.Saturday, March 23, 2002

the tree and the bike mated years ago

the potter and the cat

tasty stuffed quail

gift shops exuberant decor

Gary poses with his work

"Art is either plagarism or revolution."
Paul Gauguin (1838-1903)

I try to go back to sleep. But it's after eight and I'm a little achey. I know that if I get up and walk around and have a coffee that it will be better. And it is. The house is very cool. Rather than turn up the heat, I put on jeans and a sweatshirt and my Polartec cap and hiking boots. Maybe I'll work in a walk in a little bit. Before our day's excursion.

But I don't. Mom and Dad stop by. Dad goes next door to look at his sharecrop garden. Mom visits with me a little so I scan some pictures for her and send an e-mail with the pictures in it to my nieces, my sister and her. They are old pictures. My niece's graduation from college in the early nineties. My two nieces as flower girls, posing with old younger cousin Kyle. I cropped out the bride, the 'first wife.' My cousin beams in his awful late seventies tuxedo. Dad comes in and asks permission to cut some of my bamboo. (It is a pest in our yard, leaking over from the untamed neighbors back area, given over to nature.) In a while he comes inside, ready to go. He has cut up a fair amount of bamboo for stakes for his gardening at home, to prop up tomatoes and such. And they are off to Sun Harvest to buy some bananas.

We take off on our excursion at noon. SuRu and Gayle accompany us. SuRu agrees to drive. No one has eaten so we stop at Jason's when we get to IH-35. The place is overrun with families but we manage to create a little island in the place and eat.

Then we meander over to Hutto and to Bartlett and wander the back way to Salado. We stop in some indifferent little junk shops in Bartlett (the best thing about them is the friendly people including a woman Gayle knows through in-laws to her uncle) and also go into the one little grocery store so that I can get some Dimetapp and a bottle of water. My congestion induced dizziness has returned. Everyone else walks around the store, the only one in Bartlett that is beyond a convenience store, says Gayle.

"Anyone want anything?" I say. "They have candy cigarettes." (They do, too. Didn't know they still made those."

"They have a butcher and a meat market," FFP reports.

We arrive in Salado and wander through various gift shops. I see many things but nothing I really want. Interesting stuff, though. We end up talking to a potter at Mud Pie's Pottery. Forrest and Gayle buy egg cookers. When we came in she was actually throwing pots in the back. Nice stuff. Visit this lady if you go to Salado. She makes beautiful glazes and makes all this practical things like a ceramic steamer to go on a saucepan and the lid becomes a beautiful serving bowl. She makes French butter keepers, a device that seals the butter in water to keep it soft and at room temp with getting moldy. She makes carafes for Mr. Coffees that 'brew through.' And, of course, beautiful cups and plates and such.

We end up back at a gallery where our friend, Gary Jack Thornton, is having a reception with a couple of other artists. I'm not a collector of landscapes or cowboy art but I think he does a good job of them and he loves what he does. So that's neat. It's what we are all trying to do. Gayle and SuRu have been painting. Gary advises them on how to develop into what they want to be doing, what paints to use, how to find their style.

FFP has made us a reservation at Range which we have been told is Salado's answer to fine dining. It is in an old historic place. We are seated in the old kitchen which is down below ground. The food is good, really soaring here and there, much above what you normally expect in a little town, even one with such tourist aspirations.

Sound bounces around the room, bringing us the tales of young people's families and vacations and discussions of money from a table with an older woman and a younger woman. The latter is assessed by three of us as soon as they leave...someone trying to move in on the inheritance.

We ease on down IH-35 and home. We find we've had a power outage which has set off our home alarm and brought down our Internet gateway and machines. After lots of booting and checking and clock resetting we are relaunched in the modern world. It was a nice, peaceful outing. All of us got along well, getting to see what we wanted and enjoying the shopping, looking, eating, I think. We've vowed to do more outings. Work certainly interferes with that.

JUST TYPING
An outing.
With friends.
Catering to the physical and psychological needs of each other.
Harder than it sounds.
Being with other people.
It was quite pleasant.