Looking Back
Drove into Schulenberg on business yesterday. Half of main street, highway 90, was dug down to the dirt. It looked like a big project. Maybe the city was doing work on the sewer and water lines or maybe TXDoT was making needed repairs to the old road. Either way, it was a mess. I remembered the days after we moved back to Texas in 1962 when we made constant trips from Houston to San Antonio to visit my daddy’s mother and come up to Johnson City to see her mother. Schulenberg was on the way.
Those were slow trips in a slow car with two adults and boy in front and three boys in back. We’d only stop for gas and even 19 cent hamburgers were too expensive. And they were weekend excursions. It was my basic training on how to tune out and sink down into myself. Later, when I was married, we’d travel to San Antonio on the bits of old highway 90 left over after Interstate 10 came in, just to slow our pace. Once in a while we’d even drop down to 90A. Slow trips taken on purpose because life was coming at us fast.
In the last years of my daddy’s life, I was thankful for interstate 10. We’d blow down the road from our home in Alvin with the stereo playing to pay him a visit. He was married for the third time, having outlived the first two. They’d hoped they’d get at least five years together. But my father’s heart played out just a bit too soon. He’s buried at Fort Sam with my mother, and I’m living in a house beside the house where my great-grandmother lived. Now days I can look out the kitchen window and see my past.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale