Visiting the Sibs

Nasrin and I flew over to Austin for a long weekend, and by chance — that is how it felt — brother Marc was also in town after a year teaching in Manchuria.  So the four Siblings brought to planet Earth by the conjunction of Enid, OK born John Lang and Houston, TX born Mary Maclaine were together for the first time in quite a while.

The schedule was structured around visits to our Mother, who is increasingly invalid with Parkinson’s, osteoporosis and other afflictions relating to age.

Nancy and Steve and his wife Beck bear the burden of being there full time — about which I do feel uncharacteristic twinges of guilt from time to time.  Despite a year of serial set-backs, not all of which were the fault of the medical system, Mom is nonetheless doing better than I had imagined. Her daily care is complicated by the fact that her husband of 33 years — not our father — is himself in decline and not particularly alert to her needs.

Truth be told, time with the Siblings was the real focus and joy. We spent a considerable amount of energy digging up old memories, with pointed but good humor. And like most siblings, we share a micro-culture replete with its own dense allusions and in-jokes, a kind of jargon compiled out of our common experience but also wrought in terms of a idiosyncratic syntax which allows us to construct predictable intersubjective narratives of how things work, and what is real. Our conversations are no doubt tedious and incomprehensible to outsiders.  For us they become, on the rare occasions when we meet, the medium in which we fish once again swim.

There is a second family pole in Austin, one still emerging, and its subjects are our true legacy to the future, at least in the terms which most humans place themselves in history — through family, procreation and the transmission of heritage from generation to generation.

So we also made an all-too-short visit to Nancy’s daughter Jennifer’s home in far north Austin. Her husband Andrew was on the road from Houston, three hours away, so we missed him.  There are two siblings at this new family node (not counting here the two half-sibs whom I have not yet met). Gideon, just under four, took care to share with us his collection of toy trucks, cars and other vehicles.  Here he was just starting out his gig as toy valet parker.

Evie, here with Jennifer, was not exactly sure why we were there, and was no doubt wondering when we would leave.

Gideon suffers from autism but has made remarkable progress over the past several months due to a radical change in his diet, from which all gluten and casein have been eliminated.  Rather than try to explain all this myself, here is Jennifer’s blog on her experience and the success which the “GFCF” diet can bring to autistic children.  You will understand that the medical system is more or less closed off to this line of therapy, caught up in the greedy hands of corporate interests, including those specific to the medical guild itself – but this is a matter I shall leave aside here. Give it a read.

As for we Senior Sibs — the youngest, Steve, was born in 1951 – we ate more than we should have from a number of food groups not all of which are good for us. A certain amount of alcohol was also consumed. Food in Austin is surprisingly good, even when grossly commercial.  There were also practical considerations shaping the meals shared with Mom, such as the logistics of moving her around. Friday, for example, we ate at TGIF, wheelchair friendly.

Mom has an astonishing appetite. She had pizza here, and lamb shanks the next noon.  On Sunday morning Nasrin and I brought her a take-out bacon breakfast burrito from the Taqueria Aranditas on North Lamar.

The Sibs’ Saturday lunch was at Dimassi’s Mediterranean Buffet, a great place to pig out, though the expression is perhaps inappropriate for a buffet which has a walled-off prayer corner oriented towards Mecca, and this on the second day of Ramadan. Yes, this is Austin, Texas.  All of Texas but especially Austin has improved since I fled from it in 1963, one positive effect of globalization for those who are keeping score. And things will be even better in the future, or so the demographers claim, as the redneck class from which I emerged, dragging myself from the swamps, is increasingly marginalized.  It is enough to make one believe in evolution.

Eating and joking and joshing among the Sibs, plus Nasrin, and Beck when she made it, was the real joy and focus of this trip, since we were free to say whatever came into our twisted little minds. Friday night we were at Artz Rib House, in the famous 78704 zip code in South Austin, “where slackers rather than bubbas hold sway” and at least some denizens subscribe to the motto “keep Austin weird”.

Nasrin and I had decided to spring for a real hotel for once, a old Hyatt from the 70s built around a right triangle with that classic atrium, the one right next to the Congress Avenue bridge, and also, in its own way, in the mental zone of 704.

The timing and locale were excellent, since the 50th Annual Austin Bat Festival was being celebrated Saturday on that bridge, from under which emerge at dusk millions, so I am told, of these noble mammals.

Not to go on about bats — whose zoological name Chiroptera comes from two Greek words, cheir (χειρ) “hand” and pteron (πτερον) “wing” — but they are amazing creatures, their wings being in fact their forelimbs — they fly by flapping their hands!

After a brief stint on the bridge under a gathering thunderstorm which broke somewhere else, the five of us walked over to the Threadgill’s on Barton Springs Road, where I had glazed ham with jezebel sauce and black-eyed peas, legumes for which I am a sucker. Like Nasrin, I relished the sweet potato fries.  Nancy had tilapia, which got us off on a discussion about the commercialization and aquafarming of this particular species of African fish. Lost track of the other menu choices.

Before turning in, we had a night cap at the bar on the way back to the Hyatt.  There was actually a quite drinkable Côtes-du-Rhone.

The last meal was an impromptu lunch Beck served us Sunday on our way to the airport, something from The Soup Peddler, another 704 institution. Followed by an even more impromptu Prosecco and a quick collective look, on Beck’s laptop, at Jennifer’s website. Nasrin and I barely made it to the airport by our Hertz deadline.

O, didn’t I mention the weather?  As we go to press we don’t know, but if “triple-digits” hold until next Sunday (100 Farenheit = 38 celsius), Austin will beat the all-time record of 69 days at or above that temperature.

Back at my computer on Monday, I was able to find and to scan and these two legacy transparencies of the Sibs, which I include for the archives, circa 57 and circa 69.