8 Prayers in Passing

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1.

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Tony’s Tacos to Go is right by the entrance ramp, so that seemed like a good place to start. We pulled up at 8 a.m. I got two breakfast tacos and a Mexican Coke. I figured this represented all the essential breakfast food groups: protein, carbohydrates, fat, and caffeine. A solid foundation for a long day of sitting on my ass in the passenger seat of a pickup truck.

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I was determined to have a real South Texas Saturday.

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I moved to San Antonio in 1980. I had lived all over the world, including Europe and Arabia, and all over both coasts of the United States. I’d never had a breakfast taco before I came here. I’d never even had a flour tortilla.

 

I’d like to begin with a prayer for the breakfast taco. For the person who thought them up, praised be her (probably a “her,” huh?) name. May the breakfast taco thrive in San Antonio, continuing to nurture us, and always be better than Austin’s. Amen.

 

 

2.

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Rolling through Helotes, I saw a fireman mowing the little bit of lawn outside the District 7 Fire Rescue Station. He was sitting on one of those huge riding mowers that are as wide as they are tall, just turning circles in the small green space like that cat on the Roomba in the videos people are always sharing on Facebook.

 

A prayer for the folks whose work is keeping other folks safe. And for that person who puts up the cat-on-Roombavideos. Sometimes, on bad days, those videos are the only thing that makes me smile.

 

 

3.

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The thing about State Highway 16 is that the Medina River runs right alongside a lot of it. Right there, you could almost roll your window down and touch it sometimes. The river is right there next to you, but it’s behind bars. “Can’t touch this.” Private property.

 

The sheer imagined poundage of all the posts and wires and gates and things stretched across the Hill Country boggles the mind. Or makes you want to get into the fencing business. And it’s not just the land. All the way out of town, before you get to where the fences look like they’re built to keep the animals in, you pass all theplaces where the fences are clearly built to keep the people out. The wrong kind of people, anyway. Subdivisions. Gated communities.

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Obviously there’s a random name generator somewhere that somebody spins when they’re getting ready to build a new one of these places. Or a handful of words in a hat—cielo, rio, vista, rancho—put two or three together in any order, put up a billboard that says “from the $200’s,” and the right people will come.

 

A prayer, then, for the people who think they need fences. To live behind, to mark their territory. A prayer for how afraid they must be. And a prayer that they will do the work necessary to heal that fear and not need all these fences anymore.

 

 

4.

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Leaving Bandera (which was all bikers and roosters, more musings on the similarity of the two in a minute), we passed a flock of black vultures on the side of the road, one of them dead. Apparently hit by a passing truck or car. I spent a few miles imagining that conversation. “Fucking Fred. He couldn’t have watched where he was flying? Now we have to eat him. Damn it. Come on, boys, let’s get to work.”

 

A prayer for all the beings doing their jobs, even when those jobs aren’t what they want to be doing. For TCB, even when it sucks.

 

 

5.

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Something I learned. The Hill Country is full of bikers. And they’re mostly retirees. With my grandparents it was the RV lifestyle, but today’s grandparents, apparently, all own a Harley. Just like the RV gangs, though they ride in packs, trumpeting their exuberance at being alive, awake and affluent through the rumble of their exhaust pipes. Disposable income plus unscratched youthful yen to be a bad boy equals golden years spent in leathers, I guess.

 

In the Oak Rest Cemetery, in Medina, there’s a very shiny, obviously expensive tombstone. It’s black, engraved on both sides, and in the shape of a motorcycle. “Let’s Ride!” it says on one side, and on the other there is a name, some dates, and the inscription “son, brother, husband, father, grandfather.” As I stood looking at that stone, endless streams of doubled-up riders roared past on 16, just a hundred yards or so away.

 

A prayer for those chasing their dreams, for their partners (I sure hope this was their dream, too) and for the poor people who moved out to the country, once upon a time, looking for peace and quiet.

 

6.

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Easter Weekend in the Hill Country means people are taking their bluebonnet pictures. They are driving slowly along thetwisting, rural two-lane, traffic stacking  up impatiently behind them. They are suddenly swerving to a stop when they spot a likely location, half the car jutting out from the verge, narrowly avoiding (sometimes not avoiding) a fender bender.They are realizing they’ve locked the baby in the still-running, air-conditioned car while they lined up the shot; they are calling AAA in a panic to get the locks popped.

 

Your friends from out of state don’t know this, do they? That all those beautiful, bucolic, baby-in-the-bluebonnet photographs are taken on the side of the road. One parent taking the picture while the other dodges around, arms spread, like they’re guarding a soccer goal, making sure no small people dart out into the highway.

 

Let’s say a prayer for allll that shit.

7.

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And speaking of shit. And bluebonnets. The whole bluebonnet vista thing has been ruined for me, and I’m going to share the misery.

 

Some years ago, I was commissioned by the Witte Museum in San Antonio to write a gallery theater piece about Eleanor Onderdonk, lesser-heralded daughter of the Texas artist Robert Jenkins Onderdonk and sister of Julian Onderdonk, best known as “the bluebonnet painter.” Julian died at the age of 40 from, officially, “surgical complications.”

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What nobody really talks about (and the Witte wouldn’t let me put it in the script) was that he was in surgery as a result of a giant intestinal traffic jam. He was famous as a painter of bluebonnets, but he was infamous for “a cavalier disregard for his health” which, in some cases, is code for hardy partying but, in his case, was almost certainly a genteel way of referring to his manic episodes (I read his letters, I’m telling you, the guy was probably bipolar) during which he would not sleep, not eat and, obviously, not go to the bathroom.

 

A prayer for those who have died ignominious deaths, and for all the shit that we, as human beings, must deal with. Figuratively and literally.

 

8.

 

You should return from a trip a slightly different person than you were when you set out. Ideally, you should have learned something. 

 

In the Oxford Cemetery outside of Llano, for example, sticking contact microphones on things and then hitting them with sticks to record the sounds they made, I learned that a gravestone does not make a good musical instrument.

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Along the Llano River, stumbling upon the remnants of the Rockstacking World Championship, I learned that stones are not, in fact, a slave to gravity.

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Near Fredericksburg I learned (and I realize I’m late to the party on this) that Luckenbach, Texas is not a place. It’s a venue!

 

How about These lessons left me longing to find a prayer for all the places and people and things that are not what we think they are, maybe not even what we hope they are, but are just what they are. That might be the most important prayer of all. The man sitting next to me in the Ford F-150, is he who I think he is? Am I who he thinks I am? Who will we be to each other, and how will who we are change, as the years roll past?

 

Driving home meant driving west, into the setting sun, down out of the silvergold grass and the wildflower spackle of the Hill Country, watching the San Antonio skyline bloom against the smoldering horizon. That’s when it came to me. One final prayer to make a novena: a prayer of gratitude for Home. The illusion of a permanent stop on a lifelong peripatetic journey. Also known as the place you park your truck.