We are not going back!

Rusk – Madisonville, TX

Those of us who bike with Diana very much know that wind direction is very important to her. Not as important as butter or cream, but almost as important as having a good reserve – like a minimum of 15 bars or so – of baking chocolate around. I mean, just in case. You never know when there might be a world-wide shortage of baking chocolate. And then what would you do?

I think all of this is related to Diana’s upbringing. I mean, I’ve never done psychotherapy on her or anything, but we’ve been together for 36 years and we’ve been married for 29 years – so I have some idea here anyway. 

You see, she grew up with three brothers – so competition for food was fierce. And her Mom, while a good cook in her younger years (it all went downhill as she aged and she decided that salt was the root of all evil – but I loved her cooking when we first started dating), never had a sweet tooth. Really, as far as I can tell, the Chinese are not particularly strong on dessert items. I love the sesame ball – the fried outside around the sweet red bean paste, mmm – but other than that there are just not a lot of strong options. 

The point being that there were very few sweets in Diana’s house growing up. And definitely no meaningful butter, cream, or sugar – and almost certainly no baking chocolate. Worse, Diana’s Dad, Dr. Liu to you and I, did have a sweet tooth – and he used to secret little pieces of chocolate away around the house – hidden in plants and such – so that Diana and her brothers wouldn’t eat it all. 

The combination of scarcity and this learned secreting away behavior had a profound effect on her tender psyche. I can just see her on the couch with Dr. Freud now. He’s asking about Mommy and Daddy complexes, and Diana’s just sitting there talking about salted versus unsalted versus Irish butter, and whether it is better to buy individual baking chocolate bars or to just go to Costco and buy them out altogether . . .

So you can see – when I say that wind direction is almost as important as baking chocolate in the lexicon of Diana’s mind, it is a very strong statement. 

One last clarification. For Diana the commandment related to wind goes like this: Thou shalt never start out biking with the wind, lest thou shall eventually have to turn around and come back into the wind. It’s really a pretty good commandment overall. Not as good as not coveting thy neighbor’s wife, but a good useful rule of thumb.

Now that we have that established we can get to our story. I’ll grant you that this story maybe didn’t merit such a build-up, but either you tell a story or you don’t . . .

So we’re about 65 miles into a really long and hot ride today. We have another 18 miles to go – just to get to a hotel that we don’t even want to go to – but this being Texas there are Texas-sized gaps between campgrounds – and we’ve found one of them. 

Fortunately, the wind is at our back today. The area that we’re in now is very quintessential Texas (not that I know since this is the first time I’ve been here – but it’s how I envision it based on the show Dallas and the book Lonesome Dove and stuff like that) – with open fields where the wind can build up speed with only occasional beef cattle to slow it down. So the wind at our backs is awesome!

We’ve stopped at a convenience store to re-fill our water bottles and enjoy a minute of air conditioning. Diana, who is always finding information in ways that I can’t quite fathom, announces that there is a rodeo tonight. 

“Really?” I ask. “Where?” 

And now my mind is working: Would love to see a rodeo. Maybe they let people camp at the rodeo. Probably the cowboys need to camp and maybe some of the people who come watch. This seems promising. 

“We already passed where it is,” Diana says. 

“How far back?” I ask, hopefully.

And then Diana says . . . Wait for it . . .

”We’re not going back. No. We’re not going back!” What is left unsaid  – but is obviously at the root of this strong statement – is that going back would violate Diana’s Wind Commandment.

Now, Diana has actually been Asian since day one. So Trump cannot attack her there. And, really, as strong as Kamala is, Diana is stronger. So when she says we’re not going back – we’re really not going back . . . There won’t be a vote, or a contested election on this one. The die is cast . . .

The upshot is that I’m now sitting in the hotel room of the Quality Inn in Madisonville, next to the biggest Christmas store in the world; we’re not at the really cool rodeo where I’m sure they would have let us camp.

Which brings me to the Christmas store. They have Santas and reindeers everywhere in this store. Which of us thinks Santa or his reindeer ever come to Texas outside of a very quick trip on Christmas Eve in order to drop off presents for the few Texans who voted blue in the last election and who, thus, are not on the naughty list? I mean, come on!

Worse, there is a store across the street that we’ve been hearing about for several states now: BUC-EES. Doesn’t sound so bad, until you realize that this is a Texas store that is named after a beaver. Do they even have beavers in Texas? I know they have alligators. But beavers? I don’t think so. I mean there might be some swamp up in northern Texas that has the beaver family equivalent of the cousins in the movie Vacation. 

And this is on top of the theft of the NorthStars. How many things can the Texans try to steal from us? Santa Claus. Reindeer. Beavers. Why don’t they just call themselves Gophers? So sad. 

The ride? The first half of the day was beautiful in a wooded kind of way. I think we were in Davy Crockett National Forest. The second half was also pretty, but in more of a big sky type of way. 

I can’t forget cotton. We saw cotton growing for the first time. It’s crazy. Cotton plants actually grow cotton balls. It would be like if there were refrigerator or television plants – and they just had refrigerators or televisions growing on them – just waiting to be plucked. So that was a revelation for both of us. And inspired Diana to start singing some song she knows from her childhood about cotton and Dixie or something. (Another thing I don’t understand about Diana. How does she know all this stuff?)

We also spent some time on the El Camino Real historic route. I need to find out more about this. What was the El Camino Real? Why do there seem to be El Camino Reals all over the place (when we visit California I am always seeing the El Camino Real)?

And last question for the day: Who is Davy Crockett? Is he the same person as Daniel Boone? I asked the cashier at the convenience store where we talked about the rodeo about this. She didn’t know who either of them were. Which is strange because the town of Crockett is right down the road – and I guess Davy Crockett camped where that town is located on his way to the Alamo, where he ended up dying in the fighting (all gleaned from the historical markers in Crockett). 

Lots of blog reader points at stake here. Who can clarify the El Camino Real question? Who can, in a meaningful way, distinguish between Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone? Who can explain why the biggest Christmas store in the world is in Madisonville, Texas? 

Postscript. Diana wanted to sing the Dixie song for everyone to show how ridiculous it is that her husband didn’t know it, but she has subsequently discovered that that song is like Gone with the Wind – kind of frowned upon these days . . .