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the-healing-power-of-cats · 5 years

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iv. TEXAS

I went to the science museum in Houston and looked at the precious stones, gems, shells and stuffed animals. Then, I had a grilled chicken sandwich for lunch.

After lunch, I visited the Butterfly Center. They were playing piano jazz music and there were butterflies everywhere. I sat and read a chapter of my book. I saw a museum worker hug an Iguana tightly and bathe it. I said to the museum worker, you two look beautiful together and she laughed. It was like they were meant to be together. His name was Charro and he was their resident Iguana.

I never think about marriage but when n. told me that you could get married in the Butterfly Center, I really wanted to get married there.

Later I went to “The Galeria” malls on Westerheimer Road. I walked around the mall for half an hour looking for the Menorah Lighting. I went up escalators and then down escalators and walked around the food court. I asked several people working at the mall, but no one could tell me where the Menorah Lighting was taking place. Eventually, I found it.

At the farmer’s market in Austin, I ordered a fish taco. As the woman was adding a handful of mixed lettuce to the taco, she picked out one leaf of lettuce from the small pile of mixed lettuce. She held it up to show me and she asked if I enjoyed this particular type of lettuce. We both looked at the leaf for a moment and then, she let me know that she did not enjoy this particular type of lettuce because it always got stuck in her throat, so she was going to chuck it.

She chucked it to the side onto the grass.

After thorough research on lettuce varieties I now know that the lettuce was a green variety of looseleaf lettuce, I recall it being deeply frilled.

I met o. at a yoga class. She asked me if I wanted to visit Jefferson, a small town in East Texas. I said yes and I hoped she was being serious because sometimes people just say things to be friendly. The next day she picked me up at my hostel and we drove six hours to Jefferson.

o. told me that Jefferson was the 7th most haunted town in the United States and that her boyfriend p. was from Athens. At first, I thought she meant Athens in Greece, but she meant Athens in Texas.

o. and I believed in the law of attraction and manifestations. We agreed that we had manifested this meeting into our lives. I admitted to her that I had had a deep desire to make new friends and to visit a small town in Texas.

o. and p. drove me to dinner in a Ford f3 50 also called a Platinum Cowboy Cadillac. As, o. was feeding a pack of wild stray cats, p. told me that California was his least favorite place because liberals always got offended very quickly and liberals had a problem now with the Christmas song, Baby it’s cold outside.

There was a wolf standing in someone’s yard in Jefferson because it is legal to own a pet wolf in Texas. Her name was Jusa and she was on a big chain and stared at us as we drove by o. said she was not dangerous, all she would do was destroy your couch.

After the boat tour of Cado lake, o. asked me what I wanted to do now. I think I would like to have a milkshake or eat some pie, I said.

o. was driving me back to Jefferson so I could do that when she stopped at a stop sign and then we got abducted. Our abductor opened the door of the car, got in and told o. to drive him to his car parked at Lowe’s in Marshall. She talked back to our abductor and told him to stop talking so loudly because it was making her anxious. Then our abductor asked if he could smoke a cigarette in the car and o. said no. He replied alright. When we got to Lowe’s our abductor said that he was hungry and wanted to go McDonald’s. o. said that she was not driving that way and that she was going to take him to Dairy Queen instead. We dropped him off at Dairy Queen and o. gave him twenty dollars and our abductor got out of the car and ran away.

o. thought she was going to pass out because she had not eaten all day and just thought she was going to die. So, we decided to stay at the Dairy Queen and ordered two mini oreo blizzards at the drive through.

The Dairy Queen intercom asked if we wanted extra Oreos on the Oreo blizzard today. o. answered, no.

Although Thanksgiving was two weeks ago, p. cooked me a Thanksgiving meal. He wanted me to try southern dressing and southern fruit salad and instead of turkey he had bought a chicken at the butchers. I felt so grateful to have met o. and p.

Then, o. and p. wanted to teach me how to shoot a gun and how to drive their pick-up truck because I did not know how to do either.

p. said he had fifty guns which seemed like a lot of guns and I wondered where he kept them.

o. taught me how to drive the golf cart instead of the pick-up truck.

The next day, I took the Texas Eagle Amtrak train from Marshall to Austin. The train ride was ten hours long. I went to have dinner in the dining car and ordered the Thyme Roasted Chicken Breast served with mashed potatoes and green beans. I sat with a woman who told me that she had married a Japanese man when she was younger. I told her that I thought Japanese men were handsome. She said, yes but not when they get old.

