The good life
I found this note on the computer desktop:
Free chips and salsa with my Shiner on the patio of one of the bars on lower Greenville
Blues music live in a club
Lawry's barbecue
A steak at Texas Land and Cattle
My salary
It's obviously to do with our life in Dallas, Texas during my cotton-selling days in the mid-90s. I have no idea why I wrote it, but it seems to deal with some of the good things of living there. Those bars on lower Greenville were great for a sunny afternoon while the second-run movie theater was perfect for a rainy Sunday. They'd ripped out every second row of seats and put in small, round tables. Waiters crawling on their knees during the movie would take your order, and you could get beer, pizza, chicken, pop corn, stuff like that. Evenings were made for a round of the blues clubs. Stevie Ray Vaughan-style blues rock, sometimes more pure but still electric blues with an old black singer in front of a younger band. Steaks were divine -- anyone who says there's no difference between beef from cattle raised for eating and from cattle raised for milkmaking doesn't know what they're talking about.
I went to the Oilmen's Club not once, but twice, feeling like JR Ewing as I walked across the floor. The company received X'mas cards from Texas gov'r George W. Bush. Friendly strangers in shops and elevators would greet you, saying "Howdy. How do you think it goes?" and not knowing that they talked about the Dallas Cowboys and the Superbowl would set you off as a non-Texan in an instant, as did the quaint idea that gun control instead of teaching gun awareness to little kids in school could be a way to cut down on shootings.
Every bar worth its name had a tar bar for cigar smokers, and one bar had 150 beers on tap. One restaurant on McKinley made the best frozen margaruitas you could ever want with ice, crushed lime, tequila, cointreau and grand marnier to go with your chicken fajitas -- yet another nice way of whiling away a Sunday with friends.