Trading All-News Radio for Morning Music

In the Bay Area, we had two choices of public radio stations: KPFA (ultra-leftie) and KQED (NPR affiliate). As a student at Cal, I took a course in development (as in countries) in which the professor had us track a development story across a variety of media for the semester:  newspapers, news magazines, radio stations, TV stations. I was astounded by the results: KPFA, with its scrawny budget and its complete shunning of corporate sponsorships, had the most complete news details in every newscast: They beat out NBC, ABC, the NY Times, Time magazine, the works. And they beat out KQED, which seemed like the softball cousin of the hard-hitting coverage of KPFA.

But KPFA required a bit more righteousness and morale outrage than what I could muster on a regular basis, and to chill out they played a lot of world music when what I wanted was news and talk about news, and so while my husband remained a big fan, I switched to KQED for my daily fare. Call me a sucker for Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and the Saturday treats of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me and Car Talk. I pretty much like everyone on the NPR line-up, except Terry Gross, who drives me nuts. I had a half hour commute minimum, twice that if I decided to turn around after dropping my daughter at school and work at home. So make that nearly an hour in the car twice daily. I logged some serious NPR time. And I loved it.

Now, I am on a slim NPR diet. First of all, there is my commute, down from an hour round-trip to about 15 minutes round trip. Barely time to hear Frank DeFord tell it like it is about doping in sports or the ludicrousness of expecting top athletes to be role models. 

And then there is KUT, the Austin public radio NPR affiliate.  Try typing it into Google, you don't even get a hit on the first page. Even search variants will fail to yield the website of this mysterious station. What I want to know, first, is how in the hell this radio station on the UT Austin campus (get it, K-U-T) is the only radio station in the country with three damn call letters? Did some powerful Texas governor push that through?  Well, no, or not entirely, as it turns out. I did a little research and found out that there are 69 unique three-letter call stations across AM, FM and TV, as shown on this map, which appears on the link:

Some of these stations existed before 1922, when the nation began to shift to 4-letter calls. But KUT went defunct in 1932 and then reappeared in 1958 with the same letters. So somebody at the FCC apparently had a fond spot for history and let the three-letter call rise up once more. Or the governor pushed hard. Or both.

Now, the thing about KUT is that it is not all-news. Granted, it does have a lot of news. They do Morning Edition and All Things Considered, bless their Texan hearts, and Weekend Edition and Marketplace and The World and BBC World Update. You would think that would be enough for a gal. But no. I was accustomed to hearing The California Report in the morning, now I get the Austin Music Minute. After all, this IS the live music capital of the world. I heard the witty Do List and Michael Krasny on Forum and then Talk of the Nation with Neal or (on Science Fridays) Ira, now I get John Aielli and Eklektikos, a music show that spans a full two and half radio hours each morning.This fellow John, who does play good music and is enchanting, really, speaks in a soft, low voice as if he is melodically stoned, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I'm just saying. So when I shoot down to campus mid-morning after working at home for a couple hours, I hear whatever John wants to play and whatever lyrical story he wants to gently tell, not what is happening in the local political scene, the nation, or the world. Which is to say, I am feeling a little disconnected.

Now, I do have some options. I read the NY Times more thoroughly than I used to do. And I have on a couple of occasions listened to KQED on my iPhone. But that feels like cheating, especially when my goal is to fit in here in my new town and state. And so I go ahead and turn on John and listen to him sweet talk me into some jazz tune or, more likely, some local Austin artist who has some new release. And man, the 15-minute commute just swishes by.

On the Road Again

Nothing like a little Willie - one of several Austin music heroes - to get me thinking about a roadtrip. We took one over Memorial Day up to Ft. Worth. Before moving to Texas, I knew Ft. Worth primarily as the last two letters in the airport abbreviation. But then the other day NPR ran a little segment on how Dallas and Ft. Worth compete over who has the better museums, art galleries, music, and food scene. So we thought we would check it out.

