Imagry
My dad lured me to his house for lunch with promises of the best barbeque in the whole wide world*, and we were stopped by a cop directing traffic while something was being unloaded in front of his building. We paused for a second, and then were waved through to my parents' building.
Today is a beautiful day: Blue skys, not too humid, plenty of sunshine and breeze, in the mid 70s. My parents sold their five bedroom house when Liv finished college, and they bought a one-bedroom loft on the top story of a new mid-rise building. They hired Jose to tweak the inside a bit a little when they first moved in, and the house is truly wonderful. Their only complaint is that they keep on running out of wall space for their art. That complaint would probably persist in any home they owned.
And as awesome as the inside is, the outside is even more impressive. 3500 square feet of deck that looks to the south and to the west. Incredible views, hundreds of pots** of flowers and roses and fig trees and pomegranate and crepe myrtles and citrus. Two dining areas, three seating areas. A hot tub. And an endless breeze, even on really fucking hot Houston summer days. And it's high enough so the mosquitoes don't usually get there.
Choosing where to eat the best barbeque in the whole wide world was not difficult, especially what was going on down below on the street.
My parents live right next door to Holocaust Museum, and their balcony overlooks the Museum's grounds. The musuem was designed to be an abstraction of the ovens that the Nazis used to burn people. It's a modern design, and I think its a fairly cool building. Right now there's an exhibit on Darfur going on.
Today, though, they were delivering a new piece for the museum's permanent exhibition. A few days ago, they extended a wall outside and built a platform. We'd seen rails on the platform, and we thought that maybe it was a further abstraction of how Holocaust victims were delivered to concentration camps.
But it wasn't an abstraction.
The cop that had waved us through was part of the team delivering a railway car that was dangling in the air when we'd driven by. When my father and I saw it as we pulled up to their house, we immediately knew what it was. It didn't need to be marked or labeled or in any other way identified. It was smaller than a cattle car, and it didn't have as many gaps between slats for air. The roof was canvas and concave (or is that convex? I always get those mixed up), and there was a door that looked like it would slide open. It looked like the car was freshly painted, but I have a feeling that it probably was originally the same color.
We just watched them unload it in silence.
It was much more disturbing than a lot of the other things I'd seen at the museum. Knowing how many people had been stuffed in there. Knowing that some probably didn't make it alive out of there. Knowing how many thousands of other cars just like it there had been. Looking at it, innocently dangling in the air on a pretty spring day in Houston, Texas, was sort of surreal.
I pass by the Holocaust Musuem so many times in the course of a week, I sometimes forget that it's even there and what it means. It's something that adds to the amazing view from my parents' balcony. But I think that this car, this simple vehicle of transporting things from point A to point B, will help me to remember a lot more frequently as to what that museum stands for.
*>Barbeque cookoff this weekend! Head to Lee County's entry for a rough approximation of the BBBQitWWW.
**Those hundreds of pots were a fucking pain in the ass to move when we were evacuating for Rita.
Today is a beautiful day: Blue skys, not too humid, plenty of sunshine and breeze, in the mid 70s. My parents sold their five bedroom house when Liv finished college, and they bought a one-bedroom loft on the top story of a new mid-rise building. They hired Jose to tweak the inside a bit a little when they first moved in, and the house is truly wonderful. Their only complaint is that they keep on running out of wall space for their art. That complaint would probably persist in any home they owned.
And as awesome as the inside is, the outside is even more impressive. 3500 square feet of deck that looks to the south and to the west. Incredible views, hundreds of pots** of flowers and roses and fig trees and pomegranate and crepe myrtles and citrus. Two dining areas, three seating areas. A hot tub. And an endless breeze, even on really fucking hot Houston summer days. And it's high enough so the mosquitoes don't usually get there.
Choosing where to eat the best barbeque in the whole wide world was not difficult, especially what was going on down below on the street.
My parents live right next door to Holocaust Museum, and their balcony overlooks the Museum's grounds. The musuem was designed to be an abstraction of the ovens that the Nazis used to burn people. It's a modern design, and I think its a fairly cool building. Right now there's an exhibit on Darfur going on.
Today, though, they were delivering a new piece for the museum's permanent exhibition. A few days ago, they extended a wall outside and built a platform. We'd seen rails on the platform, and we thought that maybe it was a further abstraction of how Holocaust victims were delivered to concentration camps.
But it wasn't an abstraction.
The cop that had waved us through was part of the team delivering a railway car that was dangling in the air when we'd driven by. When my father and I saw it as we pulled up to their house, we immediately knew what it was. It didn't need to be marked or labeled or in any other way identified. It was smaller than a cattle car, and it didn't have as many gaps between slats for air. The roof was canvas and concave (or is that convex? I always get those mixed up), and there was a door that looked like it would slide open. It looked like the car was freshly painted, but I have a feeling that it probably was originally the same color.
We just watched them unload it in silence.
It was much more disturbing than a lot of the other things I'd seen at the museum. Knowing how many people had been stuffed in there. Knowing that some probably didn't make it alive out of there. Knowing how many thousands of other cars just like it there had been. Looking at it, innocently dangling in the air on a pretty spring day in Houston, Texas, was sort of surreal.
I pass by the Holocaust Musuem so many times in the course of a week, I sometimes forget that it's even there and what it means. It's something that adds to the amazing view from my parents' balcony. But I think that this car, this simple vehicle of transporting things from point A to point B, will help me to remember a lot more frequently as to what that museum stands for.
*>Barbeque cookoff this weekend! Head to Lee County's entry for a rough approximation of the BBBQitWWW.
**Those hundreds of pots were a fucking pain in the ass to move when we were evacuating for Rita.