Senior Moments

by Willard Spiegelman

  The university trustees and supporters like to use the label “traditional,” instead of “conservative” or “conventional,” to describe their aesthetic preferences. These preferences reflect the prevailing political views of the city fathers, the ruling class. Although Texas has always had a strong populist tradition—kept alive by The Texas Observer and, until her death, the journalist Molly Ivins—Dallas has been fairly immune to it. The city of Dallas, with its increasing Hispanic population, votes Democratic, as does Houston, but Texas suburbs and gerrymandered districting keep Republican politicians in office. Although the city has successfully moved beyond its post-1963 shame, older citizens can still remember with embarrassment that this is where Adlai Stevenson was spat upon and where the John Birch Society had strong local support. Racial conflicts that sometimes literally burned through other American cities in the 1960s merely simmered here; to its credit, Dallas ended de jure if not de facto segregation quietly. It was better for business as well as the city’s reputation. Enlightened leaders like the late mayor Erik Jonsson and the late merchant prince Stanley Marcus helped the city recover from its status as international pariah. In 2013, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, some Dallasites still felt a need to make amends. Others pointed out that where Buffalo and Washington, D.C., are never held responsible for the deaths of Presidents McKinley, Lincoln, and Garfield, the city of Dallas, not Lee Harvey Oswald alone, shares the blame for what happened here. Larry McMurtry, the unofficial literary spokesman for contemporary as well as mythic Texas, has had a longtime aversion to Dallas, which he has labeled “a city run by and for bankers. This is good if you are a banker. If not, not.”

  Dallas is, in ways that New York is not, America itself. Dallas—how many new American cities are different?—can now be defined by its commitment to big-time sports and big-time religion. To say that sport is religion is no understatement. Whenever an academic like me tries to persuade university administrators that spending more money on pseudo-professional teams (read: football) is like pouring money down a drain, or observes that every defense for Division I athletics (they raise money; they draw attention to the school; they promote school spirit) has been proved categorically untrue, eventually someone will play the trump card: “But this is Texas, and this is football.” End of discussion. Whenever the Dallas Cowboys play in the Super Bowl—not that they have done so in years—the city’s water pressure plummets during television commercials, because everyone goes to the bathroom and flushes the toilet at the same time.

  Some years ago, I used to frequent a barbershop, not a posh unisex salon, but an old-fashioned place with fluorescent lights; high, plumped revolving leather chairs; manicurists who called everyone “Hon”; and paunchy, affable heterosexual good-ole-boy barbers who wore jeans and cowboy belt buckles and who did not take long to give a haircut. One Tuesday, my barber asked me whether I’d seen Troy Aikman’s winning touchdown pass in the Monday night Cowboys game. I confessed that I hadn’t. Obviously sensing that I was not keeping up my end of the conversation, my barber, Dwayne, said, “Oh, I guess you’re not a football fan.”

  “No,” I replied, “not really.”

  “You watch baseball, then?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I don’t follow baseball, either.”

  “Wait, son, if you don’t like football and you don’t like baseball, what do you like?”

  I hesitated, not really thinking, and blurted out naively, “Opera.” Only the sound of a pair of scissors hitting the floor broke the silence.

  Even a non-observing, non-believing person cannot avoid noticing the pervasiveness of religion throughout the region. Although the entire Bible Belt has expanded, encircling the girth of much of the country, Dallas may be the buckle of the belt. Roadside churches, billboards, advertisements, meet the eye everywhere. For more than a month around Easter, sometimes even longer, ritzy Highland Park lawns sport tasteful little crosses planted in the front yards proclaiming, “He Is Risen!” It’s enough to make a secular person cringe. When I was growing up, religion was a private affair. Now it is unashamedly and evangelically public, touting not only a message but also an affirmation of the good faith of the believers, who are patting themselves on the back.

  Like our southern presidents “Jimmy” Carter and “Bill” Clinton, preachers usually dispense with all formality now. America has abandoned or at least suspended last names. The South has led the way. There’s Dr. Jim, Reverend Don, Father Steve, Pastor Wally, not to mention Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart. Large posters with pictures of these smiling men of God with their pressed hair dot the local freeways.