Notice from this nice little map (taken from a UK travel site, which must account for the dropped 'S' in what they referred to as a province, not a state) just how convenient it is to get from Austin to some nearby big cities, like San Antonio, Ft. Worth, Dallas, and Houston. What remains to be seen is whether or not these places are worth the trip. That is what we set out to discover:

Ft. Worth is a 3-hour drive from Austin, make that 4 if you stop, as we did on the way home, for BBQ. I think Tom Robbins set his book in Washington, but it could have been here because the roadside attractions along the interstate were many and odd. Most disturbing were the pro-life billboards. Clearly, we had left Austin behind. Another sign that we were in a more conservative region was the beer selection at the Rudy's along the way, almost all Budweiser products with just a slim half dozen Shiner Bocks; to top it off, we were among the very few folks who grabbed cold ones of any brand with our Memorial Day meal.

We stayed in the Omni, a new hotel downtown. The hotel was nice, although its nationally-renown restaurant was over-priced. Lots of other fun places to eat in town. Many of them were booked up due to a pro-golf tournament in town (we were mere feet away from Vijay Singh in our hotel lobby, which made my husband happy), plus a big opera festival. But we made it to Joe T. Garcia's, kind of a local attraction with wickedly strong Mexican martinis, and to Ol' South Pancake House. Now that was a cultural trip: a big mural on the wall showing a plantation scene of a large estate home and rolling hills (no cotton), white Texas middle-aged women waitresses, Hispanic busboys, and a single Black family as customers. I don't really think of Texas as the south, even though it joined the Confederacy. Texas is just Texas. So the pancake house was a bit surreal, but locals and tourists raved about it, so we went and I agree, the German pancake loaded with lemon juice and confectioner's sugar was very tasty. The pancake was German because many Germans settled central Texas, which brings me right back to my own cultural heritage, being Pennsylvania Dutch. You leave but you never go away, apparently.

Our first stop was the Ft. Worth zoo, which has a tremendous reptilian exhibit called the Museum of Living Art. We liked that more than the safari exhibit with its African animals, of which they have many. Having just been to Uganda and seeing these animals roaming free, we had to ponder that maybe our Uganda trip has ruined zoos for us. Also very good, especially with kids, is the Museum of Science and History, which has a large, well-designed discovery area. We spent a good hour or so creating domino trails (world record: 4.8 million, our personal best: somewhere under 30), electrical circuits, and shadows in the shadowbox.

Right beside this museum (everything is grouped together in a "cultural district," which is convenient) is the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. Now this is one piece of cultural work. They have a fine display of rodeo outfits (think rhinestones and needlepoint) and a detailed photo/video history of rodeo women.

Less clear is their narrative around ranch women and everyday cowgirls. They play a short movie that claims every woman is a cowgirl, a rather odd assertion born by a disconcerting combination of Republican individualism and ranch country feminism.We were lucky: they were running a Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit downstairs, with lots of her sketches and photos of her on camping trips in New Mexico.

Finally, we also went over to the stockyards. Ft. Worth is one of the few cities where they still run a herd of cattle through the streets to and from pasture. They go twice a day, presumably out and back, at 11:30 and 4. Of course, we landed up at 4:10 (turns out high school graduation was in the convention center near our hotel, the streets blocked with proud parents) and missed the whole show, who knew cowboys were punctual? But the surrounding area was intriguing for kids and sufficiently cowboy-ish, the Ft. Worth tourist equivalent of San Francisco's Pier 39.

Overall, we give the city a big thumbs-up. It was damn hot over the weekend, which made the zoo trip a challenge and made our daughter reluctant to ever leave the hotel pool. We'll go back sometime in the fall, and make our dinner reservations in advance.

A Run Around the Capitol

One of the nice things about living in a state capitol is that I can take a weekend run around a pretty magnificent state building. The Texas State Capitol is the biggest in the nation (read, my state capitol is bigger than yours, as Texans like to point out) and second only to the nation's capitol in square footage (but ours is higher, so there). At Christmas, we joined a carol-singing, tree-lighting evening ceremony on the capitol steps that was downright lovely. Anyway, this run is a perfect getting-ready-for-10k-races weekend run. It winds through our Hyde Park neighborhood, goes past our daughter's school, goes past the UT football stadium, circles the capitol, and brings it on home back through UT and some park-like areas. Mudpie, our dog, can do a five-mile version (skipping the capitol) when it is not so hot (i.e., before May).

