January 17, 2002

Before jet airplanes flew travelers across the country, the main contacts visitors had with Texas were memories of being stationed in a dull army post during World War Two, or perhaps a dreary confinement in the medical complex in Houston. Two important attractions come to mind that made a change: Big Bend Park and the River Walk in San Antonio.

Only faint recollections remain of the ranches lost to the park. But from a Christmas holiday in San Antonio, I remember a muddy little stream awash in trash, only noteworthy at flood stage and favored by hombres needing a place to hide. Now it's a river crossed by arched stone bridges, aglow with strings of colored lights hanging from tall cypress trees, and navigated by excursion boats.

My annual holiday developed after a travel magazine mentioned that hotel rates become favorable in San Antonio the week prior to Christmas. "Favorable" means a 66 percent discount off a $270 rack rate at a full service hotel, or 90 bucks a night for a double room decorated as soft and luxuriously as a velvet velour pillow. Added is a glassed breakfast porch facing a courtyard shaded by oak trees and dotted with preening white peafowl and exotic plumed pheasants. Looking out the big glass window on a December morning is a long ways from catching your reflection in the cracked ice covering a water trough on a winter morning out west.

This past season, friends invited me to a benefit dance. Hard to go off and leave the ranch with bitterweed poison threatening the sheep from early snow and a trap of first-calf heifers making up a straggling herd of two head defying gestation limits to ruin a holiday. But the very best advice on preventing aging in Modern Maturity magazine says folks who foxtrot and do the Mexican polkas on regular engagements can remain agile and alert far beyond expectations. Just the dips and turns of ballroom dancing free the body and mind to better guide a wobbly old ewe through a gate, or flex the fingers to slip on obstetrical chains in the birthing of calves.

And what a dance it was in the grand ballroom of the Hyatt on La Soya Street. Corridors filled with fancy folks. Host and hostess as handsome as dons and princesses in formal blacks, flowing organdies, and swirling silks and satins crowded the dance floor. (The benefit was for Hospice of San Antonio.) Sitting with such influential people as the chairman of the music committee, I stayed limber rising from my chair to bow and nod to passing dignitaries. The modern band, "The Chickadee Eight From Decatur," refused to play soft music, but did relent and do one waltz the old saxophone player hummed over and over until the others caught the beat.

Next day, my friend and I met our hosts for lunch at the liberty Bar on East Josephine. The Liberty Bar is a decrepit eating spot of shiplap lumber close to splintering and collapsing from age. The food draws such a crowd that the city placed one-hour parking limits for blocks around. Worried us some until I remembered that unless San Antonio had changed, no one connected to City Hall knew how many minutes made an hour, much less how to time a parking spot.

After lunch we went to an art exhibit at the McNay Museum. The show featured a 58-piece collection on loan from Smith College on Corot to Picasso. The college's curator was a mighty slick operator. He invested a lot of the museum's dough on unfinished canvases by such famous artists as Paul Cezzane at huge savings and a big increment in value.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped by a used bookstore housed in a building as ancient as the Liberty Bar. Hard to say if the structure holds up the books, or the books prop up the building. My first selection was a green colored book faded by time. On the fly leaf in flowing thick script was the inscription: "Ida Aldwell, Sonora, Texas, 1916." Open at hand was a memory of a ranching family my whole clan knew and liked.

I leaned closer to the shelves holding Miss Ida's book to air. No one was around. Writers of the 20s and 30s, the likes of Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and Lardner, lined the near wall. The books began to beckon, to pull: "Take me home with you," they seemed to say. I turned away, as I knew many more books added to the ranch house and my walls would sag as bad as the bookstore and the Liberty.

Might have been the house creaking causing motion to pulse from the musty books. I slid Miss Ida's book back in place. Limited myself to a dozen copies and waited for my friend in the car.

 

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