The Visible Woman...September 3, 2003

Everywhere I was today had a passing familiarity, a pull of nostalgia and yet was like nowhere I've ever been and yet like everywhere else..

You can't go back. The people aren't there and the buildings are mostly gone or else transformed. I had a cup of gourmet coffee in a shop fitted inside a building that used to house the movie theater of my youth. For a quarter, I saw Giant there in about 1956.

I put some roses on Mom's marker at Restland. But she's more real at home in my piles of photos. Or in my head.

I visited with people from my youth. But it wasn't the same, of course.

Dad and I drove streets and highways that were familiar to him not as their urban, concrete and chain restaurant realities but as the fields of farmers he knew, the 'jockey yard' where traders gathered, a vacant lot where he found an old coke bottle. He said, "That was Merriman's field. He died there when his plow overturned or something."

My aunt lives near places I prowled thirty years ago on Lower Greenville. Things look familiar. And yet, not.

Wednesday, September 3, 2003

A Journal from Austin, Texas. A Project of LBFFP Stealth Publishing.
food	reading	writing	time	exercise	health and mood

I put some flowers on her marker and pulled a few weeds trying to grow over it.	like nowhere, like everywhere Everywhere I was today had a passing familiarity, a pull of nostalgia and yet was like nowhere I've ever been and yet like everywhere else.. You can't go back. The people aren't there and the buildings are mostly gone or else transformed. I had a cup of gourmet coffee in a shop fitted inside a building that used to house the movie theater of my youth. For a quarter, I saw Giant there in about 1956. I put some roses on Mom's marker at Restland. But she's more real at home in my piles of photos. Or in my head. I visited with people from my youth. But it wasn't the same, of course. Dad and I drove streets and highways that were familiar to him not as their urban, concrete and chain restaurant realities but as the fields of farmers he knew, the 'jockey yard' where traders gathered, a vacant lot where he found an old coke bottle. He said, "That was Merriman's field. He died there when his plow overturned or something." My aunt lives near places I prowled thirty years ago on Lower Greenville. Things look familiar. And yet, not.
JUST TYPING You really can't go there. It isn't there.
		Food Diary. About 8am [Cafe Brasil, Dallas] pork empanada, two eggs up, a bite of toast and jelly About 11:30pm [Pantry Restaurant, McKinney, Texas] scoop of chicken salad and tomato *About 4:30pm* twenty-five ounce beer About 6:30pm [some Italian place...Snyder Plaza, Dallas, Texas] pepper-crusted ahi tuna green beans mashed potatoes (not a HUGE portion) It felt like one of those horrible travel days of no exercise and much food.
		Time flies.... Dad and I were driving, finding people, meeting them, eating with them, yada, yada. Our visit with his eighty-nine-year-old brother probably seemed short to him...but long to us.

		Reading. Reading a collection of The New Yorker Profiles...but didn't read much.
		Scribbled in my notebook.
		Exercise Nothing. Well, maybe a couple of ab exercises.
		Mood was okay if only because I made it everywhere I'd intended to go.