Whole Foods: The Mother Ship

The Whole Foods chain started here in Austin, where the mother ship store sits at 6th and Lamar downtown. It is not the original store, which was much smaller and a couple blocks away, but it is the stand-in for it and the mythical heart of the organization today. We put off our first visit for a time when we could dawdle, pause, stare, peruse, sigh and otherwise fully appreciate the experience: a Thursday date night.

Whole Foods and I go way back. I lived in Berkeley in the late 1980s when Whole Foods was just beginning to invade the Bay Area. They took over what used to be a co-op grocery store there, which caused a lot of protest, made worse because Whole Foods is non-union. Today, Whole Foods continues to be in political hot soup thanks to the peculiar views of its CEO, who most recently earned notoriety for writing a WSJ op-ed against Obama's health care plan. For these kinds of reasons, I have always struggled with Whole Foods.  But when Whole Foods took over a mainstream down-on-its-luck grocery store in my previous home of Redwood City, CA, I celebrated. I was there on opening day, smiling at every "team" employee and thanking them all from the bottom of my property-owning heart. Being near Whole Foods meant our house value increased, a boost that even those of us in the Silicon Valley could appreciate.

Our quality of food also shot up. In our neighborhood, mostly working class but slowly transitioning to a Google enclave, being seen with the green woven WF bags was not necessarily a good sign because many folks refused to pay that kind of money for groceries. (Back in the day, my Berkeley grad school peers called the co-op replacement Whole Paycheck.) For me, shopping at Whole Foods was a personal money-management choice: We drove low-end, high-quality Japanese cars and kept them until they nearly died, then took the money we saved on vehicles and spent it on upscale American mustard. There's logic in there somewhere. And with a small child in the house, grocery shopping at Whole Foods while leaving my daughter at home with her dad became a kind of therapy, a relaxing stay in a gently-lit setting where I could sip a latte while poring over the ingredient labels on marinade bottles. No mainstream grocery store - like Safeway in California or HEB in Texas - could come close to providing that kind of escapism. I won't claim that we reaped all the health benefits of our choice because we still had flaws in the conversion process (raw vegetable to gourmet dinner) back home. As we wryly noted, we simply had a higher quality of vegetable rotting in the bottom bins. But we couldn't really blame the store for that.

So back to the Mother Ship, aka 80k square feet of sheer amazing food displays. There must be at least half a dozen little cafe-like areas where you can sit down and dine on food prepared before your eyes: BBQ, pasta, burritos, vegan concoctions, or, as we did, seafood. I had a superb crabcake made with Maryland blue crab, pared with a great chardonnay. Our WF stores back in CA were mere shadows of this one, which will become a destination stop for our visiting friends and family. Call me a fan, high prices and all. As an added bonus, there are the nifty cart escalators that transport your groceries to the basement garage. Having date night in the grocery store would speak really poorly of Austin if the store were not the mother ship Whole Foods. Go there and see what I mean.

Gastronomically Speaking....

I'm not the first to say that Austin's food scene is a tad disappointing. I like to live in a place with great restaurants. Doing so makes me feel metropolitan and serves as a clear reminder that I left my small hometown, that I am somewhat worldly, as it were. Austin abounds in cuisine like BBQ, which the Bay Area did not, but sadly falls short in the Asian food department, where the Bay area excelled. Which is to say, we miss Asian food. We are, however, determined to find the 10-12 restaurants that any city-dweller wants to count on as his or her standard hangouts. My list on this page will track my favorites.

I think it says something a bit depressing about a town when a supermarket makes the top 10 list of places to eat. But actually, now that Central Market's cafe has reduced the size of its salads, but not their price, they are facing removal from the list. Their redeeming qualities include the patio, play structure, live music, and tasty, healthy fare.   

