BORN TO BE WILD

In the last days of the millenium, a child is born into this crazy world

From the outside, people who observe my circumstances might consider me a lucky fellow. I have a good marriage, great kids, close friends and family, a successful business, a beautiful home in a wonderful small town and, to top it off, I get to play with this fun little newspaper.

It's a glorious existence and sometimes when my wife and I are sitting on our front porch, the southeast wind sifting through our wind chimes, the cardinals flitting like crimson fairies between our bird feeders, we'll suddenly be struck by the feeling that we are living in a dream. Sometimes it just feels too good to be true...like a magical movie fantasy. We may not have a big pile of money in the bank, but at times like that, we are quite clear that we are rich.

Despite my charmed existence, like most folks, I get a mite down at times. I wrote a little blues tune about this contradiction a couple of years ago. The lyrics go like this:

The bottom line is that I didn't have to wait for middle-age to turn crazy. I've been that way all along. I function pretty well in society, but there's a reason for that. For the most part, my friends and family are nuts too. In fact, from where I stand, it looks like almost everybody on this planet is flipped out. I’m talking deranged, irrational, bonkers, reality challenged and outright lunatic. It’s part of being a human being. We can't help it. We were born that way...born to be wild.

Here are two tales that illustrate my point.

My wife was to turn fifty in a few days, that most mid-life of events. As that traumatic passage approached, she and I found our mental health rapidly deteriorating. As is typical, the Queen seemed oblivious to this rapid decline in her lucidity. I, however, could see the handwriting on the wall. It said “...you are losing your mind.” I don’t know who wrote that unpleasant message on my wall but I had to admit it was accurate. Over the last few months, our lives had become increasingly complex. We were beset by a whole chain of emotional time bombs and our rational faculties were feeling the wear.

At the top of our list was the fact that our oldest child and only daughter was soon to have a baby girl. The Queen and I were beset by visions of our genetic heritage cascading down through the eons. We were talking to her almost nightly hanging on every obstetrical detail. My daughter is a mental health professional. It's a respectable profession and she has plenty of work to do right there in her own house. She's nuts and so is her husband. They left Texas and moved to Colorado despite our wishes and now, they're going to have a baby. Would anyone sane do that? There's not enough air to go around in Colorado as it is. Why bring another set of lungs into the world? But, that's how those kids are. They don’t listen to me. They haven't been entirely well in years..

The Queen and I already have a very fine grandson. He's nutty as a fruitcake too...thinks he's a rock star named Zandar. At least I don't think he's really a rock star. I guess he could be. I don’t keep up with the music scene these days. Of course, I'd love him even if he was. He’s a real stud. The two of us like to play auto racing video games, have head-on collisions and laugh maniacally.

The exciting milestone of our granddaughter’s impending birth was to be accompanied by several other landmark events. Our youngest son, the last of our children, was to leave home about the same time the new child was scheduled to enter the world.

His plan was to leave for Colorado to join his sister and brother-in-law and make his fortune as a computer geek. My youngest is a wonderful young man but seriously imbalanced. It's a sad story. He became interested in computers at a very young age.We should have known better. An overexposure to computers will drive you crazy every time. It’s too late now. There’s nothing we can do about it. We just have to make the best of the situation.

He makes very good money for a seventeen year old. This is due to the fact that he has the Queen and I at his mercy. In recent months we have begun to realize that our business is going to collapse into dust when he leaves. He is the only person who knows what's going on with the computer network that keeps up with our far flung small town financial empire.

Therefore, we have a case of empty nest syndrome that could soon be followed by a case of empty wallet syndrome. The boy is intelligent, responsible, polite, hard working, saves his money, doesn't drink, drives carefully and has very clear career goals. What kind of 17-year-old does acts like that? I don't know where we went wrong. We tried our best but something is just cockeyed with that boy.

Unlike our youngest, the Queen and I understood the responsibilities of youth when we first met. We were students at the University of Texas. It was the Fall of 1970.

I lived in an apartment with four other young men. She lived upstairs in another apartment. She and one of her roommates became fast friends with my four friends and I.

