When All With Baby Hearts

The trees were dripping lights.

Down out of the Austin hills usurped by suburban manicures and anonymous similarity, down the death trap of 2222, once a line of demarcation, now just another exit to colossal growth. But, this enchanted evening we’re headed back into and not out, in search of the Austin that needs no EKG to register its beat. Down the ghost of Balcones Drive, across the now tamed MOPAC highway, diminutive sister to the sprawl to come, almost an asphalt oasis with her genteel curve down what can never again be construed as a west side. East on 35th down the back alley of 34th, across Guadalupe, deep in our annals the street of the virgin and there is and always will be something pure in the virtue with which she threads and guides those who never wish to be lost. She ushers us into a neighborhood grand in its demise, a grandeur Jim Bob Moffett (a man seen in Austin for what he really is) can never hope for in his hill desecrating communities of 18 hole golf.

But, the spirit of this evening is Tiny Tim’s and not Scrooge’s, Dickens takes a back seat to rollercoasting the hills and hopelessly (and eternally) bad 9 year olds’ jokes. We spill out of our donkey van into our Jerusalem Medjugorie of lights, a night when all with baby hearts are assured of miraculous vision as we spill down the avenue of trees. Impossible to think of this wonderland as a month of Sundays spent grousing away from football games, thumbs impaled by errant staple guns, curses as the highest unsupporting branches of oaks are painstakingly climbed and cloaked, surely it was as much a miracle of light for the unreconstructed hippie denizens of 37th street, to wake from dreams fueled by acid dropped 30 years ago and wander into an Oz of some hill fairy’s making. Better yet to imagine an abandoned neighborhood brought back to life by Glinda’s wand because where after all were the tenants who left us their yards their streets their porches their cars their motorcycles gleaming glistening in an afterstream of light? The centerpiece house with lawn chairs for all the twirlers, all of us spinning tops, fighting nausea to see candy colored meteors of our own making. Wrapped entirely in black plastic, an 1800 square foot condom house proclaiming light as our essence our joy our most secret desire: cow lights, pumpkin lights, lizard lights, flamingo lights, chili lights, underwear on clothesline lights, apple lights, bottles of light, spools of light, bubblewrapped lights, egg cartons of light, and the mad genius of packages of light stapled whole to the side of the house. Was it to show us money was no object in our pleasure, was it fatigue at the end of a long day, or was it simply a mirror to the internal circuitry that glows unbidden and tangled within us all?

Catty-corner, then, from Xanadu to Santa’s top, a 20 foot high kaleidoscope of lights where spinning is done for you, a visual bedtime story, your only labor to lie beneath its spinning point, a cluster of light you want to reach out and lick with your tongue it is so near. If Xanadu was phallus then the spinning top is Santa’s breast, a spinning world under which we lie, orphans all brought home, reunited by the circle of our crowns, leaves and wintergrass sticking in our hair as Rosey, my 5 year old new best friend lies beside me proclaiming her love for the green lights, and I wax on for blue, and Tommy is Romeo for the orange freckles in the midst.

Where else to end this magi’s wanderlust but at the speakerphone of an A&W root beer stand, a tray of 6 black cows mooing at us from frosted mugs, suspended from van window, Christmas caroling with Bing or Mel or Nat or even my scorpion sister Joni telling me which way to Barandgrill. Where else indeed, but that would be my own It’s A Wonderful Life Jimmy Stewart dream, back from heart’s death at the bridge, over the frozen river, face warmed by tears of joy and angel wings.

And on those angel wings we will fly to Onion Creek and D. E. Crumley’s grocery store, the progenitor of all the Christmas lights spawned on 37th, a place where every night was Christmas, a veritable junkyard of light, a place where once a lost 27 year old boy, his cheetos bought for a trip south, looked up into a cobalt blue sky and saw that like the moon, the lights never go out, they just are clouded by the industrial strength of our sun-driven dreams.