THE WAY WE LIVE Dallas is in (surprise)…Texas

Tell me this is an odd complaint, and I will agree. But that won’t make it go away. On any given day, after too many hours in the car, after too many visits to strip shopping centers, after a tour through the TV department at Sears where 35 color television sets are all tuned to the same newscast showing the same kid in Sarajevo wearing the same David Letterman T-shirt, I can’t remember where this is. Is this anywhere? Nowhere? Everywhere?

In our parochial smugness we tend to think of New York as a contrived environment, a man-made thing, an arrangement that could be anywhere people wanted to make il. But in New York the rivers and the sea and the gulls and the huge expanse of Central Park intervene to remind people that once upon a time the Indians lived there. Somehow that makes it a place-a place with claws in the earth.

In Dallas something about central air conditioning, going everywhere in a car, walking in malls in the winter and never seeing a park much bigger than a school yard, something about the flat lid of the sky looming out over the endless flat plop of the land, David Letterman’s dufus grin shining at me from a thousand chests-1 just forget. I can’t remember if this is here or there or where on Earth.

I told my wife I needed to re-establish a sense of place. She suggested a cheap vacation. My own thoughts turned to Lake Superior, She suggested the Frio River. west of San Antonio. As a compromise, we went to the Frio River, west of San Antonio. It was wonderful. It’s like Michigan with poisonous snakes.

On the way home, we spent two days in San Antonio, a block from the Alamo. I am the Yankee of the pair. She is the fourth-generation Texan.

She took our son. Will, to the Alamo five limes in the course of two full days. In all they put in at least three full hours of Alamo time. That does not count the time we spent watching the Alamo movie at the IMAX Theater. Nor does it count the time back at the hotel room where she solemnly recited the story, explained each facet of it and read different interpretations of it in various children’s books.

My wife remembers visiting the Alamo when people spoke in whispers. She remembers listening to her mother tell the story of the heroic defenders, then stepping inside the mission and having goose bumps thinking of the men who had died there.

Now people talk out loud in the Alamo. But, given that it’s the ’90s and people talk out loud in movies and wear shorts to worship, I would have to say the people I saw inside the Alamo were relatively reverential.

Back at the room my son made a paper flag that he wanted to attach to a long stick. He asked me how to spell “VICTORY OR DEATH.” My own sense of history and the world made me shrink. 1 wanted to spell it, “VICTORY. DEATH OR POSSIBLY EMIGRATION.”

I’m just not very big on death. Especially as a major theme in early childhood. How about “VICTORY OR DARN.” “VICTORY OR WE HAVE TO PLAY AGAIN.” And victory. I just don’t know about victory. I can think of other things. 1 remember a man 1 used to work for. a West Texas type, whose idea of a fun evening was sitting on the other side of a booth in a bar drinking whisky and staring at me in unblinking silence. If I had a flag it would have said. “CONVERSATION OR DEATH.”

It’s good to drive back home through the country. It’s great. You tell yourself you’re going to see people working the land, and mostly you don’t because the people have all moved to Arlington and Richardson where they work split shifts. You tell yourself you’re going to meet colorful old coots in the general store, and mostly you don’t because they don’t have a general store anymore, they have a Split-Second Mart selling the same livid-red rotisserie hot dogs they sell at the Split-Second Mart near your house in East Dallas, and the woman behind the counter is not colorful but depressed looking, and she just moved to this small town last week, and if you speak to her she will ask you if you are a lawyer.

But those are just the facts at the moment. The real facts. Norman Rockwell farm families and quaint hick towns: That’s not what’s out on the land anymore. The little towns haven’t been viable since World War II. Farming is all performed by French chemists. It’s not a thing to regret. It’s a thing to know.

Driving back up from the Alamo, you have to embrace it, all of it, even the outlet malls, because it was all bought with blood, and because your wife is training your son to believe he has to die for it if Santa Anna ever comes back.

You have to stare, peer, and see those loony Tennesseans loping down across the grasslands with their long rifles and their coonskin caps, riding right through the middle of the outlet malls, passing through the walls of the buildings like light through glass, looking fora fight at the Alamo.

Of course it’s all man-made, Of course it’s all contrived, Who do you think made the Alamo, Martians? There was probably even a guy sitting around San Antonio complaining and caviling when they built it, sneering and saying, “Oh great, just what we need, yet another generic mission complex.” What a jerk.

I felt much better when I got back, and I had a better sense of place. A better attitude. A real sense of rootedness.

So get in your car. Drive out of town. Sit in some dirt. Touch a tree. Read a plaque. Arm yourself with place. Tell me this. How on earth can they have David Letterman T-shirts already in Sarajevo? Who cares? Be here! (I’m OK as long as I don’t have to go to Addison.)