  The United States now prides itself on being a land more than friendly to religion, especially friendly religion. Southern hospitality has become the national religious custom: “Y’all come back, y’hear?” “Y’all don’t make strangers of yourselves.” Religion, all-inclusive, nonthreatening, welcomes and draws us in, like big potluck picnics. On the side of the laity, “Sunday best” now means ironed jeans and starched shirts for tieless men, although their womenfolk hew—at church as in the workplace—to a less relaxed standard. As Americans have come to profess their faiths more openly, they have become more casual in their rituals. Fear and Trembling have made way for Hugs and High Fives. Religion Lite has become the equivalent of low-cal, low-carb diets, especially in the happy planting of spirituality in the suburbs. What would Jesus do? In Dallas, he would probably live in a new house, drive an SUV, coach his kids’ soccer team, and greet people at Sunday services by stretching out his mighty hand and asking, “Hi! How y’all doin’?” Pope Francis must have been paying attention, when making his cold calls, to his Protestant brethren.

  Let me be fair: It’s not just the mainstream Christians who have felt the pull of convenience and ease. Some years ago, a local couple, the age of my parents, invited me to join them for Kol Nidre services at the most prominent reform synagogue in Dallas, the largest Jewish congregation in the South. Because on the holiest night of the religious calendar the congregation overflows the sanctuary’s seating capacity, Temple Emanu-El has two services. My hosts suggested we make our appearance at the earlier one, after which we would go out for an elegant Italian dinner (rather than the traditional at-home Jewish meal of roast chicken or pot roast). “Thank you so much,” I said, “but even I know that you’re supposed to eat before sundown and then go to shul and fast for twenty-four hours.”

  “Oh, yes,” they smilingly allowed, “but this will be much more fun.” Who was I to complain? When in Dallas …

  And when in Dallas, one eats Dallas foods as well as eating on a Dallas schedule. We now have our share of artisanal cheeses, microbreweries, expensive chewy bread, gleaming organic produce, and international specialties. Whole Foods got its start in Austin; Dallas was one of its first venues outside the Hill Country. South American, Indian, Vietnamese, Middle Eastern, and African markets exist in neighborhood pockets. Forty-five years ago, all store-bought bread was of the Wonder sort, soft and tasteless, and lettuce meant iceberg. Liquor by the glass was not available in restaurants; you had to become a member for a nominal fee. Not any longer. We have become international, and “ethnic” means more than Tex-Mex. Where once we had only the mystique of Coors beer—made from the purest water in the Rocky Mountains and never sold east of the Mississippi—we now have home brew that actually tastes like something.

  Modifications, especially in pronunciation, have been made. The universal flaky French breakfast pastry is referred to as a “crah-sant” (as it is almost everywhere). No amount of correction will succeed in getting a Dallasite’s mouth around the actual word. I have also given up my efforts to get the staff at delicatessens to change the signs reading “proscuitto” to “prosciutto.” Or to remind the uninterested, unaware cafeteria and coffeehouse student personnel that an Italian sandwich is called a “panino,” not a “panini,” as they say here and—well—virtually everywhere in America. And, likewise, that a single cookie is
not a “biscotti,” or two of them “biscottis.” Linguists can explain these changes as the natural Americanization of a Romance language. I still don’t like them. Call me a dinosaur.

  Linguistic purists will wince, but I have softened in my disapproval even as the words and sounds still strike me as tinny. A biscotto by any other name will taste as sweet anywhere you eat it. Still, the availability of asparagus out of season, and of international foods everywhere, and the post–Alice Waters sophistication of the American palate have had, as a downside, the effect of making a middle-aged person or a senior citizen as nostalgic for the comfort foods and watering holes of yore as he is for the old accents that have been absorbed by the blandness of standard American. In Dallas, culinary nostalgia means a yearning for sweets and fats, the favored food groups, and cafeterias, the preferred locale of all social strata, especially after church on Sunday or on cook’s night out during the week. (Some people still have cooks.) When the Zodiac Room at Neiman Marcus reached its zenith as the ne plus ultra of culinary art in the mid-1950s, a glutinously sweet poppy seed dressing was the covering of choice for both green and fruit salads. Even today, in our more refined condition, the bottomless glass of iced tea goes with everything, all the time. Tea in a pot must be ordered as “hot tea”; “tea,” tout simple, means the ubiquitous Drink of the South, available in varying degrees of sweetness.

