Kate showed me a video of a Dallas concert for the band, Beck, in which the band has a group of puppets representing the band members doing things around Dallas. The first place the puppets visit is Texas Stadium in Irving Texas. This brought back memories of a trip that John Boswell and I made to Dallas to attend a wedding of Graham Gardner and his former wife (sad).
The wedding occurred on Saturday afternoon at the Methodist Church on the campus of SMU. It was a very pretty church and the service was nice. After the wedding, John and I showed ourselves by arranging to play a song about marriage and the travails of a husband and wife over the loud speaker at the reception in the large room that they had rented in the mega-hotel for the reception. Graham and his father in law and most of the folks thought the song was great. Graham's wife and mother-in-law thought otherwise (sad).
Anyway, after the wedding was over, John and I changed clothes and drove over on I-40 to Fort Worth, and spent a number of hours in the Stockyard District of the old part of town. It was fun. Very old fashioned and western. I loved it. We drank a lot of beer and ended up in a room in the hotel where we were playing guitars and entertaining rodeo cowboys, rodeo groupies and air line pilots from New Zealand. We ended up with kiwi key chains from the pilots. They loved us. John and I are convinced that we have legendary status in parts of New Zealand now.
Anyway, at the end of a long night that stretched into early morning, we drove back to the La Quinta in eastern Dallas. As I drove down I-40 through Irving, John pointed out Texas Stadium to me. I turned my head to the left and tried to focus on the stadium. As I did this, I experienced a sensation in which the stadium appeared to turn over on its side and I was looking down into the stadium from above. As I realized the precariousness of this position, I jerked my head back forward in front of the car and continued on our journey back to Dallas. My sole vision was a small box of clarity in front of me, heading eastward toward Dallas.
Later that morning, we slept for about two hours at the La Quinta, until Cindy called and asked if we were on our way back to Atlanta. Saying yes, I tried to get John up and moving. In an hour or so, we were back on the road to Georgia. Later, we made a side trip to Tyler (for some reason necessary to John) and an even better side trip to the battlefield park at Vicksburg. That was amazing.
The one thing I remember about Vicksburg other than the battlefield, which stretches from one end of Vicksburg to the other, was the fact that apparently all the women in Vicksburg were ravishingly beautiful and all the men were ugly and deformed. I guess the combination of the two keeps them at a moderate position which prevents them from creating a population of trolls or fairy princesses.
There is a fairy tale aspect to Vicksburg, which, oddly, I discovered in a convenience store attached to a gas station. It is truly amazing what you will discover in such places.
We got back to Atlanta and I recovered the lost sleep from the night before. A long journey but a lot of fun.
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