We developed that special bond that only those of our generation experienced, one created by cutting classes and becoming intoxicated on the way to protest marches. We avoided the draft, burned out our brains and our bras and passed out in public places. We knew how to have fun. We knew what it meant to be young.

Sure, we were completely demented but we were proud of it. We called ourselves the Bon Vivants.

In the early 1980’s, my wife and I had arranged two reunions for the remnants of this motley crew. The first was called the Bon Vivant Reunion and the second the Bon Vivant Ball. Now, fifteen years later, we were to host the Bon Vivant Retreat. We had some concerns about how our old friends might be received in our conservative little town. What if the Bon Vivants started waving peace signs at the Mercantile or decided to run around naked?

The last item in this nightmarish list of overwhelming attacks on my mental equilibrium, was the fact that somehow the Queen and I ended up with four businesses. Don't ask me how it happened. They just grew like viruses. I started in Round Top a simple carpenter restoring old houses, then, one day I had a head-on collision with an 18-wheeler and couldn't work for a few months. On a dare from my sister-in-law, I created a little newsletter for the Round Top Chamber of Commerce and suddenly I had a little newspaper business.

I got interested in the Internet and created a web site for the little newspaper and just as suddenly, I had a little Internet business. I didn't do it on purpose. It was like some kind of strange chemical reaction that got out of control.

Lately, a registered architect has joined our merry little construction company and now the two of us have a little architecture business. My wife explains all this away by saying that I am an obsessive-compulsive maniac who is playing out childhood inadequacies in a dysfunctional manner, but I think she's glossing over the real problem. I think it happened because I'm crazy.

I have some really capable people working with me or this mess would have gone into the dumper a while back. Of course, they're very sick, most of them. Otherwise, why would they be working for me. Even with my moonstruck wife and our crazed employees keeping me out of trouble, sometimes running four small businesses at once creates a little stress.

I don't want to be overly dramatic, but there are times when it's like trying to gift wrap a family of rabid wildcats in crepe paper and barbed wire while roller skating on the edge of a cliff in a lightning storm with your pants down. Of course, I haven't actually done a lot of gift wrapping, so I could be wrong. In any case, I was feeling a bit fragmented the week before the Queen’s birthday. That interval is referred to in these parts as "antiques week." Antiques week is a period of time when our small community is invaded by large numbers of seriously psychotic people who roam like hordes of urban homeless through the streets, looking in windows and throwing money around like it was chicken feed. We do not mind these poor delusional souls visiting our town, as long as they go home after they have bought a few expensive things. We feel that we are helping them. We think that it is therapeutic for them to give their money to us. After all, they don't really need it. They're crazy.

Everyone we know was busy that week. It's exhausting harvesting all those greenbacks from ladies in cute straw hats and SUV's. My sister-in-law called up and asked the birthday Queen over for dinner Sunday night even though her birthday was on Friday. This particular sister has a very jazzy restaurant in town that she and another friend founded accidentally. They got their restaurant much the same way I got my newspaper. This makes sense if you know them. They're both ‘round the bend. Their husbands will tell you that. Of course their husbands are a little weird, too. Anyway, the plan made sense as we were all too busy to stop for revelry. My wife deferred her birthday celebration for two days.

Saturday, our lives were an antiques and crafts blur. We heard through the grapevine that our middle child was coming home. We were happy to hear that because he’s a beautiful young man, very talented too.

Our oldest son is a fine carpenter and runs his own contracting business in Austin while attending school full time. It's a heavy load for one so young but he is doing his best to pay me back all the money he owes me.

Their entire lives, I have explained to my children the considerable expense that has been required to bring them to the state of near perfection they now inhabit.

I have long explained that I expect to be repaid with reasonable interest. I have repeatedly made it clear that monthly payments are acceptable. However, for some reason that is not clear to me, they all remain in arrears.

I forgive the middle son though. He can't help it. He's a real crackpot. So is his girlfriend. Oh sure, they're sensitive, loving, creative, ethical and extraordinarily capable people but they wear sandals and little leather necklaces. She doesn’t eat meat. They spent last summer touring all across the nation and sleeping in a tent. They talk to their pickup truck. They act just like the Queen and I did when we were young. Sometimes, I think they should be institutionalized.

