• Tag Archives Texas

  • Scene of the Crash Bar-B-Q

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    78  bar steady 29.79  1mph SE dew-point 65  Sunrise 5:53 Sunset 8:44pm  Summer

    Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon
    This is a few of the 50+ Ellis clan who attended the 2008 reunion at rest on the back porch of the Baker’s Texas sized house and property.

    ellis727500.jpg

    The reunion entailed a good deal of eating and the usual amount of what have you been up to.  A few of the more memorable updates for me follow.

    Jean Cate’s son Jeff and his Brazilian wife, Danielle, move to Brazil in two weeks for at least ten years.  They’ve lived in the states for some time, but after the birth of their beautiful son decided he needed immersion in Brazilian culture.  Jeff doesn’t speak Portugese, but said he’s gonna right to work on it.  The impact of the line of demarcation effects our family.

    Many people had retired including Dan McGregor who, this September, will watch from the side lines as school starts without him in any of his many coaching assignments:  basketball, football, tennis, golf, and several others.  We were all a good bit grayer than the last time I attended the reunion in 2000.

    Jane (Stephens) ran a family meeting in which Aunt Dorothy and her husband Harley Brown were remembered.  They both died over the year since the last reunion.  Aunt Dorothy had a phenomenal memory, all agreed, recalling family facts long after others had forgotten them.  She died at 100+ intellectually sharp up till the end.  “She proved you’re never to old to learn.  Yeah, And never to old to get married!”  She and Harley married when she was 90 or so.  Harley was a world recognized expert on riffle beetles.  Riffle beetles capture oxygen and work with it below water.  He was a fun and funny guy.

    We agreed to have the meeting next year the third week in July, place undecided.

    I became interested in Ellis history.  We all know a good bit about the Spitler side of the family, but not much about Elmo Ellis and his family.  Apparently Lloyd Ellis, son on Henry Ellis, Elmo’s brother, has come the last few reunions and has some considerable history.

    A few stories reveal a good bit.  At one point Elmo and Jenny gathered their children on a train from somewhere in Oklahoma where Elmo had work as a farm hand.  Their destination was Mustang, Oklahoma, sort of the family seat of the Ellis and Spitler families.  In Ada, Oklahoma Grandpa Elmo got off the train and none of his children saw him again save for Uncle Charles.  He had a glass eye, losing one eye while fighting a grass fire.

    Those who knew him a bit said he was charismatic, charming, but “never got down the working thing.”  He was a rich kid who ran through a sizable inheritance.  Family.

    Mike Simpson, a former petroleum engineer and owner of an oil and gas services company he recently sold, gave me some tips on looking up information about our land in Pecos County.  He thought the fact the guy wanted to buy the land meant he knew something, too.  The oddity is that the best website is the Texas Rail Road Commission which handles all oil related permits for the state.  They apparently also control all matters related to trucking. Go figure.

    Before I sign off today I wanted to mention a couple of other interesting sights along the way to Mineola.  There were 2 Beer Barns.  At the Beer Barn there are two truck sized drive through bays, somewhat like a coin operated car wash.  The trick here is that you can drive in, buy your beer by the case, or, as the sign said, Get Kegs To Go and they load it in your vehicle.  You don’t have to get out.

    At a major intersection on Highway 80 there was a vendor wagon with a sign that read:  Scene of the Crash Bar-B-Q.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Memories Travel 📎and tagged

  • “If it’s not at Brookshires or Walmart, we can get it in Tyler.”

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    68  bar rises 29.75  0mpn ENE dew-point 63  Sunrise 5:53  Sunset 8:45pm  Summer

    Last Quarter of the Thunder Moon

    As you can tell by the lawn mower postings, I’m back from Texas.  No handy computer down there.

    Confession:  We had no problems with the airline.  I loved the plane, a small Embraer with a single aisle and two rows, 2 seats to a row and plenty of legroom.  Left and landed on time.  Since we didn’t check anything, no extra fees.  Carrying no electronics and all the liquid stuff in the handy quart bag so security was as painless as possible.  The rental car was cheaper than advertised and we got a PT Cruiser which was at least an interesting compact.  This experience was enough, given my basically positive experience on the flights to Hawai’i, to make me rethink my “never fly unless absolutely necessary” pledge.

