Travelers

Oftentimes, in unexpected and unusual ways the past has a way of catching up and when it does in some painful or unpleasant way, I retroactively reconnoiter in an attempt to discover exactly at what point in time the decisions I made or actions I took set in motion events that led to whatever outcome. Sometimes it's not hard at all. I was aware as I was doing it and so, like jumping onto a moving train, the repercussions and changes they heralded came as no surprise. However, that's not what I want to write about tonight. Tonight, I want to write about the future because my son, Logan, and I are about to jump off a platform onto a train that is moving very fast.

At this moment there is an eleven year old South Korean boy named David Lee hurtling toward us across the Pacific Ocean, seven miles high and close to 600 miles per hour; he'll arrive in Austin late tomorrow and then he'll come to live at our house for the next three months. There are reasons for this.

Though eleven seems startlingly young to me, Logan's school routinely hosts foreign exchange students from SK. This past Monday, the Principal sent out an email to the effect that there was a desperate need for a family to host David, as he was about to board a plane and come over and so far, no one had volunteered.

Ending the Year

I dreamt about my grandfather again last night. Though he died almost thirty years ago, he still appears regularly in my dreams and last night’s tracked most all of the others I have of him. He’s always the same, in his late seventies, active, fit and interested in whatever is going on, which is a far remove from how he was at the end, broken in body and spirit.


In my dream I was driving a red truck that had been sitting up for some time. After getting it up to speed, the thick layer of dust had blown off to reveal the old and spider tracked paint, patterned with minute hairline cracks like an impenetrable, organic labyrinth sprung from the slow passage of time. I drove into and finally through a howling

Terrae Cognito

This an old essay, one that Stephanie G'Schwind of "The Colorado Review" was kind enough to take after offering some much needed suggestions resulting in many, many revisions. It is in the CR 2004 Summer Issue XXXI. Check them out at http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/.



Terrae Cognito



Lately I’ve been digging up parts of my family. I’ve returned after an absence of many years to my father’s homeplace, a hundred acre farm/ranch in the southernmost section of Collin County, Texas where my grandparents lived until they died. As many of the generation who came to adulthood in the fifties, my dad—realizing there was no was no future for him there—lit out for the city as soon as he could.

The house itself was not remarkable in any architectural sense, as are some of the stone houses found in the hill country and other parts of the state settled by immigrants from the northern European countries. Aesthetically it was—and remains—little more than a two-story box, cobbled together to provide shelter from the elements, and little else. But filtered through a lifetime of memories, some mine, some provided by my ancestors, it was the axis upon which my paternal family revolved. Each Sunday we would all convene there for lunch, and my grandmother—Minnie—would try to make herself heard over the din of clattering utensils to apologize for again serving the same meal: fried chicken, mountains of mashed potatoes, lakes of cream gravy, okra fried in cornmeal batter, homemade biscuits, corn on the cob, green beans, all washed down with sweet tea and followed by meringue pie. Unless she let us eat cake. To the best of my knowledge, with the exception of the tea, flour and spices, everything we ate there was produced on the farm. Thus, when in elementary school one of my teachers accused me and some accomplices of behaving in the old cliché—specifically running around like a bunch of chickens sans heads—I knew, perhaps better than she, exactly what she meant.

To the casual observer, the only thing remarkable about the house is its position relative to the road that runs into town. Unlike many of the other houses in the area—most of which are now gone—my grandparent’s house was on a dirt lane almost two miles from the main road, a fact that during rainy winters frequently necessitated prolonged periods of isolation. I’ve often heard my grandparents and others claim that the farm is on the highest point of Collin county. I don’t know if this is true or not, but standing in the yard one has an almost panoramic view of the surrounding countryside, so I guess it’s true enough to make for another curiosity: unlike most of the other houses I’ve seen in the area, theirs had no storm cellar. Perhaps after spending weeks mud-bound at the end of that long bog of a driveway, being sucked up by a tornado headed for oblivion seemed a prospect not entirely dismal.

Meanwhile, back in the suburbs, life at my parent’s home was like it was for many other middle class kids growing up in a city in the late sixties and early seventies; staid, placid and predictable. We ate supper at seven and watched the Vietnam War on the news. My friends in the neighborhood