  To someone like me, who grew up with and in the East Coast’s Horn and Hardarts—both the Automat and the cafeteria—the grandeur of Texas cafeterias was awe-inspiring. The old drill was standard. The line began with “congeals,” an all-purpose label embracing wedges of iceberg lettuce, deviled eggs, Waldorf salads, ambrosia, aspics, and Jell-O molds of extraordinary complexity and variety. It progressed through main dishes that included southern hash, a succulent mixture of brisket and onions, and proceeded to bitter greens (collard, mustard), four kinds of cooked okra, yellow squash casserole topped with cornflakes, and overcooked green beans that you had to avoid at all costs. Then you came to the section for breads, including yeasty white rolls that emitted a puff of steam when you opened them and corn bread that remained moist and did not crumble. The line ended with desserts that would have inspired Wayne Thiebaud paintings: the pies—cherry, coconut, banana cream, other fruits in season—plain yellow cake, multilayered German chocolate cake, and some puddings. A high-class place used whipped cream; a less attentive one, some chemical imitation. And iced tea accompanied everything.

  Local food, la cocina tejana, has at least one pinnacle, which many scorn but which I adore: chicken-fried steak. The best version used to be served at a now defunct lunchtime-only cafeteria near downtown. The restaurant’s motto: “We Cook for Texans, Not Frenchmen.” After thirty-five years of waking up at four in the morning, shopping at the farmers’ market, opening the doors, doing the cooking, cleaning up, and getting home at four in the afternoon, the tired owners announced they were closing their shop. Their announcement initiated a month of local mourning. During the final week, the lines snaked around the block; people like me took pictures of our last meal. Tears were shed. Jane and Michael Stern, tireless aficionados of American diner food, touted the place in Roadfood and Goodfood, and no one ever ate more chicken-fried steak than these two well-traveled, well-fed Yankees.

  The concept is simple, but the proper execution can be tricky: you bang to death a thin piece of meat of not very high quality, you batter it with what you normally use for fried chicken, you fry it quickly to sear in the steak’s juices, and you serve it with a rich, creamy, peppery gravy, accompanied with homemade mashed potatoes and greens with a strong iron taste. In bad places, the gravy looks and tastes like wallpaper glue. For dessert? La pièce de résistance: peanut butter pie, silky, lacy, in a crust made with lard and covered with whipped cream. And one never expected to go back to the office for a full afternoon of hard labor: a two-hour siesta was called for, plus an additional dose of Lipitor and/or an arterial vacuuming. Texas food will not qualify as part of anyone’s low-fat, low-sodium, or low-carb regimen. As in other areas of local culture, nothing succeeds like excess.

  I am no expert, but I must offer a modest word regarding the two most popular local cuisines, Tex-Mex and barbecue, subjects about which people have said a great deal, spilled much ink, and raised many hackles. The first is a hybrid affair that deserves more respect in an age of hyphenated diversities. We distinguish it from California-Mex, which uses more avocados and pretends to be lighter and healthier; from New Mexico–Mex, which substitutes green chilies for our red ones; and from authentic, multifaceted Mexican cuisine, in which the black bean, rather than the brown pinto frijole, predominates. Redoubtable Tex-Mex has promoted a cuisine of poverty to respectability. Beans, chilies, and onions lend a Texas accent to brisket, rather than pork or other cuts of beef. When I moved to Texas from Boston, where brisket was available mostly in Jewish neighborhoods, I took heart when I learned that it was a staple throughout gentile Dallas. More recently, Dallas can lay claim to having invented fajitas, not an authentic Mexican dish at all, and the frozen margarita, a distinctly yanqui concoction. (On another front, in 1951 a local secretary invented Liquid Paper in her garage to help her undo her too frequent typing mistakes. Texas ingenuity knows no bounds.)