    With two of us along things always go smoother because we can divide traveling chores, so that’s part of it, but, in the end, it was ok.  Not pleasant.  Barely worth the cash.  But OK.

    We spent the weekend encased in East Texas heat and humidity.  97-99 during the day, cooling down to around 80 at night.  Since we were not hiking or picking peaches, it was ok, but both Kate and I find the heat enervating, unpleasant at best.  The Bakers, Carol and Charyn, have a huge home on considerable acreage outside Mineola, Texas.  A former executive for Bell Helicopter, Carol exudes a charming, Texas style hospitality.

    Once, long ago, I took a train through east Texas on my way to visit Uncle Charles, Aunt Berta and their daughter, Charyn.  This was at least 50 years ago, but my memory of it is fresh because the pine trees and the hills surprised me then, just as they did this trip.  When you leave Dallas and head out toward Mineola, the road takes you through flat, reddish tan countryside.  Somewhere around Grand Saline (yes, a big salt deposit there.  I asked.  Morton has a big mine.) the flat begins to roll and the reddish tan countryside has forests of pine and oak.

    The drive on Highway 80 runs through Forney, Terrell, Willis Point, Grand Saline, Elmo, Fruitvale and Mineola.  On beyond Mineola 80 hits Big Sandy.  I love the names of these towns.  There are fruit orchards along the way, peaches, apricots and others I could not identify.  Even with the salt and the fruit and truck farming, these towns all look worn and tired, as if the promise of the past had not quite come to life.

    Mineola is different.   It has antique stores and quaint restaurants, Mineola Mercantile, for example, which is a restaurant and stuff store.  This is a small town like Long Lake, Stillwater, even Anoka surrounded in the countryside by large properties protected with iron gates protected by keyed locks.  Horses are everywhere which helps explain the iron gates.  This is the good life far enough from what they call the metroplex, Dallas/Ft. Worth, that the people who live here can feel rural with many of the comforts of upper class life.  This includes a Brookshire grocery which is equivalent to a Minnesota Bylery’s.

    Carol and Charyn said, “Anything that’s not at Bylery’s or Walmart we can get in Tyler.”

    I’ll report some more on the reunion tomorrow.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Memories Travel 📎and tagged

  • A Certain Inner Doldrum

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    68  bar steady 29.98 0mph SE  dew-point 56  Sunrise 5:48  Sunset 8:50PM  Summer

    Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

    Thump.  Thump.  Pause.  Thump.  Thump.  Thrudda Thrudda Thump.  Bang.  Thump.  Thump.  Most of the time it is quiet here.  At night the quiet becomes complete, with the exception of tonight.  One of the neighbors must have had left overs from the 4th.  Strange sounds at night make you wanna know what’s going on.  Kate went out back and I went out front.  Saw nothing.  Either of us.  Both of us concluded fireworks.  A suburban July nighttime mystery.

    The tone of my last few posts has trended down.  My inner barometer falls, not steeply, but it does fall.  Why?  Midsummer blahs.  The whole weight thing.  A certain inner doldrum.  Maybe a change in my spiritual life.  This is the realm of melancholy, not depression, and it usually precedes a creative period.  As I fall deeper into my interior, it is as if my gifts and energy fall with me, not in a negative sense, but as preliminary to a harvest.  When I pull inward, my outer affect often declines, but the interior feeling is that of gathering my resources, marshaling them into a coherent whole.

    The weather in Minneola, Texas has 97 and sunny as a theme for the three days we will be there.  97 is cooler than past reunions.  The last time I headed to Oklahoma for an Ellis reunion it was 107 the whole time I was there.  That’s hot.  We’ve gotten notes about what to bring to help defray the cost of food for 36 adults and a gaggle of kids.  Charles Paul, that’s me, gets a pass, but Kate and I will pick up something once we get there.

