I also think having a dedicated “business day”–I wonder if Monday after A__ W__’s class would be a good time for that, a break from the most intense school of your week–would keep that part of things under control.

December 31, 2019

That line must have been written in Texas, or just after a weeklong visit. I’m not surprised to see that line emerge from a visit to my in-laws in the western suburbs of Houston. Writing from that house right now, I see how the energy here bends toward the material, the commercial. New York is, of course, a commercial city, too. Ask Edith Wharton; ask Alexander Hamilton. So what’s so different about the commercial spirit of Houston? Is it just the way my in-laws talk and think? Certainly being surrounded by their expectations of financial success makes me intensely aware of the incompatibility of that vision with a simply lived creative life. (Case in point: moments ago, I went downstairs for a second cup of coffee. “Are you doing writing?” Nani asked. “Yes,” I said. “Is it for your classes or just … general?” “General,” I said, which I guess covers it.) So of course, some of this feeling is hyper-local to this house. But some of this incompatibility has to do with place writ larger.

One difference between New York and Texas is the presence in New York of a creative energy that drives everything and can be found anywhere. It’s an energy identifiable by the hard edge of its surface, the pliable and unstable interior structures that enable unpredictable combinations. I love that energy, that exhausting, invigorating hustle found nowhere I’ve lived quite like in New York. Other places reach a kind of stasis, but reinvention is at the center of the logic of New York. Change is its stasis.

What’s at the center of the logic of Texas, the logic of suburban Houston, as I experience it? I notice a kind of dominance, a theory of being able to control the natural and social environment, to force the surrounding world to submit to what is comfortable. Related: Day-to-day living is manageable here in a way it isn’t in New York. That’s evident, even as we don’t have complete control of our days, living with my in-laws. Figuring out, as we did yesterday, how long we’d be in Texas (until mid-March) helped us plan out our next ten or so weeks, in such a way that we can have some footholds, some stasis. The point of these footholds is so that we can move between them. Structure gives us more freedom.

What S realized that made possible that stasis was that the footholds we wanted–the dedicated times and spaces for us to feel like we had control over the rhythms of our days and weeks left here–were most possible in the city of Houston itself, not this outlying suburb. Here, daily life seems imagined on a longer term, with the rhythms and schedules changing with far less frequency, starting when things are pleasant and ending before they get tough.

(Here I just talk about the weather, but the critique might extend to any social interaction).

No, Houston, with its concrete bayous and statues of the heads of American presidents, is a city of imperial reach, may be a 19th-century settler-colonist’s wet dream. But it’s a city, a place that draws people who want more than just roots, but flowers, fruit. Cities have energy, they churn and cycle, and even if the surface looks the same for a while, change is in progress underneath.

It’s not that we love the fruit on this particular tree. Houston’s gleaming glass towers and the arcs of its highway overpasses might as well be drawn from the Weekly Reader or the Jetsons, visions of a clean, advanced center in a techno-utopia. Indeed, in downtown Houston, poverty is nowhere to be seen. That’s part of the design, part of the logic the city shares with its suburbs: to make invisible the difficult, to foreground the convenient and the clean. No wonder it seems to Eastern eyes totally soulless, sterile.

Compartmentalization is the great myth of Texas. Separating this group and that, this experience and that, homogenizing right up to your personal property line. At home, we lived in an apartment where rotating groups of men sat outside our ground-floor apartment and drank all day while listening to a range of terrible music. To be clear: I don’t miss that. But still, here, no one sits outside even in their own backyards. There is no real noise. You might think that peaceful. It’s not peaceful. It’s empty.

But if emptiness is where we are, if compartmentalization is the theory here, then I can work with that. Our family can work with that. Compartmentalization is something we always seem to attempt, compartmentalization of time into a structure in which we can improvise, against which we can push and pull and adapt.

Yet the line above, about A__ W__ and her class, shows how foolish that really is. I laugh to recall how the time immediately after her class was always fraught. At first, Monk was supposed to go to afterschool with Tune. But her grade, pre-K, was the only one not phased in. S would end class early and pick her up for the first two Mondays; we set things up with the afterschool program to have her stay for a little while, but that wasn’t working either. Not sure what we’d do, I wrote A__ W__ and said, I might need to drop this class if I can’t get the childcare piece figured out. I was this close to saying “Do you think I could use something like Google Hangouts to join class?” But that seemed ridiculous.

How ridiculous does it seem that we’d all be on videocalls a month later?

That’s the thing about control. It’s an illusion. The structure of the world that works best is a flexible one, a foundation that can shake and bend, withstanding the wobbly ground on which we all must build our lives.

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