  A related north-of-the-Rio-Grande-food cuisine, barbecue has inspired partisans and combatants throughout the South. Experts call it vitamin Q. People take sides. This is serious business, or “bidnis” as they say down here. Do you use pork or brisket? In Texas, only brisket. Pulled, shredded, sliced, chopped? What kind of wood for the smoking? At what temperature and for how long? What, if any, kind of sauce? A dry marinade or a wet one? A small west Texas ghost town, Terlingua, hosts an annual chili cook-off. Football is not the only thing to produce intense competitive rivalry.

  Barbecue has made forays into the hipper precincts of Brooklyn and elsewhere throughout the States. Regardless of how you like it, the point of barbecue is that it is messy. The worldliest, most sophisticated hosts know to take out-of-town, especially international, guests to the little roadside shacks that have the best stuff. Or even to serve it at home on fine china. Just as Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt gave hot dogs to King George and Queen Elizabeth when the royals visited Hyde Park, so our local gentry, taking their cue from the late Stanley Marcus, always do the Texas thing for our visitors. Several years ago, I had to entertain a prominent New York writer coming to give a reading. I asked whether she would prefer an elegant continental meal or down and dirty barbecue. “How could you even ask that question, Willard?” she replied. Stanley Marcus was an arbiter of fashion in more than couture. Why, after all, give your guests quenelles de brochet sauce Nantua, coulibiac de saumon, or veau Prince Orloff, those tired old-world masterpieces?

  At the 1989 opening of the Meyerson Symphony Center, a glamorous local philanthropist threw a meal for visiting music and architecture critics at her pink mansion. It was late August, not Dallas’s most promising or hospitable season. The temperature as well as the humidity hovered in the mid-nineties, but we ate buffet-style, al fresco, under the fragrant magnolias. The spread: barbecue, pinto beans, three types of coleslaw, corn bread, fried okra, and pecan pie, all washed down with bottles of Lone Star beer and pitchers of iced tea. The press could not get enough of it. Journalists are not known for delicacy or fastidiousness to start with, but I knew that our hostess had made the right choice when I saw celebrated British and German music critics jostling and pushing one another to get back in line for seconds and thirds. Barbecue sauce covered shirts and ties, jackets having long since been removed. “I learned this from Stanley,” the hostess said to me. The Old World reveled in its collision or collaboration with the Wild West. We were locavores before the word had gained its current cachet.

  * * *

  Thinking about a place inevitably means thinking of any place, of the idea of place itself and its relationship to human identity. Some people feel at home everywhere, some people nowhere. Most of us have
greater attachments to some places than to others, for reasons ranging from habit to aesthetic preferences. My thoughts, above, about Dallas began with bodily things—details of temperature and humidity—and ended with food. Eating is also of the body. Wallace Stevens wrote, “Beauty is momentary in the mind … / But in the flesh it is immortal.” He is suggesting the difficulty of registering, on the pulses of memory, a memory of and from the senses. The body constantly receives messages, but the mind, that poor sieve, retains only a faint recollection of the shape of an experience. Amy Clampitt once remarked that only a person who knew what it was like, deep in her bones, to be cold could fully appreciate Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes” and its opening in the bitter chill of a January night. But once winter has passed, did Clampitt, or Keats, or any “Snow Man” really recall that chill? Does the body have a mind of its own? Thinking back to an experience, can I say, “This is what happened”? I know, in my mind, that I have felt Dallas heat and its effects on body and spirit, the ways it debilitates, irritates, and fatigues me as cold never can. The recalled pleasures of certain foods stick with me after their tastes have vanished. Wordsworth makes an odd, provocative distinction in The Prelude: “the soul, / Remembering how she felt, but what she felt / Remembering not” (italics mine). It is as though this great poet of childhood were saying something like “I knew that I was happy but I cannot remember what happiness was, or even what it was like.” The process of remembering takes precedence over nameable feelings.