Tuesday in Texas

Although this photo is from Texas Highways, it’s the way I remember the sky over Roosevelt-Wilson School.

Standing by my mother looking at Roosevelt-Wilson Elementary School, this is what I saw:  Sky.  So much sky the low building seemed irrelevant. I didn’t take to the tall trees and rolling hills of Pennsylvania, but the sky over Texas City in my memory is cast in bright blue all the time, with white clouds just for emphasis. The sky made me feel like my troubles rose up and drifted away, leaving room for whatever adventure would happen next.

Not too much time passed after our arrival in TC before someone thought of enrolling me in school, probably Aunt Jackie, and Roosevelt was the closest. As I stood outside the school, staring at the sky, I smelled the chemical odor from the plants, which I was already getting used to, but I also smelled the pungent aroma of the breeze over salt water in Galveston Bay, rotting fish, and old mud.  I liked that, though I knew it wasn’t roses.

Roosevelt-Wilson. The taller building is the gym (I think); the low building housed the classrooms (from Images of America – Texas City, by Albert L. Mitchell).

The one-story school squatted on a piece of land so vast it seemed like a prairie, right there in the middle of town. Rows of neat houses lined the streets on both sides of the field, houses with swept sidewalks and grass lapping at the curbs. Even the children walking to school had a mowed look, scrubbed, tucked in, belted, flat-topped and pony-tailed.

There would be three marvels before the school year ended, two marvels of kindness and another more spectacular marvel concerning a pony, which I’m pretty sure I imagined. But to tell about these marvels, I have to tell about Roosevelt-Wilson School. My friend Lana recently said that everything in Texas City seemed perfectly normal until you said it out loud, and writing about it is the same way. It all seemed normal at the time, but it was much more fun than that.

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The Amber City.

Late October 1955, rolling into Texas City on a Greyhound bus, this is what I saw:

On the distant skyline, a metropolis, huge, beckoning, a fantasy city. I mostly lived in books, so I compared it to Oz, the Emerald City, green and glowing. This town twinkled more like a Christmas tree, tiny orange lights running up the towering skyscrapers, an Amber City. And there were lighthouses.

“It’s so big,” I said, sleepy, never sure of my mother’s mental whereabouts, even though she sat right beside me.

“Not that big,” she said.

“But the buildings. And lighthouses?”

“What? Oh. The plants.” Her impatient tone closed the subject. Asked and answered.
In a symmetrical loop personal history often makes, my son at a young age told an interested adult that his dad worked in a flower shop. This was way off the mark, so I asked where he got that idea. “Daddy’s a plant manager,” he said. Perfect logic, and that remark took me right back to the night I saw Texas City for the first time. I would grow up, move away, and live in many cities, but I would call that little coastal town in Texas home for the rest of my life.

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“Here We Are, There Ain’t No More, Yea Seniors ’64”

The life of a person is not what happened, but what he remembers and how he remembers it.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I dedicate this blog to the Texas City High School Class of 1964, and to all the graduates of that time and place. The Class of ’64 has mystically reinvented itself as we should have been, and not as we were, all in the name of second chances. A few generous leaders sent out an invitation: Come back and be welcome, popular kids, band kids, fringe kids, cowboys, and hoods. Come be part of the class in our wisdom and maturity. Remember as you will what was small and exclusive, but come back and be welcome now. The quote of this introduction, although penned by Marquez, was passed along by an outstanding member of our class, and within this context, it seems particularly appropriate.

The very word memory evokes a visceral response – deep in the heart, in the mind, in a singular place, different in all of us. There’s a barren patch between fact and fiction, a place where we toss out seeds and something grows, something made of memory and truth. Why do we remember things a certain way? Why does someone who shared the same experience remember it so differently? Memory has much to do with truth and little to do with fact, and as for fact? As time goes by I trust that word less and less.

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