Not Yet, I Haven’t

Posted on October 12, 2023 by admin

Not long ago I came across the blog of a fellow – Everywhereman.me — who aspired to visit everywhere mentioned in the U.S. version of the song “I’ve Been Everywhere.” He then did just that, mostly by motorcycle. I don’t think I’ll do that exactly, but that’s the kind of meshuga I like, since I’m a bit touched myself.

Though others have recorded it, including Johnny Cash no less, I associate the U.S. version with Hank Snow. As well I should.

The original version was Australian, written by Geoff Mack and a hit for Lucky Starr. I have to give it its due. Australia is full of lots of weird and gorgeous place names, after all.

You need a written list to keep up with Lucky, as posted in Wiki. Or a very detailed knowledge of Australia.

Other versions for other places exist. None other than Stompin’ Tom Connors starts off in the United States, but naturally gravitates to Canada, with an entire verse about the Maritimes.

Canada’s fine, but Texas place names are just as good.

By one Brian Burns, who managed to work in some of my favorites, ever since my days of poring over Texas road maps: Pflugerville, Dime Box, and Cut and Shoot.

Remember the Alamo. In This Case, As It Was In 2018

Posted on October 1, 2023 by admin

A summerish weekend to kick off October, and we were out and about in the warmth. Soon temps will be more in line with the usual Octobers of northern Illinois.

Some trees are changing, but most still are holding their green. That too is bound to change soon.

Five years ago in October, I spent some time in San Antonio after the passing of my mother. That included a walk around downtown. I was persuaded that my mother wouldn’t have wanted me to mope around the house, but rather do what I would have done anyway. That is, go out and see things.

Even in very familiar places.

San Antonio tends toward pleasant weather that time of the year, and so it was that day. A lot of people were visiting the Alamo, taking in some of the demonstrations on the grounds. Such as the firing of period firearms.

Not, I think, using actual ammunition. But everything else seemed authentic, especially the loud bang!

Downtown Dallas Sculpture, 2013

Posted on September 17, 2023 by admin

Wee rain in the wee hours, which makes waking up to go to the bathroom a pleasure, at least once you settle back into bed. The light rain continued after daybreak, and made a pleasant backdrop for staying in bed to read. I expect the grass to respond by re-greening and unkempt-ing.

Ten years ago this month I was in Texas, including downtown Dallas. I visited the Nasher Sculpture Center then, which has the best sculpture real estate developer Raymond Nasher (d. 2007) could buy, and lots of it. Such as a bug-eyed Picasso (“Tête de femme,” 1931).

“La Nuit” (ca. 1902-09) by Aristide Maillol.

And something a little newer, “Quantum Cloud XX (tornado)” (2000) by Sir Antony Gromley.

The Nasher isn’t the only place in downtown Dallas to spot sculpture. Not far away is “Colts in Motion” (1980) by Anna Debska.

As well as “Bear Mountain Red-A Texas Landscape” (1982) by Alice Maynadier Bateman.

It’s a whopper that has outlasted its original corporate patron. A nearby sign says the work was carved on site from a 12.5-ton block quarried near Fredericksburg, Texas, for the building, then known as the Diamond Shamrock Tower (717 North Harwood St.). The company had moved to Dallas from Cleveland not long before – companies moving to Texas isn’t a new thing – but was eventually swallowed by Valero Energy, which is based in San Antonio.

Big Bend Camera Failure

Posted on April 30, 2023 by admin

Though I grew up in Texas, I never got around to visiting Big Bend NP until five years ago in April. Didn’t give it much thought while I schemed to go other places. The distance to the park is more psychological than geographic, I think. From San Antonio, for example, it’s a full-ish day’s drive to the park (six hours), but since when have Texans ever said, That’s too far to drive?

I had two cameras with me on the trip. One, my sturdy Olympus, model number I can’t remember, a standard and not especially expensive digital camera I acquired in 2012 so I could take pictures at events for a new freelance job. It took good pictures, better than I expected. The other digital image-maker at Big Bend was my camera phone. It was newer than the Olympus, since I got it to go to Mexico City a few months earlier. Even so, it only intermittently produced good pictures.

I started capturing the Big Bend scenery with the Olympus, as usual. It started taking vastly overexposed images, often the second or third of the same scene.

A thing that made me go hm.

Still, I got some decent images with the Olympus. It’s hard to go wrong in Big Bend.

By the time I got to Santa Elena Canyon on the Rio Grande, the Olympus had quit taking anything but overexposures. So I resorted to using the camera phone, producing lower-quality pictures that were sometimes OK.

