Dusk in Texas

This time, right now, the end of May, is when I miss Texas the most. It's been in the 90's for a while now in Waco, most years, but the pool just opened; the kids got out of school. The start of summer really means something when you live in Central Texas. The crickets are loud at night, the heat can take your breath away when you go outside, and everything is, in a word, languid. I love that word, the way it is used in the mesmerizing Steely Dan song, "Deacon Blues," which has a 70's vibe in precisely the way that Waco does, singing about the "languid and bittersweet."

There is something about dusk this time of year, there. People on a porch, or at the pool, or out on a ranch, just being, as the heat breaks a little bit, the light hitting just right.

You go to the pool. Someone orders margaritas, and they talk about hunting javelina, that you have to deal with that thick hide and use a knife sometimes, out in some sweltering patch of South Texas. A few more guys come over and tell stories. Knowing nothing, I listen and nod, and wave over another margarita as the kids splash around and whatever song of the summer emerges starts to worm its way into the brain. I didn't always have to be a law professor there, and that was good. I liked that, at dusk in the heat in the summer. I was guy number 5 on a deck chair as no one quite was thinking about dinner yet. Kids are starting to ask their moms, gathered over the way, about that.

Someone heard that some schoolteachers had opened up a barbecue joint out in the country someplace, just a pit and some picnic tables, so you'd go out there. And there it was, a bunch of cars pulled over by the road, parked up on the grass, and the smell of the sweetest smoke in the history of the world, filtered up through brisket and sauce and God knows what else, but it is a scent I can't get out of my head even now. So you go up and pay five bucks to a guy who last week was giving a final in history, and then you go over to the pit and they put down three things on a plate: a slab of brisket, a slop of beans and two slices of white bread taken straight out of a bag of Mrs. Baird's. There is another guy, who still has finals to grade from his math students, and he is sitting in front of a cooler of beer. You give him two bucks, and you get a can of Miller Lite and take it to the picnic table and smell the smoke and hear the stories and drink a few of the beers and the night slides away with every sense fulfilled, on a wooden bench under a tree forty yards from a Farm-to-Market road. Languid.

And the thing about it all is that the moments, these start of summer moments, aren't about anything else. It's not leading to anything else, there is no future or past in it. It's just... right then. And that, my friends, that right then, is pretty damn good. 

It took me a while to get Texas; how people loved it so much. But those languid days, that start of the summer... I got it. And today I miss it.