When I arrived in Austin, I walked to the public transit bus stop and in the bus, a young man showed me videos on Youtube of bus drivers punching passengers and of teachers dragging students across the classroom. We both could not believe this was happening in this country.

q. called her dad and told him that I had made new redneck friends in East Texas. q.’s dad thought that was funny because he was also a redneck.

q. bought Don Chelada, which is beer that you mix with chili powder. I was sitting on the couch when I spilt some Don Chelada onto my sweater. Oh no! I got some Don Chelada on my sweater, I said.

q. said that she was proud of me. I said that I was proud of her. You’re a wild woman, Laura. You’re a wild woman, q.

My host in El Paso, r., seemed very sad because his wife was away, skydiving in Spain for six weeks. So, he spent his time at home brewing beer and making wine. He told me that he had once been in love with a Swiss girl from Gstaad but that their long-distance relationship had not worked. There, he had tried Gruyère cheese which he now made in his garage. He pointed at a little fridge and told me that that was where the Gruyère was.

s. arrived at r.’s house around 9 am. He was a young Japanese man wearing a backpack. He had come from Las Vegas and had just spent the night on a bus, so he wanted to take a shower.

I showed s. r.’s house as if it were my own. I told him where the bathroom was and the coffee machine. I told him that he could leave his stuff right there on the couch. I asked him if he wanted a coffee and I also asked him if he wanted it long or a short. I don’t think s. heard this last part of my question.

t. was sitting in the kitchen and had heard the last part of my question. He said that in America you don’t have long or short coffees. Instead, you just have espressos or coffees. I said, I guess short or long coffees are European.

t. and I told s. that we were driving to White Sands and that he was welcome to join us. When s. understood that he was going to White Sands with us, he looked very excited. I was also very excited about visiting White Sands.

In the car we asked s. how long he was staying in the States. He replied, it is very beautiful. He was talking about the landscape and the New Mexico landscape was breathtakingly beautiful.

We spent several hours walking across dunes of white sand in the national park. We also did some sledding and took our shoes off. t. told us that White Sands was where they had tested the atomic bomb, because the place was so isolated nobody would find out what they were doing.

Then, t. drove us to a gas station which was also a Greyhound bus station in Las Cruces because s. and I were taking the bus back to El Paso.

On the drive to the bus station, t. put on Simon & Garfunkel and the two of us sang many of their songs. I told t. that I thought the name Cecilia was beautiful because of the Simon & Garfunkel song. t. was surprised that Simon & Garfunkel was a thing in Europe. We listen to all sorts of things in Europe, I said.

We said goodbye to t. who was driving on to Tucson. The bus was twenty minutes late, so s. and I ate some of the walnuts that I had packed in my bag while we waited.

s. and I agreed that we did not want to have dinner at IHOP so, we went to a Korean restaurant instead. We both ordered the Bibimbap in a hot pot and the waitress complimented s. on his bleach blonde hair.

On our walk home, a dog barked very loudly and s. got scared. We laughed about it and I told him that I got scared all the time while traveling and that the other day I got really scared of my own shadow because there were two shadows and so I thought someone was following me. But there was no one following me, it was just my own shadow.

When we got back to the house, s. gave me two packets of miso soup. One packet was bright green and one was bright pink. Then we did laundry together.

The washing and the drying were going to take an hour and twenty minutes. s. said this was okay for him and I said that it was okay for me. When the laundry was done, he was already curled up and asleep on the couch. I took out the sheets that I was washing and because I thought that it was rude to leave his washing in the dryer. I took out his clothes and made a small pile on top of the dryer. It was a neat pile but also not too neat. I wanted it to look like a casual pile. I did not want it to look like I had spent a long time making the pile. I wanted the pile to convey my respect for him and I also wanted it to say thank you for spending the day with me and for being my friend.

The man sitting next to me in the Greyhound bus from El Paso to Albuquerque wanted to listen to the Country Christmas playlist on Spotify but Michael Bubblé would not load and he was getting frustrated. I told him that the WiFi on the Greyhound bus was not good enough to load songs on Spotify. We talked for a little bit and then he decided he would try loading Michael Bubblé again. It did not work and so he got frustrated again. I insisted the WiFi was really very bad. Then we talked about our favorite scary stories because fear is a popular topic of discussion in America. Occasionally, he pointed things out through the window like, look that’s the Rio Grande.

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