Some standouts on the list include Swad, all good Indian food, all typical minimal ambiance. Too many of the restaurants I list are located in strip malls. Not good!  Fino was delightful, though I worry a bit that we will quickly tire of the menu, so we will limit our visits. Rudy's BBQ in its 360 location is pure heaven, despite selling gas in the front. (Is that really necessary?) Bless them for the large grassy lots for play and the picnic tables (but guys, we need more parking). Aster's is great Ethiopian, but the location beside and under the freeway is less than ideal. You'll often find us at Tom's Tabooley for Saturday lunch, hanging out playing card games in the sofa area. Oddly, they have awesome fries, something, like BBQ, in which Austin does seem to excel and which is adding far too rapidly to my waistline. Crazy Cajun was a yelp find, just in time for the crawfish season, great boils, low ambiance. All the other restaurants in that strip mall are Vietnamese pho shops and most of the clientele are Asian, so it makes for an interesting cultural excursion.

Bombay Bistro, another strip mall place, is what Clay Pit ought to be (shame on the latter for having such a beautiful building, ambiance, and location, yet such truly tasteless food). The remaining places on the list are all fairly close to our house; many offer everyday fare like hamburgers and espresso drinks and pastries. Trudy's is highly notable for its $5 Monday Mexican martinis in a shaker that pours out at least six of them, so yes I am so cheap as to ask for an extra glass to split it with husband. Titaya's is a Thai place of note, inexpensive, tasty, and conveniently next door to Half Price Books, making it a great date night spot.

Still missing is a super Chinese place. Not sure that is on the horizon, as we have tried some of the top listings in the Fearless Critic book and have been unimpressed.  We have also yet to hit up the many airstream trailer food stands, whose food we are told is stellar. First supermarkets, next trailers. I'm trying to be open-minded. We're saving some of the fanciest places for special occasions; these include Uchi's and Wink. No point getting hooked on a place that is so expensive.

Barton Springs Pool and a Quintessential Austin Day

A single place can make a town. Luckily, Austin's got several of them. Don't ask me why it took us so long to make it to Barton Springs Pool, where we went yesterday with friends visiting from California. Admittedly, that is some damn cold water, but my goodness, that place has an aura. I'm told a group of Tibetan monks visited a number of years back and deemed the pool a spiritual site; they perform a ceremony there now every time they visit the city. That tale may be urban lore, but it is completely believable. I think we put off going there because we said, "Fine, a pool.  Pools, pools, pools, we get it: Austin is hot, people swim, enough already." We obviously had no idea.

Nestled in a very green and natural setting, the pool is essentially a creek dammed up before it joins the river (but Austinites call it a lake) that winds its way through downtown. Long and narrow, the pool has a wading area and stone beach at one end and a diving board and deep water at the other. The slopes on either side of the pool are rather steep. One side is part grassy hillside and part rocky path around the pool; the other side is all grass. A sign says the surface is natural, though the pool is man-made and the bottom of the pool, which is slick with algae in places, seems poured.

The water is permanently 68 degrees, fed by a natural spring. That probably feels great on a 105-degree day in the middle of summer, but was a little chilly for a 75-degree day in April. I stood in the wading end a full half hour, shivering and creeping forward inch by inch, enjoying the view of a couple skyscrapers downtown that appear in a gap of trees. Finally, I submerged myself - my heart nearly stopped! - and swam to keep warm. One of those delights that come all too infrequently in life.

As we sat on the edge and watched the kids play and swim and explore, I told my husband, "This place alone just raised my quality-of-life assessment of Austin a good three percentage points, maybe more."

Afterward, we made our way down the parking lot of South Lamar just in time to catch a kid's movie and a late lunch at the Alamo Drafthouse, a great place to see a flick and eat in the dark. (Being newbies, we keep making the mistake of ordering nachos, an unwise move when you cannot see what you are reaching into.) On the way back, we grabbed ice cream at Amy's and threw a ball around in Shipe Park, our neighborhood park. Left the kids with our nanny and took off for drinks on the balcony at Stephen P. Austin Intercontinental, which afforded a lovely view of the capitol dome in the sunset. Tapas, small plates and wine at Fino topped off one very spectacular day in Austin.

