winter variety, but it exists. I read a study that said that in India the incidence of depression is higher in summer than what passes for winter; in Italy, it’s the opposite. Who knows why? One thing is certain: at home in the States, or anywhere else, you can always add layers of clothing to keep you warm, but there are limits to what you can remove.

  The postwar growth of the American South owes everything to the development of universal central air-conditioning as well as to low state taxes. For the first half of the twentieth century, Dallas was still, like Houston and Atlanta, a relatively small town. The women and children of the bourgeoisie went away in the summer to the mountains of Colorado and New Mexico or to the lakes of the upper Midwest. Menfolk worked in their offices, ate in restaurants, had mistresses. Life in Manhattan and Philadelphia was much the same. Families were sent to beaches on the Jersey Shore or Long Island, where the men came, by train, for weekends. In Dallas, you had to travel farther to get away from the heat. Fewer people could afford to make a short break. Trains were inconvenient. Anyone who stayed in Dallas slept outdoors on screened-in porches, with electric fans to move the hot air around. People took cold baths. Women wore light clothing; no one exercised or expended calories unnecessarily. Frequent hydration helped to restore depleted energy. And everyone got used to the situation; no one knew anything different.

  I sometimes think of Wallace Stevens, who went west of the Mississippi only once in his life, and of how he, like Elizabeth Bishop, divided his imaginative energies between the North of Connecticut (Nova Scotia for her) and the South of Florida and Cuba (Brazil, as well as Florida, for her). Like any New Englander sensitive to the awakening of spring, he understood the gradual opening of the soil, atmosphere, and human spirit as a simultaneous revival of erotic energies. And he knew how to take the measure of his region through nuances of color and temperature: “The man who loves New England and particularly the spare region of Connecticut loves it precisely because of the spare colors, the thin lights, the delicacy and slightness of the beauty of the place. The dry grass on the thin surfaces would soon change to a lime-like green and later to an emerald brilliant in a sunlight never too full. When the spring was at its height we should have a water-color not an oil and we should all feel that we had had a hand in the painting of it, if only in choosing to live there where it existed” (“Connecticut Composed”).

  What Stevens called the “mythology” of his region—composed in equal parts of topography and weather, as well as history and human culture—has its Texas equiv
alent. A New Englander gains hope in the spring. After winter’s dulling and dimming, lengthening daylight and warmer temperatures cause the human sap, like that of the trees, to rise. In the South, the process works the other way around. Life begins in autumn, a special bonus for an academic like me who customarily thinks in terms of the school year. As the days shorten, as first the nights and then the days themselves begin to cool, the human spirit emerges from hiding. We start to breathe, and to think, again, following summer’s oppressive languor. For much of the year, the sun is too bright, the colors too vulgar. In October, the harshness relents and nature restores a measure of softness to itself and to us. We come back to Stevens’s “water-color” from the garish “oil” of summer, when there was no place to hide from the sun. Dallas in July and August is a de Chirico picture: bright, geometric, and seemingly devoid of human life. The landscape becomes entirely metaphysical. When summer’s emptiness at last gives way to the paradoxical fullness of a mild winter, we regain a central human outlook. Between November and April, any day in Dallas might have a freeze or a modest snowfall. One year, I celebrated Thanksgiving here in shorts and T-shirt; the next in sweater, corduroys, and boots to protect against icy streets. One year, we can pretend we are back north with the Pilgrims; the next, we are likely to be in Palm Beach. At least we no longer feel like outcasts in the baked land of relentless summer.

  Weather is one thing; topography and landscape make for a different but related story. It is normal to feel a preference for native soil, so transplanted New Englanders often have difficulty in most of Texas, which has two seasons: summer, and everything else. North Texas is prairie—neither desert like El Paso, nor hilly like Austin, nor semitropical like Houston. God almost certainly never intended for anything to grow here except live oak, hackberry, mesquite, bois d’arc (pronounced “bow dark,” and so called, according to myth, because Noah used this hardwood to build his flood-withstanding boat); some sad-looking bushes like the ligustrum, the boldly shaded crape myrtle, the salmon-colored quince, the Carolina jasmine, the trumpet vine (all healthy and easy transplants); and the hardy redbud, a cross between tree and bush, of no particular attractiveness in shape or foliage except for two weeks in early spring, the end of February, the beginning of March, when it opens its luscious, plum-colored blossoms. I had never noticed this tree in the Northeast, although it grows there, probably because it is only one among many providers of spring color. In Dallas, it stands more or less alone. Erotically beautiful and, like most erotic phenomena, painfully ephemeral, the redbud might symbolize the way beauty breaks in everywhere, even when and where we least expect it. Most trees here are small by the standards of Colorado or Connecticut. In some neighborhoods, you used to pay a fine if you sawed down mature plantings. A Yankee will always miss lilacs and horse-chestnut trees, poplars and ginkgoes, but in Dallas we do have the lovely, delicately aromatic wisteria and the catalpa, whose popcorn-like blooms brighten the streets at least two months before their northern cousins open up.

  A half century ago, you could still find some cotton and alfalfa fields within the present city limits. Dallas’s soil is clay, inhospitable to agriculture and to construction as well. Every building foundation that has not gone down to bedrock—that is, every residential property in the region—moves with the seasons, in soil dry and cracking in the summer, wet and spongy in the winter. To minimize the shifting of the foundations, especially during arid spells, homeowners used to be instructed to soak the perimeters of their houses. During a decade of unhappy home ownership, I went outside every morning in July, hosing down my 1927 house, which stood on an old-fashioned pier-and-beam foundation. So did my neighbors. We watered our houses.