The Olympus revived to create some good images later in the trip, but was increasingly unreliable. That was its last trip. Later I checked its settings, tried different settings, tried different data storage cards, and poked around online for some reason for it taking overexposures, to inconclusive results.

Once upon a time, you’d have taken your broken camera to a shop for examination and possible repair, but now? I figured I’d gotten my money’s worth out of the Olympus, and soon acquired just as good camera — better in some ways — in the form of a used iPhone that was no longer a communication device.

The failure of my camera on a trip was a kind of inconvenience, though barely even that. Back when Ann went to Washington, D.C., with a junior high group, some camera error or other meant she returned with few images. This upset her. I told her I was sorry she lost the images. But as worthwhile as capturing images can be, or sharing them, seeing a place yourself is the important thing.

The Sunken Gardens, 2013

Posted on March 5, 2023 by admin

I’m not sure I realized it during my visit in March 2013, but the Sunken Gardens in Brackenridge Park in San Antonio had been restored only about 10 years earlier, by a public-private partnership. Nice work.

The Sunken Gardens is another one of those places I’ve visited across the decades with a shifting array of companions: my grandmother, first of all, but also every one of my immediate family, cousins, high school friends, visiting girlfriends, other out-of-town visitors, my fiancé-then-wife, my children. It’s a personal favorite of a place.

It isn’t authentic in the sense that Japanese garden designers created it. Rather, the city parks department created it from an abandoned quarry in the 1910s, probably after consulting photographs and maybe other sources on Japanese gardens, but I don’t know that. Maybe the department just winged it.

It is authentic San Antonio: an interpretation of a Japanese garden that whatever the inspiration, is inspired.

The main pavilion, an impressive bit of rock laying.

And of woodwork.

Ah, Texas in March. Spring green, ahead of summer brown.

Youth.

Been 10 years. I ought to go back if I can, but I’ve accumulated a lot of personal favorite places over the years.

McNay Art Museum, 2015

Posted on February 26, 2023 by admin

Remarkable how the 2010s are receding so quickly. How is that possible? The tumults of the early 2020s, with the prospect of more to come? A kind of red-shifting of past years that gets more pronounced as old age sets in?

After all, the more moments you’ve had, the less any particular one might count, even relatively recent ones. Or does it work that way? No doubt there are TEDx talks about the plasticity of memory, all erudite and maybe even persuasive — until some future decade, when they’ll be considered wrongheaded if they’re ever watched, which they won’t be.

These thoughts occurred as I was looking through my picture files for February 2015, when I spent some high-quality time in south Texas. One evening during that visit, I popped over the the McNay Art Museum, one of San Antonio’s lesser-known treasures.

I’d been visiting the museum for years. Decades. We went there on field trips in elementary school in the early ’70s. It helps that it’s conveniently located near my mother’s house and the school I went to — no more than a mile away.

“Ohio-born heiress Marion Koogler first visited San Antonio in 1918, shortly after her marriage to Sergeant Don Denton McNay, who was called to active duty in Laredo, Texas. Later that year Don McNay died from the Spanish flu,” the museum says.

“In 1926, Marion moved to San Antonio, where she met and married prominent ophthalmologist Donald T. Atkinson. The following year, she purchased her first modern oil painting, Diego Rivera’s ‘Delfina Flores,’ and the Atkinsons commissioned San Antonio architects Atlee and Robert Ayres to design a 24-room Spanish Colonial-Revival house that would one day become the core of the McNay Art Museum [which opened in 1954]”

There was a later addition (2008) to the house to expand the museum, which now has about 22,000 works, mostly 19th- to 21st century, many regional, but not all.

I’m especially taken with the gorgeous courtyard. I’ll bet more than one proposal of marriage has happened there.

The courtyard features a few works from the collection, such a Renoir, “The Washerwoman” (1917).

The heart-wrenching “War Mother” (1939) by Charles Umlauf (1911-94), a sculptor originally from Michigan, but living in Chicago and working for the WPA when he created it.

The work is credited with helping him get a teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin in the early ’40s, which he held to 40 years.

Another Umlauf: “Cruxifix” (1946).

A remarkable talent. One of these days, I want to visit the Umlauf museum, which is in Austin. And of course, I want to go back to the McNay again.

The National Shrine of St. Thérèse

Posted on January 8, 2023 by admin

Well over a decade ago, during a summertime visit to San Antonio, I drove to the west side of the city to see the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Little Flower, which I’d never seen or even heard of before, despite growing up in that city. It was very hot that day, as it tends to be that time of the year, so I didn’t linger outside to take many pictures, though I snapped a few marginal ones.

