Dallas / Fort Worth and Me

 As long-time readers may recall, I currently live in Garland, which happens to be the tenth largest city in Texas (no, really). As such, it actually has a lot of good stuff going on, though by no means as much as Dallas, Fort Worth, or even, say, Plano or Arlington. Much of its cultural wealth is concentrated in old downtown Garland, which has existed as such since 1887, when the local post office was created midway between two rival towns, Duck Creek and Embree; the new post office was called Garland Station after the U.S. Attorney General of the time, Augustus Hill Garland. That’s him down there. Please note that I didn’t take this picture; I’m not quite that old. It was probably taken by the famous Mathew Brady, though no one’s sure.

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When last I wrote, Gentle Reader, I was regaling you with tales of the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, where the flowers are now in bloom and spring is in the air (intermittently, anyway). The Arboretum is in the middle of its annual Dallas Blooms festival, which will continue until April 13 (mostly on the weekends), so this is a great time to visit the place and get to know all 66 rolling acres.

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 I recently paid a visit to Addison’s Out of the Loop Festival, which is held yearly at the Water Tower Theater at the Addison Theater Centre; this year it took place from March 6-16. To be honest, it wasn’t quite what I expected; I knew there would be art, music, and theater performances, but I figured there would also be booths, food to be purchased, and maybe even games. But the closest thing to a booth was the table where the Girl Scouts were selling their cookies out front. Well, I’ve always been a fan of Girl Scout cookies, so I bought three boxes. They’re expensive this year — $3.50 per box. But wonderful as always, despite the fact that I couldn’t eat many, due to my diabetes.

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 When last I left you, Gentle Reader, I was poised to describe the Freedman’s Memorial in Dallas, which is located at the former site of the old Freedman’s Cemetery. That cemetery was a local institution from 1869 until the 1930s, when it was largely wiped out by road construction. Its location (what’s left of it) is now a Dallas Landmark site.

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In the 1930s, the good city fathers of Dallas, all of whom were white as the driven snow, decided that those newfangled horseless carriages that were getting so popular needed a better way to get from south to north and vice versa than the surface roads they already had. This was right around the time when the marketing geniuses of Madison Avenue (not to mention their clients in Detroit and out on the oilfields) had started pointedly suggesting that us independent-spirited Americans needed individual conveyances, so we wouldn’t have to use public transit with all the other riffraff.  The fact that said public transit was cheap, in place, and quite effective was of no consequence; over the next few years the rails were grubbed up or paved over, the overhead copper wire recycled into alternator motor windings and the like, and the Car became King. It was only in the late 1980s, as both car and fuel prices skyrocketed into the stratosphere, that we realized the error of our ways and started putting all those things back, at hideous expense.

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As a native Texan, I have nothing but the greatest of respect for Hispanic culture. It’s one of the roots of Texas society, after all, and in a wider sense American society as well — and it’s easy to see that it’s becoming an even more important part of our society, as the Hispanic population becomes increasingly larger and more vibrant. For that reason, I’ve tried to include as many Hispanic festivals and celebrations as I can find in this year’s list of Metroplex events, though heaven knows I’ll never be able to attend every one. I will, however, make an attempt to attend a representative cross-section.

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As I write this, a juggernaut is fast approaching, like a runaway train set to knock the D/FW Metroplex (and incidentally, the rest of the state) utterly flat. It’s not just a light at the end of the tunnel anymore; it’s a blazing mechanical behemoth that’s impossible to avoid. It’s the Texas presidential primary, and it’s happening (gulp) tomorrow.

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