All right, now that Mama Ticky and Aunt Lilly are tucked up for the night (sounds like the opening of a southern novel in the style of Harper Lee) I can do a bit of a writeup about my day. Which, as events will show, is important, at least to me.
Those of you who enjoy maps, grab a Texas map and follow along.
Mama Ticky is not a bad driver, especially considering her health, but she is an...enthusiastic and very confident driver. Fortunately she doesn't drive on freeways. Well, they terrify me too. I drive on them, but not in an unfamiliar car or state. Therefore, the expeditious I-45 that goes directly from her Houston suburb to downtown Galveston doesn't really come into the equation for us. Instead, the plan was to drive down 288 until it hit a junction with 6, meet up with Aunt Lilly (actually Mama Ticky's dead husband's cousin's wife, we'll get to her later) and follow 288 to the causeway across to Galveston. Not much slower than 45, running parallel to it.
As we were well underway, Mama Ticky -- who has lived in this area of Texas since her family moved here from omg wtf PARIS when she was young -- began to reminisce about people who lived in the area. She's not a great storyteller because she tends to forget key and unguessable words in the middle of a sentence, but she had quite a stock of them. My favourite was the one about the Civil War Veteran she knew as a child, who lived on a stretch of land behind the railroad tracks and bred Jack Russel Terriers as cattle dogs. Yes, that's right. Jack Russel cattledogs.
Anyhow, as we were blissfully driving in precisely the wrong direction, not yet having noticed we were on 521 and not 288 (in my defence, I didn't know we were supposed to be on 288), I re-pondered as I have often done, on my Story Theory. My story theory states that the main stock-in-trade of the elderly is stories, and a central goal of my life since the age of fifteen or so is to compile enough interesting stories that I am not reduced to talking about hip-replacements at the age of eighty -- which is another thing we'll get to in a minute.
Which is why I'm glad I have this LJ, really. Most of the really interesting stuff in my life has been chronicled here, particularly Boston, Philadelphia, and graduate school. So if I ever forget it, there is a place it has been kept. I like that.
Commentary post-hack: Oh, the irony.
Anyhow, we finally realised that we were on the wrong road when we, uh, found the junction between 288 and 521. After some insistent map-rustling on my part, we got onto 288 and went back the way we'd come for about half an hour until we reached 288 and 6. Aunt Lilly had not yet arrived. So, we got a soda at the designated meeting point and waited for her.
Aunt Lilly and Mama Ticky married a pair of cousins (not their own cousins...Mr. Aunt Lilly and Mr. Mama Ticky were cousins) and each raised a brood of boys while living down the road from each other. Lately Aunt Lilly has been having some hard times due to one of her sons trying to screw the other three out of her also-deceased husband's estate. These are women who are land-rich; Aunt Lilly's husband owned three ranches, and Mama Ticky owns at least one ranch, one untenanted spread, one homestead, a town-house, and an oil well. That's irrelevant but interesting, anyhow.
Aunt Lilly showed up a few minutes after we did, in a large minivan, and we caravanned merrily down 288 towards Galveston or damnation, and as it turned out damnation came first.
Actually, I probably wouldn't have noticed the religious nature of the town of Santa Fe, Texas, if I hadn't had the full story from Mama Ticky. As it turns out, Santa Fe is (ironically, since it's named after a Catholic Saint) full of the sort of hellfire-and-damnation Baptists who run Catholics out of town (as late as the nineties) and nearly riot because the state says they can't have prayers before the high school football game. This did, it is true, explain the "Covenant Cuts Barbershop" and the eerie, Stephen-King-Novel-esque churches made out of trailers and occasionally barns (the latter being the "Church of the Harvest". Er).
Having survived Santa Fe with my pagan soul intact, we made our way more or less without incident to the timeshare, where I am bunking on the flip-out couch in the living room, Mama Ticky and Aunt Lilly both being octogenarians who deserve the proper beds in the two bedrooms. I don't mind, except that neither of them want to close their doors, which means I am typing this very quietly.
Spending any amount of time with Mama Ticky and Aunt Lilly, concurrently or consecutively, is a little like attending a conference of geriatric physicians being held at the opposite end of a small hotel from a conference of estate lawyers. Most of their conversation is...amusingly, at times, centred around the body parts that are wearing out and the wills they either have to write, rewrite, or challenge in court.
Fortunately I had brought snacks, because by the time they had caught each other up on the hip replacements (Mama Ticky) and the pasture-divison plans (Aunt Lilly) it was rather late. Still, we piled into Aunt Lilly's car and went down the seawall to Tortuga's where I ate possibly the spiciest shrimp I have ever had in my life. By the end I was eating sour cream, straight, to try and get the BURNING under control.
And then we came back and watched the news. The end. :D *faceplants into keyboard*
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