I find myself feeling about Dallas the way I felt about Midland while I was growing up: biding my time while I find a way to get out. There are things I like about this city. There are always pluses and minuses to any situation, and in many ways I’ve been lucky here. But I still find myself looking for the back door.
I’ve been reading Dawn Powell’s diaries. In one entry she wrote, “There is really one city for everyone just as there is one major love.”
I first visited Austin when I was 16 years old. In many ways, that trip changed my life. My high school boyfriend invited me to visit his family and one of the people I met was his grandfather. For the first time, I met someone who made his living as an artist. I had always loved to read and write, but never considered the fact that real people might actually be writers or artists. Meeting Charles made that kind of life seem possible, if not necessarily easy.
The visit also included trips to Deep Eddy and Barton Springs. To a girl who’d grown up in parched West Texas, swimming pools fed from natural springs seemed pretty darned great. I sampled tasty cappuccinos at Quack’s. Nowadays Starbucks has infiltrated Midland like pretty much every other American city, but back then, having a cappuccino during the height of Folger’s diner coffee was a real eye opener for me, in more ways than one. I met liberals, hippies, artists, and idealists. For the first time, I fell in love.
I fell in lust with a few other places. Then I'd get restless, move, live in different city. Eventually I discovered that I am a Texas girl at heart, but there’s really only one place in this state where I want to live. I find myself thinking about Austin the way some people dwell on their first love, wondering if maybe that first one was the real deal after all.
I’m an adult now, allegedly. I have a mortgage, a job, a child. I find myself listening to bids for an expensive custom door to replace our decades-old back door that no longer locks (expensive because our house is older and nothing is a “standard” size), and choosing colors to the paint the den, while simultaneously scanning real estate and job listings in Austin. I can see a life in Dallas. I have a life in Dallas, and it's a good one, but then there's the daydream of moving that will not go away. I go back and forth in my mind so often I’m starting to get whiplash. It’s exhausting. And ultimately seems like a huge waste of time and energy ... but I am having a hard time stopping. I was talking to Katy and asked, isn’t holding two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time a description of insanity? I’ll try to be positive and say it’s an example of integrative thinking.
4 comments:
I have the perfect solution: Stay in Dallas but get a summer home in Austin :)
And remember what I said about having two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time: it's a sign of an intelligent, open, thinking mind!
I would totally miss you guys if you moved but if you decide that's where your heart lies, you've got to follow it.
Actually, that might be a great solution if I could swing it. A here-and-there solution.
I think part of my "issue" is that it seems like a bad time to move or to try to sell our house, but the heart wants what it wants when it wants it, I guess.
I would miss things about Dallas, though, that's for sure.
I guess I am starting to warm up to Austin after all these years. It always seemed to "Texas-ish" to me. South west esthetic is not my thing, I would love to live in San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Portland perhaps... I think this comes from not being a native of Texas. The music scene always disappointed me on every visit, as it seemed to be mostly cover bands and Texas blues. The "hippies" looked like they would kick your ass for looking at them the wrong way... slackers with steel toed cowboy boots tats and gas guzzling art cars! lol
But on reading your post on wanting to live there, I realized I was still holding old grudges against the place based on not finding the culture I had hoped for in general in Texas and not being able to connect to the culture that I did find.
Dallas was a bust for me artistically. Perhaps if I had made the move to Austin like so many people suggested I would have found more connection for my music. But then... I would not have met my lovely wife and would likely be married to some tattooed art car driving cowgirl. : )
So it all worked out.
Yes, Dallas has been good to you!
Austin is definitely "Texan." Though I have to admit I feel pretty Texan myself. Just not of the Dallas-Texan variety.
I think Austin, Dallas, any city is what you make of it, to some degree. I just seem to have really good luck in Austin meeting like-minded people, having interesting experiences, generally just feeling in my element. I have moments like that in other cities, but Austin for whatever reason, just feels like home to me.
I just read this blog post by a woman who now lives in Austin but is from New York. She feels the same way about NY, that it is her home, but there are reasons she's living in Austin.
http://stephanieklein.blogs.com/greek_tragedy/2008/02/lost-in-new-yor.html
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