  Dallas was for most of the past century the country’s largest city not located on navigable water. Its very reason for existence has never been ascertained. John Neely Bryan, the city’s so-called founding father—its first Anglo resident—pitched a cabin here in 1841. He died in 1877 at the State Lunatic Asylum, to which he had been admitted three years previously. But no one knows exactly why he built where he did. Somewhat later, a group of Swiss Fourierists established an ill-conceived Socialist colony, La Réunion, on the south shore of the Trinity River, which dries up and swells with the seasons. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, Texans entertained quixotic dreams of making the Trinity a real cargo-bearing waterway to the Gulf of Mexico. (Residents have also spent much money and had heated discussions lately concerning ways to open the river and turn it into an urban playground and nature preserve. So far, nothing has happened.) The Socialists said the landscape reminded them of Burgundy. Their experiment failed. La Réunion lasted for several years in the mid-1850s and then vanished without a trace. Even Fort Worth had a raison d’être: it was built as an army base. Dallas, however, represents the triumph of the stubborn human will over both nature and rationality. And it profited from one enormous stroke of good fortune: it became the intersection for two train lines in 1873. Business boomed. Dallas became, both literally and then figuratively, a crossroads. Once the trains came through, merchants, capitalists, and other entrepreneurs followed.

  What remains of the prairie in western Nebraska still preserves, especially in springtime, the primal beauty Willa Cather describes in My Ántonia, O Pioneers!, and other books. Wild nature has long since fled from Dallas, where every blade of grass is a work of art but where little comes close to Central Park or the Boston Public Garden in design and beauty. Instead, the landscape has gradually become a network or spider’s web of highways leading from shopping centers and malls through garden apartment complexes to single-family-home neighborhoods.

  Elizabeth Bishop visited in 1978 at my invitation. Two months later, she wrote to her school friend Frani Blough Muser, “When I drew back the curtains at the Ramada Inn the first morning I almost cried.” Five years later, Amy Clampitt, who had arrived by bus, said that “Dallas itself is a monument to seeing who can put up a glassier, tonier-colored, mirror-plated skyscraper; not much class at all that I could see,” although she allowed that in the adjacent countryside, where her cousins lived, “it’s another matter.” The motel where Bishop stayed looks out over an expressway that is really Dallas’s Main Street, a thoroughfare that moves the populace along a north-south axis. Traffic, not water, flows in Dallas. To a poet whose life and work were nurtured by the comfort of a location—Key West, Brazil, Nova Scotia, and, in the last chapter, the Boston harbor—a landscape with no water in sight offered neither beauty nor inspiration. In Bishop’s eyes, nature had either been suppressed by the human quest for urban life or never been present. In either case, it was indiscernible. She sent me a polite thank-you note after her return to Boston. In it, she said that she and her friends traveled into the piney woods of east Texas after visiting Dallas, “where we saw the saddest little towns I have ever seen. We saw a road marker that said ‘Poetry—Three Miles.’ If poetry is in as feeble a condition as ‘Poetry,’ I don’t think there’s much hope for it in Texas.”

  In certain sectors of the ever-expanding and ever-contracting “metroplex”—what we call Dallas and Forth Worth, forty miles apart but growing into each other like a molecular coupling—large commercial buildings of no particular style seem to have been dropped by helicopter into the soil. That’s how the landscape struck the late Ada Louise Huxtable, doyenne of American architecture critics, when she visited in the mid-1980s. A man-made lake occupies a big space near downtown Dallas; its waters are mostly still and muddy, its surrounding vegetation brown scrub. But it offers shade and respite. The downtown, until recently a nine-to-five hive for worker bees, has come back to life modestly as a result of close-in housing, the conversion of department stores and banks into condos and apartments, and an imposed “arts district,” which the city fathers wisely realized would help tourism and commerce. It boasts buildings by the Pritzker Prize–winning architects Norman Foster, Philip Johnson, Rem Koolhaas, Thom Mayne, I. M. Pei, and Renzo Piano, plus a majestic bridge over the Tri
nity River by Santiago Calatrava. The masterful Piano pavilion for the Nasher Sculpture Center (2003) has been embroiled for years in a kind of real estate controversy not unique to Dallas: an adjacent condominium tower, sheathed in fiercely reflective glass, casts shadows into the museum and is ruining, according to museum officials, the gorgeous outside sculpture garden. The battle has taken on David-and-Goliath proportions.

  An arts “district” Dallas may possess, but a district is not the same as a neighborhood. It is imposed rather than organic, dictated and not natural. The automobile still rules here, as in most of the United States. Few people walk, except for the earnest, mostly middle-aged women, doing their cardiovascular best. In the days before these sturdy and determined exercisers, if someone was seen on the streets in certain posh suburban neighborhoods, he would be stopped by the police, politely questioned, and then, especially if he was a person of color, driven to his destination. The efforts to produce a mass transit system have attracted a matched set of commuters: workers from the predominantly affluent white suburbs heading south into town in the morning, and African-American and Hispanic workers, often domestic ones, heading north. Both groups reverse directions for the evening commute.

  The city has begun to encourage high-density living. It calls it the new urbanism. It wants to allow people to live close to where they work. But walking is still a dicey proposition. The sidewalks do not cooperate. They tend to be crooked, narrow, uneven, and cracked; they often have utility poles or trees growing in the middle; they do not allow two people to walk abreast, let alone groups of people walking in opposite directions. And we have one even more challenging obstruction: the heat. In April and October, you would probably break a modest sweat during the afternoon. In May and September, you certainly would; from June to August, you’d be as wet and baked as I was when I walked home from my first foray to the suburban Neiman Marcus.