I knew that I would not be called upon to take any significant role in the inevitable parade, but I wanted the best vantage point possible. So, I searched through my contacts for the number of my oldest, most faithful friend, the Romanian taxi driver who had saved my life on so many occasions. Even though he was clearly the best person for the job, I had two nagging reservations about calling him. The first issue was that I had never actually been to Romania, never walked 1.6 kilometers in his shoes. The thought and culture police would hear his stilted accent in my mind and accuse me of culturally appropriating him. I met him years before this was considered a problem and I am reluctant to allow it to color my relationship with the best damn taxi driver and most reliable friend a man could have. His sense of direction can be frightening, but his loyalty is unquestionable. When he is by my side I am always reminded that it is more important who you are with than where you are going.
The second problem that I have been wrestling with since our last adventure is that my Romanian taxi driver is quite possibly totally imaginary. Fortunately I live in a town where mermaids populate the peripheral vision of all the residents, trickily morphing into humans when observed directly. We forgive ourselves quickly for lapses in reality in San Marcos.
You can imagine my relief when, despite my concerns, he showed up at the house only slightly late in a newish Mazda with a handful of candies for the girls. I felt a pang of sadness that he had traded in his Peugot 504, an old school Cairene black and white taxi, for a modern sedan. But who am I to hold my friend in place? His smile and enduring confidence were the same. We embraced and set off into town.
The town was aflutter with activity. On the square, under the shadow of a large bronze statue of Jack Hays, our mayor stood on a hastily constructed stage and excitedly shouted orders to what appeared to be members of the high school football team. They had been volunteered by their coach to help with the lifting and moving of things. The mayor was a kind soul, whom everybody in town seemed to like, though nobody could actually remember voting for him. He was elected on a two plank platform. The first was renaming an alley that jutted off the square, 'The Kissing Alley'. His second promise was to bring mermaids out of the periphery and grant them full, perhaps even enhanced, citizenship. I personally could care less what you call an alley, though I am suspicious that the mayor's activities in that alley had been different than mine, or most of my fellow graduates of SWT. If we had called it anything, it would probably have been the 'peeing alley' or maybe even the 'puking alley'.
The recognition of the ever present mermaids struck a deeper cord, curiously uniting in descent three seemingly disparate groups - devotees of a nearly forgotten swimming pig named Ralph, those who are uncomfortable with the cultural implications of characters that seem to fetishize feminine beauty and vulnerability, and sailors who both desire and fear the formerly mythical creatures. As a sailor, a father of daughters, and a fan of Ralph, I find the mermaid movement unsettling at best.
Perhaps in some token nod to the cult of Ralph, hog hunters were brought in from Luling for the parade. They would be running wild hogs through the streets, behind the middle school marching band in the parade line up. There were obvious concerns about safety and sanitation, but the hog hunters confidently reported there would be no unseemly incidents. They assured the city counsel that their heavy chested, square headed dogs could keep the hogs under control, while delighting local children with abundant tail wagging and face licking sweetness. As the parade was to end at the Rio Vista waterfall, there was even a chance that fans of Ralph would have the increasingly rare opportunity to see pigs swimming, as they had done regularly during simpler days of yore.
At the airport, a group of mariachis were gathered and practicing to welcome the guests. Clearly somebody had to be on the ground, ready to perform the moment the plane landed and the door opened, our honored visitors experiencing San Marcos for the first time. A city counsel member had suggested that a line of hula dancers present the guests with leis, but that seemed more confusing than ironic. Another idea, which unwittingly revealed deeper fissures in our seemingly harmonious town's culture, was that Little Miss Cinco de Mayo could perform a Selena song, wearing a sequined push up bra and a ridiculous floppy hat. The town's anglos reportedly felt beleaguered in their attempts to rectify a clear desire to bridge the gap with their hispanic neighbors with their unwavering insistence that most Selena songs were jarringly annoying to actually listen to, regardless of their cultural significance. Fortunately San Marcos is blessed with an abundance of talented mariachis who graciously took their places on the tarmac, at least delaying the debate for another day and cementing the illusion of unity. Everybody loves mariachis.
Perhaps it was our collective desire to impress the outsiders that prevented us from questioning who exactly our guests were. Nobody seemed to wonder why we should care what these very important people thought of us and our town or even what was so important about them. Yet there was little debate about how the visitors should be treated, regardless of which side they were on. One of the appeals to life and culture in this particular part of Texas is how tricky it can be to discern the roundheads from the cavaliers. So many of us hide our rabid partisanship under camouflaged baseball caps and an adherence to old fashioned manners. And so we pandered on and on.
Schools and schoolchildren were called into action. Their normal math and reading lessons were suspended in order that the kids could make preemptive thank you cards from brightly colored construction paper, glue sticks, and mountains of glitter. Music teachers practiced vaguely patriotic songs on the bleachers, pig tailed kids mouthing the words along with the canned music. A dunk tank was set up and the most charismatic teachers took their places on the damp bench, preparing to entertain the crowd while they waited for the arrival of the dignitaries.
After considerable debate, the university was temporarily shut and the college students were encouraged to retreat to their parents' homes in Plano, Pflugerville, Pasadena, and other suburbs where their terrible driving and relentless parking could be reabsorbed into the local fabric of their youth. A cheer rose up from the center of the collective throats of townies as the last of their cars was seen merging onto the highway. Of course there would be stragglers who stayed behind, estranged from their parents and already on the schedule to work at various restaurants and coffee shops around town. Life must go on.
My driver and I set off early to pick up a torta and get a good spot at the airport. The fellows at Taqueria Patroncito, caught up in the momentum of the day, stuffed our sandwiches with extra meat, spicy green salsa running down the sides. We drove too fast and listened to an ironic version of the Australian pop song 'Live is Life', covered by the former Yugoslavian band Laibach (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC73Os9NmZE) at least nine times over and over on a pair of busted Kenwood eight inchers. It was equal parts grueling and exhilarating.
When we arrived, the crowd was already swollen at the the tiny municipal airport. Surrounding pastures became makeshift parking lots. Snacks were sold, mostly breakfast tacos, which speak for themselves and are beloved by every citizen down to the last child. While there was considerable jostling for a good view, particularly as the small jet landed and taxied toward the waiting crowd, people remained in high spirits and reasonably polite. Nobody wanted to screw up this historic moment, to blow our best chance to really shine.
Silence as the plane's slow roll become a full stop. Breath was collectively held, thousands of pairs of eyes watching the door, waiting for it to open....
For an audio recording, read by the author.....
https://soundcloud.com/user-704968293/vip-a-san-marcos-tale
