Stepford, Texas

Someday David will decide it’s time to retire.  The thought is disconcerting.  What will he do when he no longer has a place to go every day?  We’ve heard that many people retire to the area north of Austin, and because David has a couple of days off, we decide to visit the area and see if, in the future, this will be a nice place for us to settle.

The notion makes me feel rebellious.  I have a house full of unpacked boxes.  There’s work to be done.  Also, it makes no sense to move to some random unfamiliar town just because we’re approaching a certain age.  The three towns we visit—New Braunfels, Georgetown, and Marble Falls—are becoming rich off the baby boomers who are flocking to the area, buying homes and boats, golf carts and RVs. 

David is especially interested in a place called Sun City, a Del Webb retirement community outside Georgetown.  He’s overly enthusiastic, in love with the place before we’ve even seen it.  I’ve visited the website and it looks sterile and colorless.  I’m scared to death he’s going to like it. 

The woman who gives us a tour of Sun City is very sweet, a young mother with a soft voice.  It’s her job to sell us a new home; this can’t be easy, as the model homes are awful—closed-off kitchens, tight hallways, low ceilings.  The facilities outside the home are the selling points.  Two fully outfitted gyms that offer classes as well as equipment, several swimming pools, tennis courts, walking trails, three golf courses.  Painting, pottery, wood-working, and fabric studios.  Allotments for gardening, a softball diamond, even a dog park.  There’s a drama club that puts on three productions a year.  And common-interest clubs, like biking, reading, hunting; there’s even a club for people who like to remote-fly airplanes.  If you like to do it there’s a club for it.  There’s probably even a club for people who enjoy clubs. 

“Do you like living here?” I ask a woman in the art studio.  A couple of people sit at easels, serene as they paint—and they paint well. 

“I love it,” she says.  “It’s safe.” 

Yes, it’s safe.  Gray people poke along in golf carts at five miles an hour.  Every stair has a rail and an accompanying ramp.  And a burglar or rapist would never venture here—anyone young enough to burgle or rape would draw notice.  

We enter the fabric workshop, a paradise if you like to sew, which I do.  Machines are set up, ready, waiting for someone to stitch a seam or two.  There’s a quilting table with an in-built Bernina that looks even more advanced than mine.  Several women hover over tables on the other side of the large room.  When they see me enter, they swoop, excited to see a different face, desperate for new blood.  They tell me everything I want to know without my having to voice one question. 

“This is a wonderful place to live.  Do you sew?  We have knitting and hooking, even fabric art.  We take field trips to quilt shows.  And if sewing isn’t your thing, there’s plenty else to do.” 

“My husband calls us old hens,” one says, happy that her husband likes to tease.  “Mostly what we do here is gab, gab, gab.” 

Their ages range from mid-sixties to really old. 

Living here would be easy.  The most difficult decision David and I would ever have to make would be what to have for dinner.  Making friends would simply be a matter of stepping outside the door—literally, as the houses are only separated by a few feet.  It seems self-indulgent, though, to move to a place where all you do is have a good time.  And isn’t it odd to remove yourself from society simply because you’re older than you used to be?  Although I imagine the younger people of Houston would be thrilled to get the seniors off the roads.  No matter how they couch it, this is a place where people come to wait to die.  But shouldn’t they be doing something useful while they wait?  Something besides playing games, filling the hours with hobbies, and talking, talking, talking? 

We leave the area on Saturday morning.  Tomorrow David will begin a lecture tour of Canada and the northeastern US.  Ostensibly, he’ll be speaking to engineers and geologists about the geologic features that indicate the presence of shale gas.  In other words, fracking.  This is, apparently, a controversial topic in Nova Scotia and I fear there will be heckling.  Good luck, David!

If you're in Marble Falls you've got to eat at the Bluebonnet Cafe--delicious food and small town atmosphere.  

We looked at a home on this golf course in Horseshoe Bay, outside of Marble Falls.  

There's a charming square around the courthouse in Georgetown.

David waits for me at the Monument Cafe in Georgetown.  

You thought I made it up, but I didn't.  We really visited this place

Houston: The Best Place to Be

Fly in on Thursday afternoon, Trip-the-dog happy to get out of kennel, makes lake of pee on baggage claim floor.  David stays with Trip while I race to restroom seeking paper towels.  One of those dispensers—wave hand, single towel buzzes out, wave hand, towel buzzes.  Need at least twenty.  Wave, buzz, wave, buzz, wave buzz . . .