Anyway, when Sunday finally rolled around, we were exhausted. The fields and pastures around Round Top and Warrenton looked like the trampled and muddy meadows of Woodstock after that rock concert so many years ago. Admittedly there was a higher incidence of wicker chairs, art glass, primitive antiques and bric a brac but otherwise it looked the same. My wife and I lay draped like limp rags in two rocking chairs on the front porch of our home. It had been an exhausting week.

"God," exclaimed my wife weakly "we need a vacation. I wish we were paddling right now." One aspect of my wife's mental problem springs from an obsession regarding canoeing and outdoor activities. She drags me constantly from one river to the next, from one campground to the next in a seemingly endless search for the perfect outdoor experience.

It's a sad condition. All of her friends and family recognize her outdoor addiction for what it is and refuse to enable her. She has begged them for years to join her and they have politely refused. Like any true addict, she has not allowed these disappointments to daunt her but has soldiered on, planning one failed camping escapade after another.

No one has ever come. The two of us always end up alone.

My only hope has been that one day she will hit bottom, take stock of her life, give up her tragic and healthful obsession and lay around the house drinking cold beer in a ratty nightgown while watching soap operas like a normal wife.

That evening we gathered up our things to go to her sister's. We expected it to be a short evening as we knew the few who were coming would be gaunt survivors of the antiques' holocaust. As we drove up, we noticed a few extra cars and when the Queen tried to walk in the back door, her sister walked up and ushered her around the house into the back yard. There, sitting in lawn chairs around a big campfire, were all our best friends and much of our family. Scattered around them in the wildflower covered pastures that surround the house were tents, growing like mushrooms out of the verdant ground.

Two of her sisters walked up and gave her a hug. "Happy birthday" they said. "We're all going to camp out tonight. We decided that's what you wanted the most."

The Queen's eyes misted up, the expression on her face moving from astonishment to rapt joy. I pulled my jaw, which had been resting on my paunch, back into a speaking position and said "I can't believe it."

It was a warm and wonderful night. We ate fancy food brought from the restaurant, sat around the campfire under the twinkling stars and sang old songs. One of my nephews sat in my lap and snuggled most of the night. He' a great kid, a little batty, but a great kid.

After a while, the songs died down and one by one, the people my wife loves most in the world took turns telling stories about her, saying how much she meant to them, and why they loved her, and what they would always remember about her.

She sat there by the fire, sipping her wine, occasional tears welling up in her eyes and collected those words. She packed them away in the little hope chest she keeps next to her heart so that years later, she could take them out like tiny jewels and run her fingers through them.

She would take those words and hold them over her head in the sunlight and marvel at the way they made rainbows. She could pull those tender, loving words out of that safe place where she cherished them, and remember when times were hard, the best parts of why she had lived in this world.

Our boat glided to a halt in the rocks along the river's edge. We hopped out and picked our way downstream through the boulders until we could see the falls. We were being careful. After you wrap your canoe around a rock and go tumbling down river a couple of times, your unprotected body parts bouncing off boulders, you learn to scout any sizable run of white water. We were canoeing on a stretch of the Guadalupe that was new to us, so when we heard the roar up ahead, we pulled over to the side.

"Look," I said. "That fall must be three or four feet tall!" My eyes were glazed over. I was in a zone. We had hit every rapid just right all day long and I was feeling invincible. The Queen was not so sure.

"There's an easy run on the left," she offered tentatively. "I don't think we can get around that big limb in time to turn the bow into the fall."

We wrangled back and forth for a few minutes until she finally agreed to attempt the route over the little waterfall. We tottered over the rocks back to our boat, paddled up river a way, then turned our canoe towards the rapids. Hugging the right bank, we caught the current, picking up speed, until we were about 30 feet above the waterfall.Slipping under the big oak limb that blocked the entrance, we dug in and turned the boat radically to the left into the face of the roaring maelstrom. Suddenly, we were airborne. The Queen let out a high pitched "Woooooooooh" and, as the bow plowed back into the river, a wave of water slammed into me, soaking me to the bone. I didn't care. We zigged and zagged through the remainder of the rapid, the boat bucking like a minor league bronco. "Weeeeeeeee!" we cried like excited children.