Performance Art in the 'Hood

For several weeks, my neighbors on the block below us spent hours each weekend standing in the street with plastic jugs of water at their feet. There were about 10 people, all adults, and they were all dressed in white. We had no idea what they were doing or why. My daughter and her friend across the street took to spying on this group, hiding behind a tree at first to peek out at the goings-on, and later, having gained some courage, simply gawking in plain view on the corner. I was able to spy comfortably enough from our front porch. The group formed two lines facing each other. Cars had to slow down to get past them. At first, as an ex-Californian, I thought that perhaps this group were engaged in emergency preparedness training (all that water in jugs). Or, I pondered, perhaps they were some new cult (hence the white clothing), an explanation that seemed to fit our offbeat Hyde Park neighborhood.

One Saturday after a couple weekends of white-group assembly, two fellows in a car pulled up in front of the house beside us. They lugged two blue lounge chairs out of the back of the car and placed them in the yard across the way in the strip of grass between sidewalk and street. Then they took off, leaving the lounge chairs stretched out as if a parade was scheduled. What holiday? The neighbors in white, I noticed, were back at it.

Later, I happened to be hanging out in the front yard when a weird thing happened. The two fellows pulled up in their car again, wearing white swimsuits this time, and they ran across the road, lay down in the lounge chairs, and commenced to read magazines. It was a nice day, but our neighborhood is no beach. Amused, I watched some more. The folks in white down at the corner had formed two lines, their jugs at the ready. Something, it seemed, was about to happen.

Sure enough, a caravan of cars and trucks slowly came down the road, each crammed with people. Hmmm... What was going on? People in the vehicles were leaning out with video cameras, filming what THEY saw, as if those of us on the street were somehow the spectacle.  My neighbors in white let loose with all that water, drenching some other folks, I wasn't quite sure who. Of course, I called for the girls and my husband to come witness the commotion. It was all over in a few minutes. The two fellows got up from tanning, hopped in the car, and left. Huh, we said, just another day in the neighborhood.....

The next day was one of those days that comes along maybe four times in a year in which all I want to do is read cookbooks, plan meals and cook. After a leisurely morning perusing Martha's ideas for family meals, I gathered up my shopping bags and set off for an expedition at Central Market, an upscale Austin grocery store. I set off in the car and drove slowly past my assembled neighbors, who were back at it and who paid me no mind.

At the next block, I passed a large white wooden church that sits on  lot fronted by an embankment. About ten couples, all women and all dressed in white wedding gowns or some white variant thereof, stood in frozen poses on the raised yard of the church, with each pair facing inwards as if ready to assume its vows. I slowed down to have a good gander. The scene was surreal, but beautiful. Across the street, a man, dressed - you guessed it - in white, sat as if having a picnic with two small children, also dressed in white. They were perfectly still.

At the next intersection, I saw the most striking set of white-clad figures. Three middle-aged women, each with an empty shopping cart and each dressed in a toga of sorts, formed a line that stretched across half the crosswalk. They stood immobile, frozen in the motion of pushing their carts. I stopped at the stop sign and took my time to look at them; there was something so other-worldly about them. Just then a hearse turned the corner, led by a jogging bearded man wearing a skullcap and long sideburns and followed by a caravan of cars, each with a Star of David in the window. The passengers in the cars were, like the folks the day before, busy taking videos of all the sights they saw.

It dawned on me that I was seeing some kind of performance art or street theater. Which made me extremely happy that I live on a street in a neighborhood in a city that engages in such pastimes, even though I recognized that, at the time, I was having a very private day while all these folks were having the most public of days. Perhaps it was the contrast that made it all the more appealing.

I found out later that the group had a name: Floodlines. The piece, conceived after 9/11 and in its final and seventh year, asks, What does memory feel and look like? Presumably the actors dressed in white to appear ghost-like, people caught in a moment of life past. You can see a photo of the wedding pairs and read a short article about the ensemble in our local newsletter (p.14).  I'm thinking from the photo that maybe they weren't all women after all. And the Austin Chronicle ran a nice article about last year's performance that conveys a sense of how surreal it was. Finally, the artist (or her friends) has a blog about the piece.

