Coming to an Understanding
Thursday, April 19, 2007Aunt Pat has a nice house in, I guess, northern Dallas. Her house is fairly near the Dallas–Fort Worth airport, as far as I can tell from Google Maps. I remember thinking that her house seemed like the perfect size. It has a garage in back, which I also liked. She has decorated it in greens and purples, though she says she’d like to redecorate.
The room she gave me had a treadmill on it, upturned on one end. Pat had been using it to exercise, but her foot has been bothering her lately because of a congenital problem her doctors just discovered—an extra bone and extra tendon in her foot. It makes it difficult for her to walk. She was worried that I might stumble into the treadmill in the middle of the night, but I didn’t.
In the morning we decided to visit the Dallas World Aquarium in downtown Dallas. It was a bit of a challenge getting there, since I’d never been to Dallas before. We had a close call merging onto one highway—we had to sit in the white-striped triangle between highways until the traffic opened enough to let us in.
But then we moseyed into downtown, parked behind the museum, and walked almost all the way around to find the entrance. So my impression of downtown Dallas comes from parking at the aquarium and looking at the buildings around it.
The DWA is actually many things to all its visitors. 
It’s not just a bunch of bored fish pacing water in a tank. To start with, you go up to the third floor and descend through the rainforest, walking slowly down and around a waterfall. We saw monkeys and toucans, vampire bats and spotted stingrays along the way. I think there were also some (black?) swans. There were many, many schoolchildren who shrieked a lot. By the time we got down by the River (shades of Chris Farley; actually it was supposed to represent the Orinoco River in the Amazon), we were happy to sit down and watch the female diver feeding lettuce to the Antillean manatees and little cubes to the turtles and catfish.
When we had finished with the rainforest, we viewed the small exhibits in the Aquarium section. There were a number of wall tanks with amazing varieties and colors of coral, jellyfish, leafy seadragons, angelfish, grouper, morays, you name it. It made me want to go diving again. We were tired by then, and I’ll bet Aunt Pat’s foot was hurting, though she didn’t admit it, so we had lunch at the café. By this time we had meandered through the museum back to the parking lot side, but we weren’t ready to leave.
There were still two tunnels to walk through. I don’t remember the Continental Shelf tunnel all that well, but there were some beautiful spotted blue rays. Lots of fish. We visited the black-footed penguins briefly, but they weren’t doing much.
Then it was on to Mundo Maya. It began with snakes—I wish they’d had a snake-handling station—and led us into a tunnel through a cenote. 
That was amazing. (A cenote is a deep sinkhole filled mostly with freshwater and found in the Yucatan. Some of them feature intricate cave systems, and many of them flow out to the sea. They were the only source of freshwater for the Mayans, other than rainwater. The Mayan word was dzonot; cenote is the Spanish version of it. The Mayans thought of them also as passages to the underworld.) I’m not sure how DWA managed to get three different tanks in one building. Think of the structural support! We sat on the benches, along with millions of teenagers (don’t know where all the elementary stu
dents went; maybe they all grew up too fast and decided to hang out in that tunnel until they found true love), and watched sharks and rays float over us. I took some pictures of Aunt Pat that I really liked.
Much of the rest of Mundo Maya was similar to the Rainforest section. But at the end is a temple with stone jaguars and real ones (unfortunately, they didn’t come out that day). I always have mixed feelings about cats in zoos. When I see them, I yearn for them, but I also want them to be in a much larger space—or free. Someday, I hope, zoos will be an artifact of our past. But I fear that with global warming, we’ll actually end up with biospheres as the only places some species can survive.
I took many pictures of the flamingos in this exhibit, 
as well as the cenote from above. At the beginning of this section we sat, surrounded by the tunnel/cenote and the creatures that lived in it. Now we looked down into it, watching them from above.
We found it somewhat easier to get out of downtown than into it. Then we went back to Aunt Pat’s and she fixed me dinner again.
Later that night, her son and my cousin Chris came over. He’s younger than I am, and I can’t remember ever meeting him before, though I assume I did. I didn’t get to see Kim, Pat’s daughter—she’s getting married again and was spending time with her in-laws. Chris does landscaping work and is in great shape from all the work he does. Like me, he’s not much of a talker, so sometimes the conversation lapsed.
That night, I had only the second flying dream I ever remember. I don’t know who was carrying me. I also dreamed about my cat, Rufus.
The next day, I did a little copyediting at Pat’s house. As I was working, I was struck by this question: What story about myself do I want known? And I realized that what I want known about myself was that I became a writer, it wasn’t what I expected, and I came to terms with it. Now I’m ready to take another shot at it, from a different angle.
What story about yourself do you want known?
Another thing I realized at Aunt Pat’s: I was reading Jonathan Alter’s article on having cancer (in Time or Newsweek), and I recognized the anxiety he described. I had a much milder form of it when I had my repetitive motion injury. And it got me the label hysterical patient from the surgeon I was seeing at the time.
Around noon, I headed down I-35 to Austin. That was the most hellatious driving of the trip—four hours of two lanes, bounded closely on either side by concrete walls, and everybody going 55 or 60 miles an hour.
posted by Price of Silence @ 11:54 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home