The rest of that afternoon was spent drifting down that beautiful stretch of the Guadalupe River. Big limestone bluffs appeared around every bend. Huge cypress trees, some with their tops torn off by past floods, dipped their gnarled knees into the aquamarine river water. Occasionally we would see a thick tree trunk caught in the crook of another forest giant forty feet off the ground, reminders of the huge flood that hit the Guadalupe in 1997.

That night we sat by our campfire and thought of things to come. Specifically, of Bon Vivants to come. We were only two weeks away from the Bon Vivant Retreat. My mind wandered back over the two past reunions, that is, the small portions of those alcohol soaked events that I could remember. The first one remained a blur, but I did remember the little pewter steins we gave away as mementoes. I also remembered decorating one of the guys like a Christmas tree who dared fall asleep. I particularly remembered the small feather we stuck in his mustache that fluttered like a party favor when he snored.

We had the second event catered by two of our friends. He dressed like a butler and she dressed like a French maid with a very short skirt. As the Bon Vivants always had the social demeanor of rutting baboons, this touch was quite successful. The butler and the French maid served a formal meal that included the preferred Bon Vivant cuisine, a dish that had been the staple food of our youth, Kraft macaroni and cheese out of a cardboard box.

For that event, each participant was given a small clear plexiglass jewelry box. Inside was a pad of green felt topped by two large steel ball bearings. On the lid was a silver plate engraved with the date of the event and "Bon Vivant Ball." These special objects were bestowed with the explanation that the Queen and I were returning something we knew each of the Bon Vivants had lost.

As we sat silently by that campfire, my thoughts wafted back in time to the apartment we all shared just off the U.T. campus...apartment 111. So many memories...all the times we ate brown rice for a week because we were out of money; the time I held a butcher knife to my future wife's throat to get my first kiss; the time I got beat up in the apartment by that body builder from New Jersey; the time we set the apartment on fire and lost everything we owned; the day we moved back into our apartment after it was renovated and tried to throw a "house warming party" and the manager made us take our poster down because she considered the flames we had drawn on it in bad taste. I remembered all the times I got fired, all the times I passed out, all the classes I flunked... Boy, those were the days!

What is it about youth that makes your brain recollect such dismal experiences with pleasure? I not only remember those events with affection now, I think I actually enjoyed them at the time. I find that peculiar since much of what I did then I would consider pointless, stupid and dangerous now. But, such is youth. We may have been over-indulgent mindless imbeciles frittering away our lives in an intoxicated haze but, we were extraordinarily cool imbeciles. And, though we would never have admitted it, we loved each other.

It had been fifteen years since most of us had seen each other. Their responses to our invitation had been on the cool side. It had taken a while for them to answer. I was worried that we had changed too much in our time apart and would find ourselves strangers. We had kids, families and careers, full lives apart from one another. We were spread all over the nation. We had only been close for one short period of our lives and that time had been almost thirty years before.

Would they really be crazy enough to fly across the nation just to come and see us?

A week and a half later, I was standing in the Austin airport waiting for one of the guys to get off a plane from San Francisco. My image of him was from our college years. I was waiting for a guy who had long brown hair and a big bushy beard. He wore a top hat and a raccoon coat. As I watched the plane empty and my friend did not appear, I started to get nervous. Suddenly, a stranger tapped me on the shoulder. "You !!$&?*%&#!!" he laughed "I've been standing here for five minutes waiting for you to recognize me." The beard was gone. The top hat had become a dapper fedora and this guy...well, this guy was old.

I hugged him anyway. He made fun of me all the way back to Round Top.

As the two of us walked up to the house, I saw that the rest of the Bon Vivants had already arrived. We began our reunion with the traditional insults we had always used to express our affection for one another. We each commented on how fat the others had become and how much older everyone, except ourselves, looked. It was a regular love-in.

Before long though, in the traditional Bon Vivant manner, we decided it was time to party. Cheryl and I had stocked all sorts of liquor for the event. We had arranged for a stomach pump and learned CPR. We were prepared.

