It’s not often that I have the kind of weekend that bears much reporting. It’s far more rare that I have two of them in quick succession. But the weekend before last was a busy one, and the one just past had some excitement to it. (The one coming up does, too, as does the one to follow that, somehow.) And for so much to happen to and around me so quickly bears some mention.
Image from TXDoT, here, which I believe makes for public domain.
On Saturday, my stepfather-in-law (there’s some interesting blending at work on both sides of my wife’s family) had his sixty-fourth birthday. He had let us know a while back that he wanted to go swimming at Johnson park and to eat at a Mexican restaurant in Fredericksburg, Texas, both of which seem enjoyable enough things to do on a summer day in the Texas Hill Country. Consequently, my family and I planned to join the festivities–sensibly enough, I think, if perhaps with some caveats.
One of those caveats is that I don’t really swim. Instead, I sink. Even with a life-jacket on. And I have demonstrated this on more than one occasion, including a time or two when my wife has seen it happen. Because I am not buoyant at all, I tend not to go into the water, thinking that, even if there is something of a damper on a good time by my staying out of the pool, it’s not nearly as much of one as having to have a lifeguard pull me out of said pool–which, again, has happened more than once, and across a span of several decades, now, so that it’s in no way a one-time thing.
Now, we had thought that the park in question was LBJ State Park in Stonewall, which suited us well enough. The park itself has free admission, and the pool–recently reopened after a reconstruction previously thought unaffordable–asks for $2 to $3 per user. It’s a small enough fee, and the facility’s certainly worth the price, but I still see no reason to pay for something I know damned well I’m not going to use if I can avoid doing it. And, since the family well knows that I don’t swim, I was able to avoid doing it.
No, I dropped my wife and daughter off at the pool and retreated a little bit down the road to the Gillespie County Safety Rest Area on US Highway 290. I’d stopped there many times before, as might be imagined; I used to commute to Kerrville from Johnson City, taking 290 for much of the way, and there are still times that the cups of coffee I take in each morning tell me they need to get out earlier than anticipated. I’d not had occasion to stay there for any length of time, though, and, since there was a decent breeze and the temperature decided to confine itself to the lower 90°s F, it seemed a decent enough thing to do while my wife and daughter swam and played in the pool. (There are lots of places to set up at LBJ State Park, to be sure, but many of them are at some distance from restroom facilities, and I’d been told there was an event at the park headquarters that would make my setting up there, with access to its facilities, a bit of a challenge.)
While at the rest area, I sat at one of the covered picnic tables that grace it, my back to the highway and the wind coming from the southeast, and I wrote in my journal in the shade. There is something to be said for an occasional chance of scenery for the writing I do. Most of it happens while I sit at my desk at home, and a fair bit while sitting at my desk at the office where I still work. It’s sensible enough; I have the bulk of my supplies in one or another of those places, and the former is where I have such research apparatus as I still maintain. I also have chairs in those places that are not apt to aggravate my sciatica, and I have ready access to coffee and other things to drink (I’ve found I do better when I cycle more fluids through my body more rapidly). That I can also shape my soundscape to a large degree helps; certain music conduces well to how I think, and writing is thinking.
So much noted, and true, I also know well that being at home or at the office presents distractions. In both places, I have things other than my supplies and apparatus, and they call to me. At home, I’ve not only a decent chair, but also a bed and a couch that beckon. I can call the tune, but the cats’ meows and the dog’s whine also ring out for attention, or the phone rings. And even aside from all of that, I fall easily into ruts of thinking and depressive spirals that lead me down into dark places I’ve too often visited before, and at far greater length than is good for me. There are limits to how good my setup can be, given my resources, and I am ever near them.
Consequently, popping out every now and again has a salubrious effect on my work. It keeps me from falling into unhelpful cycles or helps me get out of them, which is its chief virtue. I know those cycles present danger to me; they echo with words perilous to hear and ultimately fatal to heed, but getting out every so often quiets the bitter monologue that delivers soliloquies on nothing but my failures. Getting out helps me to remember that the world is more than me, both myself and the externalization of self that the settled-into home is.
I do not always do well with remembering as much. It is easy for me to withdraw, to retreat, from a world I find confusing and frightening. It is easy for me to see what is wrong and what might well grow worse and to take myself where I feel some sense of control. It is this all too easy for me to fail to look outside myself and to focus on what might well go well after all. So much is a problem with which I struggle, with which I have struggled and likely long will. I try to take what are ultimately small steps to get away from it…when I remember to do so, which is, again, not often.
When I do remember, though, and go somewhere else to put my thoughts down, I am the better for it. I cannot always do so, of course. I do have tasks as demand I be in one place or another. I do have to be findable for a few folks at all times and for some more folks a fair bit of the time. And I do get a lot of good work done in my accustomed places; they’d not be my accustomed places did I not. I have worked to make my places good ones from which to write, but I am still glad to get out and about every now and again, to air myself and my places out and return to them ready to address what needs doing.
So it was that my time at the Gillespie County Safety Rest Area was a pleasant enough experience, the decent weather and available shade doing much to help it be so. The facilities are constructed and maintained well, and, the noise from the highway aside, things were rather quiet. Some birdsong and what I think was the chittering of cicadas reached me, and a few people stopping to make use of the facilities happened by, but the last were content to keep their own company and leave me to mine. I appreciate the courtesy, and I appreciate having gotten to have the peaceful time to myself. I think it’s something I might do again, go there to write, as duties and weather permit.
As ever, I’m pleased to put words together for you; fill out the form below to get yourself something started!
Elliott RWI 