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In Appreciation of Dallas

You don’t know how really good you’ve got it here until you compare it with other cities.
By COURTNEY DENBY |

WHEN 1 ANNOUNCED LAST SPRING THAT my husband and I were moving to Dallas, my co-workers at Washing-tonian (the D Magazine of Washington, D.C.) wished me well and in the same breath predicted that it would be only a matter of months before my straight brown bob would become bleach-blond big hair.

Then came the comments: “’Do you want to live in Dallas?” “Didn’t a girl’s mother try to have another girl’s mol her killed over cheerleading?” “Is if close to Waco?”

I grew up in Denton, graduated from Baylor University and then moved to D.C. to work for the Bush administration. These were not the first anti-Texas sentiments I’d heard. One of my personal favorites: “They should put a fence around the state of Texas and call it (he hair museum of the world.”

After living in Washington for five years, 1 was somewhat ambivalent about moving back. Bui now that I’m here, I find myself appreciating the good things about living in Dallas that I’d always taken for granted.

Let’s start with a basic: water. 1 appreciate being able to drink Dallas water straight from the tap. Every so often the D.C. municipal government would issue a boiled-water alert due to high levels of bacteria in the drinking water. During such an alert, we could not even brush our teeth until lap water had been boiled for 10 minutes. There would be a run on bottled water at the grocery store (more on grocery shopping later) then for the next two or three days, the sanitation chemicals dumped into the city water made taking a shower feel and smell like diving into a chlorinated pool. Sometimes the city would say that only those people with suppressed immune systems should boil their water-relatively healthy people might suffer a bout of diarrhea but would survive.

I appreciate that in Dallas my trash is picked up every week. In D.C, sometimes the trash got picked up and sometimes it sat on the streets for weeks. At some point, the nightly news would report a rodent problem (I saw rats as big as small dogs) due to piled-up trash. And recycling was a joke. For a while, D.C. residents dutifully separated the glass and the cans and the paper, but the D.C. Department of Public Works put it all in the same truck. The media caught on and ran a story. The D.C. government ’s first response was that the glass, aluminum and paper were being “re-sorted” at the dump, but officials were busted again. They finally admitted they were not recycling because of “budget limitations.”

1 appreciate that we don’t get much snow in Dallas. As a Texan who drove to Colorado twice a year for snow skiing, I never thought I’d curse the white stuff, but during the winter of 19961 was fulminating in D.C. One storm dumped more than three feel of snow, and the streets in my Georgetown neighborhood never got plowed. For five days, the only vehicles that made it through Georgetown were four-wheel drives. Mayor Marion Barry’s first announcement was that 90 percent of the streets had been plowed; his second was that he had been mistaken-90 percent of the streets had not been plowed. (Barry’s street was part of the 10 percent that had been plowed.)

At the height of the storm, amid everyone’s bewilderment at the lack of plowing, Barry announced that everything was “under Control” because more than 1,000 parking tickets had been issued that day. As it turned out, many of the volunteers who had driven doctors and nurses to area hospitals in their utility vehicles had been rewarded with parking tickets.

Parking tickets were serious business in D.C., so I appreciate parking in Dallas- it’s usually free (or cheap), there are plenty of spaces and parking tickets are not a major revenue source for the city. As bad as D.C. is at providing drinking water and trash pick-up, the city is ruthlessly efficient when it comes to parking tickets. Meter maids rule the streets.

I appreciate grocery shopping in Dallas. Aisles here are wide enough for a Mack truck, the selection is mesmerizing, the lines are relatively short and people don’t make a habit of counting the items in my basket in the express check-out. In U.C., grocery shopping is a sport. There were two Safeways in our neighborhood; the “communist” Safeway, as it was known, had long lines and no selection, while the “social” Safeway had even longer lines in which people could fraternize. We’d get up at the crack of dawn; on weekends there could be a 30-minute wait to check out. It was a rare trip to Safe way when I didn’t witness something short of a fistfight over how many items someone took through the express lane. And during a snowstorm, when both Safeways ran out of basics like milk and bread, things got downright vicious.

I appreciate driving in Dallas. People here don’t honk and flip me off as much. I think Texans are generally afraid, ami rightly so, to be rude on the road for fear of being shot. Whatever the reason. I like it.

And if you think registering a car and gel-ting a driver’s license here is a hassle, think again. In D.C., registering a car is a time-consuming and expensive experience. For the 550,000 or so residents in D.C., there’s only one government-run station that inspects cars. The wait at the inspection station is usually two to three hours, so cars start lining up before 6 a.m. If your car passes inspection, you can proceed to the municipal building to get in line (another two to three hours) to produce a title, proof of insurance and driver’s license and to write a check for 8 percent of the book value of your car.

Al some point you have to get in another line (usually two hours) to take the written test. Once you’ve passed, it is time to stand in line again (usually an hour and a half) to have your picture taken and pay all the parking tickets that you thought you wouldn’t have to pay because you had Texas plates. Registering a car and getting a license usually requires taking the day off work and can cost close to $ 1,000 depending on the year and model of the vehicle ($800 for my Honda Civic).

In Dallas, you can get your car inspected at most gas stations. When we went to register our cars, the line was only a few people, instead of a few hundred people, deep, and it cost only $100 to register both.

I appreciate not paying a state income tax in Texas, but if I did I’m sure it would go to better use than my tax dollars in D.C. Imagine paying a tax on your income to a city that doesn’t plow your streets in a snowstorm, only pretends to recycle, does not pick up trash on a regular basis and sometimes asks you to boil your water before drinking it.

I appreciate that Dallas’ mayor. Ron Kirk, has not spent time in prison for smoking crack cocaine.

1 appreciate the slower pace of Dallas. When we moved here. I literally had to reprogram my brain and switch gears. So accustomed to hurried hellos, I had to concentrate on taking the time to visit. People here rarely fail to slow down long enough to ask me how I am and how the baby and I my mom are.

I appreciate that in Dallas, people greet each other when they are out walking or jogging. Sounds basic, but in D.C., I made a game out of trying to get people to respond to my hello when I passed them. I didn’t expect a conversation from every passer-by. but a “good morning” or even an acknowledging nod would have been nice.

I never thought I’d say this (after graduating from Baylor, where I was routinely bombarded with questions like “Are you saved?”), but 1 appreciate that Dallas is in the Bible Belt.

In Dallas, everyone seems to be concerned about my spiritual well-being. The afternoon that my husband arrived in Dallas (he’d driven our car from D.C.), we went to lunch at Eureka !, where we ran into one of my sorority sisters. I explained to her that my husband had literally just driven into town. Her response: “Have you found a church yet?” My husband (born and raised in D.C.) looked at me with a blank stare and I-realizing I was back in The Belt-just smiled and told the woman that we were still looking.

She wasn’t the only person who asked about church. The customer service rep at NationsBank asked, the checker at Tom Thumb asked, a woman at a Junior League meeting asked, our neighbors asked. In five years of living in D.C., only one person queried me about joining a church-a friend who had just moved from Dallas.

However, in Dallas, it always seems to come back to hair. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is almost impossible to live in this city of glamour girls as a mousy brunette. My co-workers in D.C. were partly right. As of a few weeks ago, my hair is blonder but not bigger…yet. And for those concerned about my soul-we just joined a church.

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