Arrive at hotel around two o’clock.  Staying at Hilton on Post Oak, which is hosting the Miss Texas Pageant.  Beautiful women everywhere.  Cluster in lobby, faces perfectly made up, hair in big curlers.  Discuss clothes they’re going to wear and why.  Worry over interview questions.  Compare body parts, disingenuous moaning—boobs too firm, butts too small, legs too long.  Walk on shoes with heels like needles.  Sashes cross from shoulder to hip, identify contestants by counties.  Good luck, Texas beauties. 

Friday morning at the rental car counter.  Jolly man, shaved head, returns David’s license saying, “Expired.  Can’t rent to you.”  The look on David’s face.  Spend our first afternoon back in Texas at the DPS.  David is number 293.  Chuckle all day, thinking about it.  Who doesn’t know when license expires?  David, apparently.

Saturday, car shopping.  Find perfect sedan for me—sleek, clean, loaded, a Mercedes C250.  But jet lagged and feeling fuzzy, unable to follow fast talk of sales guy—demonstration, incentives, promises.  “No,” I say.  “I can’t commit.  My head isn’t here.”  The car goes to someone else and we’re sad.  Opportunity missed, but timing wrong.  Rule:  don’t buy the first car you look at. 

Houston booming.  Torn up for years, I-10 now complete; twelve lanes across in places, all moving fast, zoom-zoom.  Also, Fifty-nine so smooth driving’s like flying.  In three years, population up by a hundred thousand.  Everybody with money to spend.  Restaurants packed, malls overflowing, houses and offices being built.  Two ac repair vans on every block.  So many customers at Toyota dealership, no salesmen available.  Commerce.  Prosperity. 

By Monday Texas beauties gone.  Hotel quiet.  Tuesday, morning after Labor Day, back to work.  Elevators up-and-down with men and women in suits.  Pull wheeled briefcases, keep heads down, somber in hallways.  After eight-thirty, hotel deserted.  I am Eloise, with the run of the whole place. 

Preparing to move back into townhouse, rented out for three years.  Updating and repair needed.  Will take a week.  My job—oversee painting, gardening; schedule vent cleaning, carpet-laying, air conditioner servicing.  Furniture in storage.  It comes in when workers go. 

Computer virus invades, takes over.  Blasted.  No access to internet.  Virus spreads, attacks Spider Solitaire, Scrabble.  Oh no!  Poor vulnerable Dell.  Lobotomize a fourth time?   Maybe just put it down.  At the mall, an Apple invites me to byte. 

Painting and patching.  It'll look better soon.

Eduardo, our contractor.  His company is called Fast Paint, but he does more than paint.  Works hard and does a good job.  Honest and polite crew.  The wine on the counter is mine.  

Sam, coming home from Beijing to fulfill your obligation?

My new car.  Worrisome that my phone and my car talk to each other.  

Hard-bodied

I fitness-march through the gates of the Botanic Gardens.  It’s early in the day, not crowded yet.  Usually David walks with me, but his back is giving him fits, so this morning I stride alone, which is fine with me because tomorrow the movers are coming to pack up our possessions, and the next day we’ll fly back to Houston, leaving this beautiful and vibrant city, Singapore, which I have loved; and with this change looming, I need time inside my head. 

I hear flapping footsteps behind me and feel a whoosh as a hard-bodied woman races past.  A cloud of Chanel wafts in her wake.   Mademoiselle.  I know this because it’s the scent I wear, though I tend not to waste a spritz before I go sweat-walking in the park. 

The woman has a small child at home, a three-year-old girl, who right now is having her breakfast mess cleared away by the helper, who plays with the child and talks to her and wheels her to and from play school.  The live-in nanny is from the Philippines, a jolly dutiful woman, though uneducated; and this morning, right before pounding toward the Gardens, the runner heard her daughter say words using the idiom and inflection of the Filipina, who learned to speak English in one of her country’s rural schools; and she misuses pronouns and doesn’t understand tenses. 

The hard-body has had a disturbing realization.  She is going to have to become more active in the raising of her child, who is picking up questionable habits and lackadaisical attitudes and dietary preferences and improper word-pairings from a foreigner with dark hair.  This knowledge makes the mother so sad and frustrated that she is near tears as she brushes between a picture-taking tourist and the sprawl of newly blossomed bunga (boon-gah) lilies.  She has so little time for herself, and now she will have even less. 

Her husband travels for his work.  KL, Jakarta, Beijing, Chengdu, Taipei.  He’s all over the damn place.  He’s even been sent by his company to advise people in Pakistan, a dangerous country where he might be killed!  And does he think about her and their daughter, how devastated they will be if he’s yanked violently from their lives?  No, he does not!  And she’s here, in this faraway city, taking care of absolutely everything without his encouragement or advice.  When he’s home she loses her temper over his absences.  She rages and accuses, shrieks even.  Why is she here if he is not?  She might as well have stayed in London. 