Oh, and about those lounge chairs...Turns out somebody swiped them overnight between the Saturday and Sunday performances, this being an urban neighborhood after all. But then, that's how we all set things out on the curb for free that we want people to take, so perhaps it was an innocent mistake. The two tanners knocked on my neighbor's door Sunday morning, a bit upset, and asked her if she had seen the chairs they had left outside. Of course, she was befuddled and said no, she didn't know where the chairs were. The men rounded up some others in a hurry, I guess, because the two men were sitting there, tanning, when I took off in the car. I wondered if the blue lounge chairs belonged to them or if they had borrowed them from a roommate: "Hey, Dave, you know your two blue lounge chairs? Yeah, well, a funny thing, we saw you weren't using them, so we took them and left them on a front yard in Hyde Park and somebody ripped them off. I know, weird, huh? Anyway, sorry....."

What Makes Austin Weird

Austin's city motto is "Keep Austin Weird." We see this motto everywhere: emblazoned on mugs, tie-dyed tee shirts, bumper stickers, posters, shotglasses. Perhaps like you, we wondered, "What makes Austin weird?"

Perhaps the place to start is with the obvious, the three B's of Austin weirdness: bars, bats and BBQ. Austin is the self-proclaimed live music capital of the country, which seems a fair boast. We hear live music at the grocery store on summer weekends and at many restaurants year round, including small beer and hamburger joints (called ice houses here); even the elementary school's main fundraiser is a live music concert. And then, of course, there are the bars. Austin's 6th Street is renown, but not someplace I like to go because I don't enjoy venues where the volume is so loud I cannot hear myself think. Our first bar foray was instead to a classic venue, the Continental Club. Sushil and I went for an early show (7 pm) and between the two of us had five shots of tequila and an evening's worth of great live music for the tidy sum of $17. That's good living.

As for the bats, Austin is the proud home of the largest urban colony of bats in North America. These are Mexican free-tailed bats and over a million of them hang out underneath one of the several bridges that span the river that runs through downtown Austin. People gather in the twilight to see them take flight, a spectacle that lasts several minutes. The bats are definitely cool.

Austin's food scene is not all what one might hope, but apparently for lovers of BBQ this place is heaven. We don't eat beef or pork, so we're missing something like 90% of the fun (some places don't even serve any BBQ chicken or turkey; this is the state where pork really is the other white meat). Nonetheless, we try to be good sports and take our visitors out and about to the various BBQ joints to partake the local fare.

But talking about bars, bats and BBQ when trying to describe what makes Austin unique is missing some of the really striking differences between Austin and the rest of the country.Take, for example, tattoos.

I would argue that Austin is the tattoo capital of the country. We came in summer, which is the prime tattoo-viewing season. Think people splashing around in the swimming pool and you get the picture. Now you might think I am just talking about some old men sporting reminders of wild times during some war or the other, but you would be wrong. I am talking women: young women, middle-aged women, old women. You might be thinking little roses on the ankle or, coyly, on the hip. You would be wrong. I am talking tattoos that fully cover the arms, the back, and the legs, sometimes all three of those places on a single woman! I've lived in places like Portland and Berkeley and San Francisco, all of which have reputations for being a bit weird or hip, but none of them has a female population with such highly adorned skin as does Austin. Now THAT makes a place weird! And I mean that in a good way.

Another facet of Austin weirdness is its anti-corporate stance. Austin is determined not to allow itself to simply become the locale of store #5438 of national chains like Gap, Chili's, and Starbucks. Austin residents really celebrate local, independent businesses. A prime example is the independent bookstore, Bookpeople, a deep, full space with quirky exhibits like one on Texas history. There are plenty of other examples, including Allens Boots, which has an astounding array of cowboy boots with prices that go up to the thousands, and Toy Joy, a place arguably more for stoned college students and baby boomers looking to relive the past than it is for kids, but our child gets silly there right along with us. The anti-corporate movement keeps Austin weird through the creation and distribution of the "Go Local" card, which gets you small discounts or bonus treats at lots of funky, small establishments.

