Gonna Go Round in Circles

Happy Austinversary to Me

I moved to Austin on or around September 6, 1991. I say “on or around” because there was no cloud back then to store this information, and any calendar I kept would have been paper and eventually tossed and forgotten. 

I doubt I had a calendar. I was 27 years old and hardly had anything at all. I had $2000, a one-way plane ticket, and precisely one friend in Austin. I had no plan, no work lined up and no housing figured out beyond my one friend’s one couch. 

Oh, and I had a nine-month-old baby. 

With this thirty-second anniversary of my transplanting comes a cascade of memories. You don’t have all day and neither do I, so let me sum up the gist of these memories through the lens of parenting: Oh my gosh y’all, Austin, Texas was the place to be a single parent in the ‘90s. I lived in Travis Heights and then Hyde Park on my meager freelance income and a host of side gigs doing whatever—bartending, table waiting, pet sitting—and no child support whatsoever. It was often tight but still totally doable.

I imagine it is literally impossible now to have the sort of truly super free and super fun life young Henry and younger I were able to experience despite how very little money I made. Free everything was everywhere. Free music, free art, free family activities. 

And, of course, no screens. 

I am not bashing screens. That would be hypocritical as screens are, for starters, how we all connect every week (thank you for connecting). But I’m being more than simply nostalgic when I say that having gotten to live in pre-Internet Austin, well, there really truly will not ever be a way to do that again, to have an experience even similar. And really, truly, pre-Internet Austin was freaking amazing. Not only because we weren’t all glued to our phones but also because the insane techno invasion and all its accouterments—the skyscrapers, the proprietary tech bros, the overcompensatory sports cars, the unmanageable traffic and more unmanageable cost of living—had not yet taken over.

The most surprising part (so far) of my Texan experience is the part where I acquired a ranch, got a license to carry, took shooting lessons, and learned to raise livestock. Did not see that coming. Some days it still feels like a dream—albeit a very complicated dream at times. 

To wit: Because there is a cloud now and because I have been uploading my life to it for a long time, my iPad is fond of sending me unbidden reminders of what happened On This Date in Year X. The other day I was reminded that on September 6 last year, I faced the hardest day of my life at the ranch (so far). My heifer Bobby Jo had been laboring for days. Four other cows had given easy birth in the weeks prior and I expected baby number five would arrive just as easily. 

I was wrong. The calf was a stillborn and, worse, stuck in the birth canal. I could not pull it out alone. A young man my son’s age who worked next door came over to help. He grew up on a dairy farm and knew just what to do.

Unfortunately, what we had to do was very intense and involved some heavy machinery. Thankfully my part, while still horrific, allowed me to focus my eyes away from the scene as I slowly pushed the accelerator of the four wheeler we used to help us get that baby out. Fortunately, the young man also had penicillin handy and between delivering the calf and administering the medicine, he was able to spare Bobby Jo’s life. 

He told me that it was the first time he’d done a delivery like that since his own children were born and how much harder that made it. I explained the calf died from the same condition—dystocia—that very nearly killed my son during his birth. We sat in that four wheeler and cried together, an unlikely pair brought together by death and life.

Something I learned about cows is that they go off to be alone to give birth. Bobby Jo had done this and over the course of so many days I sat with her for hours and hours in the back pasture where she herself had been born, feeding her apple slices and encouraging words. But right after that tragic stillbirth, the most astonishing thing happened. Somehow the other cows, despite being way up in the front pasture, knew something was up. With no prompting from me, the entire herd—four moms and four babies—made their way to the grieving Bobby Jo and encircled her, standing there, all of them, in quiet consoling reverence.

Many years ago, shortly before she died, my friend and mentor Molly Ivins gave a talk—I think it might have been her last—on campus. Afterwards, I gathered with a group of women creatives at Madam Mam’s. One of the women, a writer from California, was bitching that artists could not make a living in Austin like they could in LA. Although she wasn’t wrong, someone else reminded her that something exceptional about Austin was that even if you couldn’t make a fortune as an artist, you could be sure you’d never go hungry. 

That truth, too, is foundational to my annual anniversary mind montage, when I actively pause to reflect on my time here. I have, many, many times, retreated to my own metaphorical back pasture to stew in my juices. To wrestle with my abundant mental demons. To cave in to the false but loud voices (thankfully growing softer over time) that crashed in and told me I was all alone, all alone, all alone.

I was never alone, not in Austin. And I never could get away with hiding for long. My friends would sense something was up and wander out to find me and circle me and console me and reassure me, swaddle me in sympathy and empathy, get me back on my feet again. Feed and nourish not only my body but my entire being—mind and spirit, too.

Recently I rented my tiny chapel out to a long term guest. Things had been going very, very well out here with this new arrangement of offering reasonably priced housing to people in between long term housing situations. But this guy? A liar and a drunk, he smashed out an antique stained glass window. 

I sent word out to the world—yes, via screens—how violated I felt, how utterly freaked out. I panicked over the likely costs of repair. And then, like that, within 48 hours, an Austin artist friend contacted me. She used to repair Victorian houses. She’s more than happy to replace the window for the cost of the glass, which she also knows how to acquire on the cheap. This nicely epitomizes my Austin experience. Yes, I have encountered great kindness in many places, but the level of niceness here is so off the charts that the Daily Show once did a segment on it and currently HEB is running a TV ad about the same.

It has been a brutal summer. I have vowed to spend next summer elsewhere. With increasing frequency I imagine leaving for good, to escape not just the heat but the politics. When I got here, Ann Richards was governor, Barbara Jordan was still alive and teaching at UT and working FOR THE COMMON GOOD. And even Molly Ivins and George W. Bush were relatively cordial to one another despite their many differences. 

Now we have a governor so cruel and disgusting that my bowels rumble anytime I’m in the vicinity of the capitol, the same way I still have an urge to shit my pants anytime I run into a snake. Texas Monthly reported “…by the metric of which state most aided and abetted Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, Texas far surpasses [other states.].” Families with trans kids are leaving in droves. And don’t get me started on those buoys at the border. 

Still, I find it hard to imagine quitting this place entirely. Because I keep circling back to the vast circle of kindness that has allowed me to seek and live my kooky creative dreams, to grow up, and, somehow, to grow old. To understand on a level incomprehensible to me when my plane landed at the old airport all those years ago that no matter how hard things might get, in Austin I will never go hungry for love. 

NOTES:

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