More: Notes from the Road
Howdy y’all! This is second (of
three) installments of notes from the
road. I am still in Princeton, Texas visiting and I plan to be here until
Oct. 3 or 4. Then it’s back to Nebraska until
Oct. 10 and then on to NYC.
Last week there were some tense
times for me trying to get an apartment in NYC. My son, Austin and his GF
Rebecca did the footwork looking for an apartment. They found one, a beaut on
the Upper East Side. A ground floor apartment, with laundry in the building etc.
but I didn’t get it. Why not?
I had to do a short sale on my “titanic
at 2am” condo a year ago and the resulting lower credit score cost me. The
owner of the building (landlord) just believed no one should do a short sale.
So having his pick of potential renters he said no to me. However, I did get one on 81st street (Upper
East Side and a ground floor as well) because that landlord thought it was a
smart move on my part to short sale a property 95K underwater and especially because at my age there was no hope of it coming back (in my life time). You know the good money after bad concept. So there is the tale of the tape right there. To
some people a short sale is a smart move very much like getting off a hopelessly
lost, sinking vessel before you drown and to others the honorable thing to do
is to go down with the ship or be made to go down with the ship.
Texas is hot but not like
California hot. I can’t explain it but 95 here feel(s) like 86 in California. I
feel scorched in California when it gets to 95 but here I don’t feel scorched. Can
anyone explain why this is the case? I do know every one; every last person has
A/C and good A/C. You just do here every
day what Californians do the end of August and all of September, go from
A/c at home to A/C in car to A/C at work. I will try to add a picture or two of
how asphalt roads have been deformed (buckled) under the intense heat.
Texans it seems are slowly
dropping their regional dialects, their drawls. I hear the occasional “y’all”
or “howdy madam”, or “purdy” (pretty), “pool”
(pull), “pill” (pile) “drank” (drink) “mine” (mind), “hair” (here), “grain-kids”
(grandkids) but not like it was years ago (or so I am told).
Here is how the
twang works:
“Howdy, y’all, ya shore luk purdy
taday lil lady, and I don’t mine y’all pilling that thar sodee rail high. Just
pill it up thar, and I’ll drank all aftanoon long. Y’all gat a rail nice place
hair”! "Your grainkids will luv et"!
Seems that there are more
immigrants, a desire to not stand out in the real world (businessmen traveling etc.)
and in many cities and towns there is gentrification going on. Many don’t want
to sound like old school Texans; they see themselves as more cultured. This is
especially true with younger people. The older folk’s twang away unabashedly.
Texans are real considerate. When
Rebecca’s (different from my son’s GF) van blew a tire and was on the
expressway she called her mother and me and we went to rescue her and her two
kids. So while I was standing there waiting for the AAA tow truck to arrive no
less than 4 separate people stopped to see if we needed help. In California people
don’t stop (as a rule). To be fair it is more dangerous to try and stop on
California freeways what with very narrow shoulders. Still people will help you
in this state and no one here has picked on me or given me a hard time about
having California plates.
Friday night football is king
here. I will try to enclose a picture of Allen HS football stadium which was
built for 48 million dollars. Allen is a school of maybe 2400 students, and
they have a 48 million dollar stadium. Even schools of less than 1,000 students
have state of the art football stadiums. Football is to people in Texas what
cabs are to New York, what corn is to Nebraska, what high gas prices are to
people in California.
These personal narratives will end once I get
to NY. Then it’s back to the acerbic social commentary.
In Texese:
"So much has pilled up thar to
wret bout. I can’t wait ta sink ma computer kays inta that Akma fella from
I ran."
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