Finally, Austin is certainly weird for Texas: it is liberal and heavily Democratic in a state that most of the nation associates with W. And thank goodness for that; Austin's political weirdness is for many its saving grace. There's no doubt more to Austin weirdness than just what I have recounted, so I might have to write about this topic again some day. But suffice it to say, this place is different. And that difference, that weirdness, certainly made our move easier and makes us happy to call ourselves brand-new Austinites. This is the kind of city you can proudly tell someone you are from, the kind of place that sheds a good light on your image of yourself and the identity you show the world. At least for those of us, like me, who value place.

Hot, Hot Austin

Arguably, moving to a new town in time for its biggest heat wave since 1860 is not the best way to settle in to a new place. Especially when the kind of record temperatures we are talking about are the kind with three digits. Even more so if one is conducting this move with a nine-year-old Californian who is accustomed to playing outside every day for hours on end. And playing, mind you, with humans her own size and age, not, as it were, with mosquitoes, and multitudes of them at that, to which she is dreadfully allergic. Which is all to say that our first few weeks, make that months, of life in Austin were difficult, which is why I had to wait six months to even begin to write about them.

It is not that we are California softies unaccustomed to heat. We are California softies with relatives in India who we visit often and almost always in the summer, so we *know* what heat is. Painfully so. Trust me. But that is another story for another blog (a book perchance?). I jokingly called Austin "Delhi with A/C." That was right up until the night, about two weeks in, when the power went out. Power outages are endemic to Delhi; I recall one hot day in particular, when the still fans were taunting my very sanity, as they were too often wont to do, having a conversation with my father-in-law in which I informed him, with a haughty tilt of my head, that power outages are very rare in the States. (And then that summer we had rolling blackouts in California, which no one but the two of us recognized as God paying me back for my bad manners.) But power outages were not what I expected in Austin. We sat in our family room for hours, feeling the cool air slowly seep out of the house as the vicious hot air forced its way inside. Don't ask me why we didn't simply pack up and head out to a restaurant or a mall. Maybe we didn't really know where to go yet in our new town. But more likely we simply fashioned ourselves martyrs, or possibly morons - it never occurred to us to escape. We sat there and took it, watching the clock tick the minutes off to the time when the woman on the phone had informed my husband Sushil that the power would be restored. Austin has some number you just call to find out these matters. I didn't believe her, but sitting there getting hotter and hotter, and naturally more and more irritable, I needed to believe her, desperately. I was, therefore, livid when the appointed time came and went. Then, ten minutes past, the lights came on and the A/C kicked in. I sat on the couch, rejoicing at the sound of the refrigerator back to its important work of keeping the beer cold, and marveling at the psychic powers of the woman on the phone. For weeks afterward, I was wary that another outage was right around the corner, that Austin was simply Delhi after all. Thankfully, that was the only one. The A/C kept working right up until the day we switched it over to heat, fairly certain that the temperature had dropped some forty or fifty degrees in the span of 24 hours.

How does one entertain a child who cannot function in heat in the middle of summer? How does one go about enjoying the wide front porch of one's home-owning dreams when mosquitoes come in large family groups to feast on one's ripe, untouched California skin? We had changed our license plates over to Texas ones just as fast as we could so that the local folks would more readily accept us as their own, but the flying bloodsuckers of our yard knew better: this was virgin territory and they alighted with ferocity. There was only one answer to our dilemma: the local swimming pool. The pool is but a handful of blocks away, but might I remind you of the triple-digit heat, so that you and Al Gore might together forgive us for the regrettable sin of actually driving that distance each afternoon, where we spent a couple of hours playing and trying to be nice, well-mannered people again, the kind who know that heat and mosquitoes can only last so long and that better days must surely be ahead.

Farewell, California...

Back in June 2009, my husband, daughter, dog and I completed the Great Migration in reverse, leaving the San Francisco Bay Area for, of all places, Texas. Having lived in California for over a quarter-century, I never imagined that I would someday leave the adopted state I loved so dearly to head off for what I, like so many others, dismissed as flyover country. My hope is that this blog will prove a good forum for sorting out my feelings, reflections and experiences occasioned by my family's monumental geographic shift, and that in the course of writing it I might come to understand a bit more the role that place plays in my identity. Additionally, the blog should help me share these ideas with my friends and family and whoever else might happen upon this page and perhaps to hear their thoughts.