    It just dawned on me yesterday why my name was Charles Paul or CP on both sides of the family.  My dad’s brother was my Uncle Charles and my grandfather Keaton was Charles Keaton.  A diplomatic choice of names by mom and dad, but it left each side with a need to differentiate between two of us.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Family Our Land and Home Travel 📎and tagged

  • Enchanted

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    77 bar falls 29.99  0mph NE dew-point 60   Sunrise 5:48  Sunset 8:50pm  Summer

    Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

    The caterpillar does all the work; the butterfly gets all the publicity.  George Carlin, RIP

    On Friday Kate and I take off for Texas.  The idea of flying leaves me cold, though after 2 long trips in June, driving does not seem much better.  At the moment traveling has a lugubrious feel, I want to stay home.  Work on the UU history.  Read about novels.  Write Superior Wolf.  Tend to the garden.

    Every since our flight back from Istanbul, long enough ago that I can not recall the dates right now, flying has had a curse on it for me.  9/11 and the subsequent security measures only reinforced the curse.  Partly as a result of the shutdown and general suspicion engendered by 9/11 airlines went through a rough patch financially.  Their attempts to dig themselves out of the hole only made flying that much more unpleasant.  Long flight delays.  Sitting on the tarmac for hours.  No food.  After all that, the price of oil skyrocketed.

    Flights, at least once delayed, have disappeared.  Layoffs and mergers.  Money for checked bags, for using frequent flyer miles.

    This is a downhill slope that happened to coincide with my disenchantment.  Before Istanbul flying did enchant me.   I loved to fly when I worked for the Presbytery and in the years after with Kate.  Getting to the airport signaled the beginning of something special.  Read, eat, watch the earth slip by below.  It was magical.

    Today I dread even a short flight to Texas.

    Every once in a while I get into to a travel doldrums.  Like now.  I decide I want to explore Minnesota, maybe Wisconsin and Ontario.  Or Anoka County.  The metro area.  Or just stay home.

    Still, family means showing up as I wrote before and it is my turn to show up at the Ellis family reunion.  So, we’ll take a plane ride, riding on a jet plane.  But, I will be back again.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Travel 📎and tagged

  • Miles and Miles of Flat Sameness

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    66  bar steady 29.92 0mph N dew-point 58  Summer night

    Waning Crescent of the Flower Moon

    The drive into the MIA this afternoon was the first time I’d driven any distance since the long trip to Alabama.

    Sheila gave a walking lecture on the African check out tours.  She showed pieces in Egypt, then the Nok figure, the Ife Shrine head, the Benin head.  She spoke briefly about the linguist’s staff, the kente cloth, the elephant tusk and the leopard. It was a usual well-informed presentation.  Sheila knows the African collection in some depth.  She tried to provide so-called Pan African ideas, but I didn’t find any of them unique to Africa.

    Africa, like Asia and North America, is a land mass, not a cultural designation.  It has, like Asia and North America, a bewildering variety of indigenous peoples, colonial adventures, global corporate interests and all this mixed now in the stew of politics referred to as developing nations.  Seeking for identifiers by continent,  across Africa, for example, is like seeking for unity across Asia or North America.  It is a category mistake.  Continents do not have cultures, people do.  To maintain that somehow Algiers and Tunisia share a common cultural underlayment with, say, the Zulu or the Ashante or the Tutu or the Masai attempts to shoe horn disparate peoples in a too tight continental shoe.

    Kate and I watched There Will Be Blood tonight.  This is a powerful movie with mythic overtones.  The push for oil, the mania required to build an oil company or a church, the violence of men competing for power and money and the interlocutor of the barren land combine in a peak at the roots of contemporary American society.

    Much of the filming was done near Marfa, Texas.  Marfa is the location of Donald Judd’s open air show places.  It is a unique town, a place a reporter for the Ft. Stockton newspaper told me is “Taos fifty years ago.”  She didn’t see this as a good thing.

    The land in the movie is bleak.  Until my trip to Imperial, Texas a few years ago to see our land I hadn’t understood why people would say West Texas and shake their head.  It is mesquite, sand and rattle snakes.  In a few places, for a time, there was oil and natural gas.  There is a stark beauty to it, a beauty similar to the high plains, miles and miles of flat sameness, broken at the horizon by low mountains and foot hills.

    More garden work tomorrow.  Get the red car, too.  The heads were delayed at the machine shop.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Cinema and Television World History 📎and tagged