Small Pleasures and a Miracle

We went exploring one amarillo Saturday hoping to discover the discrete charms nearby aged Texas towns. Small pleasures were the order of that day. Shared they would become a lasting pleasure. Antiques were a convenient focus since the area screamed "antiquated." The visual cues, bringing to mind words like, "dilapidation, ramshakle" were alluring. One town actually had a wacky tornado as its high school mascot. Plus, a few towns were really noted as antiquing hotspots. Maybe we'd find something irresistible, dusty, aching.

At the very worst, I'd have a few more wind-scrubbed landscapes for my memory of the hard beauty of the Texas high plains. With some luck, we'd at least scrounge an insulator or two from the power lines along the abandoned railways. A good friend has a weakness for the watery viridian of these glassy plugs. The lines were as powerless as the tracks and ridiculously near the ground. Probably set low due to the constant wind there. Still looked silly compared to the tall railroad trees in the mideast where I grew up.

Antiquing in the Southwest requires special visual skills. It's a special kind of biathalon event involving light. Strong bleaching sun and wind make you squint (for god's sake, save the retinas!) and dry you out. Enter the antique shop and it's the land that illumination forgot. "Adjust retinas, damn you!" If objects held any drama, you'd expect to find Carravagio painting these stagnant, blind interiors.

Architectural salvage is the other kind of antiquing in these towns. Just enough neglect and disregard for many buildings to retain a version of their original charms. Slouching, beaten, but still standing, still insisting on some respect.

This is Cornell, writ large. His windows found in his precious small boxes that open onto the vast and delicate. Peer into the dark inside after jockeying against the unrelenting sun and maybe, maybe something in there will unfold, stand up and articulate a wonder, a child's delight.

One building held promise because its interiors were destroyed. Not just aged, but artfully axed up and swirled around. Hints of life. Highchairs? Tables? Picture frames? It's hard to explain why destruction holds such promise. I think that when a jigsaw disrupts our seeing world, putting the pieces back together, reassembling a reality, is a necessity and brings assurance and pleasure.

The corner building, probably a business, once a residence, was accessible on three sides. The windows revealed enough to know that we might find something vital here. That optimism did not happen with every building we looked at. The opposition of exterior coherence with the interior chaos held a delicious attraction. Was it at the North wall or the street front where we saw it? Don't know. It became as strange and bracing as breathing at the North pole.

A white barn owl sat on the central stairpost inside this dark maelstrom, still and watching.

How is it possible that a perfect quiet thing finds itself in the middle of such destruction? When you look through a telescope into the deep night, what are you looking for? When you look at an earthquake's rubble, what are you looking for? I yearn to find something whole, a potent reminder of why. Maybe it's just as important for me that the chaos can be contained within a window or a telescope. What do you do when you find a savior in a manger? How is it possible to talk about it, share it, have it together? We squinted into the hard darkness and just took the miracle in, we let it fill us. We took it in.