Before long however, it became obvious that something was wrong. The party ‘til you puke, do or die Bon Vivants were not imbibing at the appropriate rates. Before long, myself and one of the others had to admit that we no longer drank at all. After this humiliating admission, the other three fessed up that their stomachs were weak and they seldom had more than a drink or two a night. The Queen, who had always been able to drink any of us under the table shook her head and went into the house to prepare dinner.

Soon the discussion degenerated to the point that we were discussing indigestion, diarrhea, flatulence and hemorrhoids. It became one of those conversations that old men have while playing dominoes or when sitting on a park bench feeding the pigeons. Here we were, a bunch of fat old farts sitting on a porch discussing the failings of our digestive systems, a far cry from the virile young studs we had imagined we were when we were young. Of course, we really weren’t virile young studs then either, but, old illusions die hard.

At first I was dismayed, sad for our lost youth. But then, slowly, I began to see that there were advantages to growing old. We were all much more relaxed than in previous years. We found it less important to compete. We were more sensitive, more able to listen and more capable of expressing our feelings for one another.

Despite the fine examples of Peter Pan and Jerry Garcia, we had finally grown up. The new kinder, gentler Bon Vivants celebrated their maturation by spending four hours on the porch in rocking chairs, watching the movie Woodstock and rating the legendary musicians.

Richie Havens; Crosby, Stills and Nash; Santana; Ten Years After and, of course, Jimi Hendrix still ruled. However, Joan Baez; the Who and Country Joe and the Fish got the thumbs down. Old rock and roll fans can be fickle.

For the next two days, the Bon Vivants roamed the streets of Round Top. They went out to eat at Lantana, my sister-in-law’s fancy restaurant. We took them to a concert at Festival Hill. We drove them around the countryside and bragged incessantly about our little town.

I shouldn't have worried. At no point did they aim peace signs at the locals or walk around naked. At least, none of my neighbors reported such behavior. In fact, the only wild and crazy thing that happened the entire weekend was a marathon contract bridge session that kept the participants up ‘til 3 AM.

Sunday and Monday, one by one, they took their leave. In those three days, we had discovered that we were still friends, still important to one another, still touchstones in each other’s lives. Perhaps we weren’t the party animals we once had been, but we were still crazy...still the wild and crazy Bon Vivants.

When you think about it, this planet is not a rational place. Nothing about it makes any sense. The weather is psycho. The landscape is wacky and erratic. The water that keeps us alive has an identity crisis every time the temperature goes below 32 degrees.The very elements are unstable.

All in all, its a nutty place to live. It’s no surprise that human beings are bonkers.

When I think about what I would like to tell this brand new grandchild of mine, this baby who will live almost her entire life in another millennium, one thing keeps coming to mind.

“Little girl,” I will say. “It’s a crazy world; a wide, wild and wonderfully insane world... and that’s the best way for it to be, because that’s the way you and I are. We’re people and people are up one day and down the next; sad and happy, hot and cold. We are angels and demons, saints and sinners, heroes and cowards and we have been that way since the very beginning.

“Lots of people will tell you that you should fit in, little girl. But, don’t you listen to them, because ‘fitting in’ means you are joining a conspiracy of people who want to make the world a sane, rational place. And that, little girl, is one thing this planet will never be.

“This world will always be a magical, impossible, unpredictable, unbelievable place where anything can happen. It will always be crazy and the best people in it will be crazy too. They’ll be crazy in love and crazy with laughter. They’ll become obsessed with crazy ideas and will turn them into crazy inventions and crazy monuments and madly beautiful works of art and music.

“And someone will have told them that they should act normal. Someone will have told all those beautifully mad people that their ideas would never work and that they should stop living in a dream.

“But, little girl, the reason our world is filled with all these wonders is that those people did not listen. They followed their crazy dreams no matter what anyone said and you should too.

“People say something ‘makes sense’ when they are used to it...when it’s something they expect. But, the best things that happen in life, the best things that happen in this crazy nonsensical world are unexpected. Love, beauty, wonder, courage, strength...none of them make any sense.

“Neither do sadness, hatred or anger. So just live your life, little girl. Have fun. Live every day and make it fresh and beautiful and full of magic...because crazy as it seems, every day is.”

Here’s the last verse of that blues tune.

Round Top Register - Texas Fun Travel Guide