Three mornings a week she runs here in the Botanic Gardens; three mornings she plays tennis with the women at the club; and on Wednesdays she golfs, which takes up the major portion of the day.  At least twice weekly tennis extends into lunch, which means a glass of white wine, and then another.  The cost is sixty dollars and she’s exhausted when she gets home.  But these lunches are her pleasant time, when her friends listen as she bemoans the unsynchronized lights at the crosswalks and the dark-eyed construction workers who stare as they take their breaks on the curb across the street from her building.  If she doesn’t spend time with the other ex-pat wives, what will she do?  Who will she see?  What will be her outlet?  She will become a woman who speaks to strangers in the shops.  She will become a frump who cooks and makes quilts and is too apathetic to accessorize. 

Fifty yards ahead of me now, her firm butt barely jiggles as she bounds forth.  She takes the curve and is gone from my line of vision.  Good-bye thirty-something, hard-bodied, self-absorbed, and unreasonable. 

Look.  A huge monitor lizard crossing the path right in front of me.  Cool.  

The woman running in the park.

This man exercises and prays by the lake most mornings.

I almost stepped on this big guy.  Usually I only spot a monitor once a month or so, but on this walk I saw two.  

A view of the lake

Last Hurrah

An international move on the horizon.  Priorities compete and time is short.   Some would hunker down and get after it. 

David and I decide to take a little holiday.  We return to Patong Beach, on Phuket, a seedy area where beefy men drink too much, wear muscle shirts, and flirt with the massage girls.  Glamorous lady-boys parade up and down the humid streets in fancy clothes, enticing people to come to their show.  Lumpish vendors push flowers and crappy toys at passing faces, saying “Buy, buy, buy.”  A bar has a show where women shoot ping-pong balls out their vaginas.  Outside the ping-pong girl bar, a middle-easterner attempts to talk his four friends into entering.  Crudely, he mimes the act.  They all laugh and rush toward the door.  They can’t wait to see.  Now the question arises—why would David and I choose to vacation in this vulgar setting?  (A better question would be—and I don’t have an answer—why would parents bring their children here?  Families are all over the place.  Children swarm.)  We’re here because the food is good, the alcohol is cheap, exceptional spa treatments are priced reasonably, the people are considerate and helpful, the beach is lovely, and there’s something interesting going on everywhere you look. 

In the morning, a nine o’clock tee time for David.  He chases a ball around a course and curses while I drive the cart and play the role of supporting spouse.  I laugh as, again and again, his ball splashes into the water.  I wonder how anyone can take this game seriously.  But people do. 

Today we form a three-ball with Derrick, from Australia, and Mark, from South Africa, two congenial men whose play is similar to David’s—in other words, inconsistent and uncontrolled, but marked by the occasional brilliant shot.  After the round the four of us meet in the club bar for a beer.  I ask Mark what he does for a living and he tells me that he buys restaurants in financial difficulties, turns them around, and sells them.  I question the profitability of the enterprise, but he claims that it makes money and he enjoys the work.  Derrick sells energy drinks.  He says it’s a competitive and stressful business, which I find surprising. 

Another thing that takes me by surprise is the attitudes of both men toward the US.  I admit to suffering paranoia on the public relations front as far as being American goes.  Out in the world, a single American is often taken to represent all of America.  So I keep my head down in the hope that people won’t notice I’m American and start ranting at me about what we’re doing wrong.  This assumption is not unfounded.  I’ve had servers walk away from me when they hear my accent.  During my years as an American abroad, I’ve been accused of being insular and invasive, arrogant and inert.  I’ve been held accountable for international monetary crises, broken treaties, slow disaster relief, supporting corrupt governments, and toppling stable ones. 

But Derrick and Mark say they’re waiting for America to act.  They seem to think we’re a nation of super heroes.  They expect Americans to go into the Ukraine and find out who shot down that Malaysian flight.  They expect the US to blow ISIS off the planet.  They expect the American scientists to conquer Ebola, the American diplomats to solve the Israeli/Palestinian issues, the American dollar to bolster the European and African economies, and the American State Department to make China play nice.  In short, they expect us to lead.  There’s been so much negativity aimed at America over the last several years that I honestly didn’t think anybody expected anything of us anymore, much less leadership. 

When we get back to the room and the internet, we’re sad to discover that Robin Williams has died. 

RIP, Troubled Man. 

David and the Lady-boys

The caddies, covered to protect themselves from the hot, hot sun.  

I lost track of how many balls went into the water on this hole that circled around the lake.  

David, Derrick, and Mark