This is a better image. I’m not sure at what point I realized that the basilica in San Antonio and the National Shrine of St. Thérèse in Darien, Illinois, were dedicated to the same person, Thérèse de Lisieux, but I know now. And whatever else I know about St. Thérèse, I also have some sense of her immense popularity as a saint, inspiring edifices around the world in her honor.

We arrived at the Darien shrine just before noon on December 29, an overcast but not especially cold day. Above freezing, anyway. There it is, I told Yuriko.

So we went in. A few minutes passed before I realized that we not in the shrine, but in the nearby museum building, which I believe was the shrine before a new one was completed a few years ago. The sign on this building makes me think that. If so, there needs to be a signage update.

This is the current shrine.

In effect, this is the fourth shrine to her that has existed in the Chicago area. The first two were in the city, a larger one succeeding the original as her popularity grew in the 1920s.

The church that housed the second shrine burned down nearly 50 years ago, but by the 1980s the Carmelites were able to find the scratch the build a third shrine out in the suburbs. The demographics were going that way anyway.

The Carmelites tasked Charles Vincent George Architects, based in nearby Naperville, to design the fourth and latest shrine, which was completed in 2018.

Behind the altar is St. Thérèse in glass.

“The architectural solution pays homage to St. Therese throughout, from the main building’s shape, inspired by the unfolding petals of a flower, a nod to St. Therese’s nickname ‘Little Flower,’ to key structures, such as the plaza clock tower, reminding us of her clockmaker father, and the 24-column colonnade, serving as a symbol of St. Therese’s 24 years of life,” CVG notes.

“As St. Therese had humble beginnings, special attention was taken to provide simple building materials using stone, brick and the limited use of wood for construction materials. The entire building layout focuses on the center altar and image of St. Therese etched in the chancel glass wall, through which there are views of her statue built out into the lake behind the chapel.”

In December, St. Thérèse is the star of Christmas trees in the shrine.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a tree decorated with prayers before, but there it was. All of them to the saint.

The museum included some seasonal features as well, such as a nativity under a more permanent woodwork depicting the saint.

Just in case anyone is uncertain, labels come with the nativity scene. Guess that’s helpful for kids who have just learned to read, but I as far as can remember as a kid, the figures were something that everyone knew. Essential Christmas lore, even for public school children. Maybe that’s not true anymore.

Modern stained glass. Some nice abstractions plus holy figures.

What would a saint’s shrine complex be without some relics?

I didn’t know dust could count as a relic, but I’m not up on what can and can not constitute a relic. The museum also has a few relics of Thérèse’s parents, Louis and Zélie Martin, who happen to be saints as well.

“Louis had tried to become a monk, but was rejected because he could not master Latin,” a sign in the museum says. “Zélie Guérin tried to become a Sister of Charity, but was rejected due to poor health.”

They couldn’t take vows, but apparently did the next best thing: produce five daughters (the survivors of nine children), all of whom became nuns.

Young Mid-Century Doctor

Posted on December 11, 2022 by admin

I have in my possession — because I lifted it from the large collection of photos at the Stribling manse in San Antonio — this square black-and-white snapshot. I think I brought it back at the same time as my pre-1960 election Ken and Sue shot.

In light pencil on the back, my mother wrote, “V.A. Hospital Party 1958.” December is on the edge of the print, so a Christmas party would be a good bet. My father probably took it. He was handy with a camera.

Unfortunately, my mother didn’t write anything else on it. My father worked for the VA at the time, so I have to assume this is a picture of a colleague. I don’t know who he was. My recollections of 1958 are vanishingly small, after all. Zero, as it happens.

I suspect no one would have given much thought about cigar-smoking at a party, or cigar-smoking by a doctor, though I imagine that my mother didn’t care much for the second-hand smoke. As a matter of individual taste, that is, and probably not as a health concern.

Via the magic of easy photo enlargement, most of the bottles can be identified.

The big bottle on the shelf is Canada Dry, which must have been a mixer. Next to it is the familiar shape of a standard Coke bottle, recognizable down the decades. A mixer as well, at least for some partygoers. Good to see a bit of continuity with the present, even if it’s in the shape of a commercial object.

Not sure about that left-hand bottle in the row of four, or the right-hand one either, but there are clearly more Canada Dry bottles in between.

The lower shelf features more Coke and gin.

Hiram Walker’s gin, as it happens. I haven’t checked lately, but I expect that’s still in stores, too.

