A grove of citrus trees, surrounded by an avocado orchard. All around the perimeter, a vineyard of mixed grapes awaits the caring hands of caretakers, who will prune the vines, cultivate and fertilize the soil, and pick the ripe grapes. The cool air, shielded from the sun’s rays by morning fog, expertly defines comfort and lavishes tenderness and passionate appreciation on all the fruit. A thousand years ago, the Arctic air would have been too cold for the plants to survive. Now, though, these few thousand acres are the only habitable places on Earth. The rest of the planet is scorched. Lead pipes buried under ten feet of hard-packed rock have long since melted. The corpses of penguins, the last of the few remaining natural inhabitants of this little piece of land, litter the salty coastline ten miles away.
Lilly Thrungle, in her tiny hut, sits at the solar-powered DVD player/transmitter. She broadcasts old episodes of Julia Child’s The French Chef, hoping someone outside Lilly’s tiny enclave might stumble upon the show about preparing Boeuf Bourguignon. But, Lilly wonders, who has beef? Still, she keeps broadcasting old episodes, clinging to withered shreds of hope.
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I learned during all my career to enjoy suffering.
~ Rafael Nadal ~
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One of my long-time dreams/fantasies emerged again this morning, triggered by an article about the vision and efforts of a woman in New York city to convert an ugly nine-acres under the Brooklyn Bridge in Lower Manhattan into a park. I love the idea of using the land in Lower Manhattan to improve the quality of life in that part of New York City. Even more, I love my dream of resurrecting a dying small town, turning it into an oasis of comfort and promise and hope.
My fantasy began to take shape while I was a student at the University of Texas. When I drove home to Corpus Christi from Austin, which was a trip I made fairly frequently, I passed through a number of small towns that looked to me like they suffered from neglect. Boarded up doors and windows, cracked and peeling paint, sidewalks overtaken by dust and weeds, and various other signs of resignation and surrender. “If only,” I thought, “I could muster the resources, I would like to salvage what’s left of this town.” I fantasized about stopping the decline of those little towns, perhaps spurring the investments necessary to return them to their former glory…or to improve on their best days from years gone by. I was an impoverished college student at the time, though, and I did not have any confidence in raising money to embark on my dream. So, I just kept on dreaming. Every time I passed through a withering little town or village, I wished I had the resources to turn my fantasy into a reality.
For years after I left Texas and then returned, I allowed the dream to materialize again whenever I passed through a decaying little town. In some cases, the town’s commercial areas just needed a coat of paint and some TLC. One such town was Whitesboro, Texas, about 80 or 90 miles north of Dallas. The spark that re-kindled my dream during a drive through Whitesboro was a “for sale” sign in front of an old, abandoned Christian Church. I thought the church building was beautiful. Though badly in need of repair, it had enormous potential, I thought. My belief in its potential, though, was not enough to generate sufficient interest to pursue it seriously. I asked a friend, who was in no more of a financial position than I to invest in rehabilitating an old church; he was mildly supportive of the idea, but wondered about the use to which the restored building might be put. My vision was flush with color, but blurry; I was sure that, if we restored it, a perfect use would be found. It has been at least eleven years since I fell in love with the idea of resurrecting that old church in Whitesboro. I’m sure I wrote about my dream at the time. A few months later, driving through another small town (Whitewright, Texas), I let that town’s potential capture me. The same thing has happened many times since in many other places. But, if my resources were insufficient at the time to take action to reach my dreams, today the resources essentially are non-existent. Such is life.
Thinking about my old fantasies reminds me that I had other, related, dreams. For a few years, I considered the possibility of returning to school to pursue an education in “urban” planning. However, my interest would more closely aligned with “semi-rural” planning. But I remember feeling torn abut that concept; I equated life in rural communities with social conservatism and undeveloped intellectual curiosity, which would have made me uncomfortable. Still today, I do not know with any degree of certainty what I might do if I had my life to live over again. Nothing seems to hold enough interest for me to keep me focused for more than a little while. Perhaps I should have steamrolled my way through another idea I once had: in week-long increments, pursue 52 weeks of wildly divergent career paths and then document my judgments about each of them. Maybe I would have scored my interest in them, enabling me to pick the one path about which I was truly passionate. Maybe not. No, not likely. I know myself too well.
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The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.
~ Lyndon B. Johnson ~
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A chipper-shredder the size of Jupiter is grinding its way through the universe, leaving a trail of metallic dust and perpetual grief in its wake. When the gigantic machine nears Earth, it will pulverize the planet’s fragile atmosphere with its enormous platinum teeth. Later, it will use a volcanic vent like a straw to suck the magma from Earth’s core. Molten rock will splash onto Earth’s moon, causing massive oceans of silver lava to scrub and polish the lunar surface, revealing a shiny reflective orb consumed by an image of raw hatred and blind rage. Those who remain will watch in terrified awe as the calamity turns into an unfamiliar landscape marred with craters—cauldrons filled with bubbling sulfuric acid. Just a snapshot of the transfiguration wrought by time.
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Morbid thoughts do not belong in the kitchen, nor at the shore. Seaside tales of horror tend to ruin picnics, especially when the rising tide has permanently blocked the only escape to dry land.