Thanks, Grandma

Posted on July 10, 2022 by admin

Fifty-five years ago, my grandmother — Grandma, always — took me on a train ride from San Antonio to Austin. I found evidence of it tucked away in an envelope at my mother’s house some time ago.

Grandma thoughtfully made a note of the fact that it was my first train ride, and the date: July 8, 1967. I was visiting Grandma for a while that summer, as I did in the years before we lived in San Antonio.

Come to think of it, the next summer while I visited her, my family moved from Denton to San Antonio. (Not the stuff of a sitcom; I knew perfectly well we were moving.) Grandma was the one who first took me to visit the house that my mother had bought, and would live in for nearly 50 years.

I find it amusing that a child counted as half a person for the purposes of train fare. Grandma thus paid fare $4.41 for one and a half riders. Adjust that for inflation, and she paid more than $38 in our current, beleaguered dollars.

Good old Missouri Pacific. Mopac.

We must have been visiting someone she knew in Austin, but I don’t remember anything about that. I do remember wisps from the ride itself, mostly the view out the window. I’m sure she knew a train ride would be a thrill for a six-year-old.

But there was more to it than that. I also remember that she told me that it might not be possible for me to ride a train when I was older, so she wanted to take me. Certainly Grandma knew, by 1967, that the writing was on the wall for U.S. passenger train service, or at least Mopac. Maybe she wanted a last ride herself, before passenger trains went the way of the buffalo.

(Outdated analogy. Like the buffalo, passenger trains came to a population bottleneck known as Amtrak, rather than total extinction.)

I imagine an older version of myself — not even now, but perhaps from mid-90s — appearing to her and saying, Grandma, I’ve ridden a lot of trains. In Europe and Asia — and once across Russia from Asia to Europe. I’ve taken the bullet train, and even Amtrak from San Antonio to San Francisco in 1990, though it was distinctly second rate.

And those are just the intercity trains. I’ve lost count of how many different subways and light rail lines I’ve taken, but it would be dozens.

She probably would have been a mite skeptical of those assertions.

It was a one-way ticket. We returned by bus the next day.

Go Greyhound. Grandma also noted that it was my first bus ride. She was being thrifty in not taking the train back, I think. The bus fare is recorded as $1.35 (just short of $12 now), though I don’t know whether that was for the two of us or just me. Even if she paid double that herself, that would have been less than the train.

She probably didn’t think buses would quit running. I don’t remember the bus ride at all.

Future me could pop up again: Grandma, I’ve been on a lot of buses, too, in lots of states and countries. I took one across Australia once. But even in America, I’ve gotten around — all the way from Boston to Los Angeles, once, and that was just part of the trip!

Isn’t that nice, she’d say, thinking at least that her grandson has a healthy imagination.

Down in Galveston, Up in Yellowstone

Posted on June 16, 2022 by admin

Back to posting on Tuesday, since of course Juneteenth is a holiday. I just found out that since last year, there’s been a mural in Galveston commemorating the issuance of General Order No. 3 by (Brevet) Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, who would be wholly obscure otherwise. The artist, Reginald C. Adams, is from Houston.

Something to see if I ever make it back to Galveston, which is more likely than, say, Timbuktu. But I don’t believe I’ll go to Galveston in the summer again.

I downloaded a National Park Service image (and thus public domain) today of the road near the north entrance of Yellowstone NP, showing the damage from the recent flooding. Damn.

Many more pictures of the flooding in the park and in Montana are here, along with a story about the curious absence of the governor of Montana.

“Aerial assessments conducted Monday, June 13, by Yellowstone National Park show major damage to multiple sections of road between the North Entrance (Gardiner, Montana), Mammoth Hot Springs, Lamar Valley and Cooke City, Montana, near the Northeast Entrance,” the NPS says. “Many sections of road in these areas are completely gone and will require substantial time and effort to reconstruct.”

No doubt. We entered the park at the north entrance back in ’05 and spent some time in that part of Yellowstone. The Gardiner River was much more peaceful then.

“Just south of the park’s north entrance, there’s a parking lot next to the Gardiner River. Just beyond the edge of the lot is a path that follows the edge of the river, under some shade trees,” I wrote at the time.

“The river is very shallow at that point, with a cold current pushing over piles of very smooth stones… piles of rock moderated the current a little, so that you could sit in the river and let it wash over you. It wasn’t exactly swimming, but it was refreshing.

“Along the road, just at the entrance to the parking lot, there were two signs: ENTERING WYOMING and 45TH PARALLEL of LATITUDE HALFWAY BETWEEN EQUATOR and NORTH POLE.”

Wonder if that sign is still standing.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: Texas