Texas Escape
20 December 2023
This piece was written in response to my lamentable failure to find 15 words in the December 8, 2023, NYT Spelling Bee puzzle (LADINOR). All 15 words are included, in bold type, in this story. The missed words, in alphabetical order, are as follows: aioli, annals, arils, dirndl, doornail, inland, lair, lanai, landlord, lira, llano, nonillion, oral, ordinal, railroad, and rial.
You might say Canyon, Texas was inland, if you consider 720 miles from the nearest ocean to be inland. About 20 miles south of Amarillo, Canyon sits in the eastern part of the Staked Plains llano, once a swampy forest where dinosaurs roamed free. When Galaxie was in the fifth grade, her father, Simon, had teased her with a story that the hulking creatures had jumped the ark too soon and been stuck in Texas ever since. Galaxie feared the same might happen to her.
Her father was a tenured English professor at West Texas A&M and those jobs were not easy to find in the new collegiate STEM regime. Thus, the family’s shackles to a town as dead as a doornail. In the annals of Canyon history, nothing interesting ever had happened, except the way we killed off the buffalo, slaughtered the Comanche, and stole their land. But that spot of unpleasantness was not a popular topic of conversation at Canyon 4th of July picnics.
The nearest big city was Amarillo, population 200,000, and not an atheist in the bunch. A big billboard to the east of town used to read “Welcome to God’s Country.”Galaxie’s mother, April, said that was just another way of saying “country only god could love.” Small g. In the way of culture, you could visit the ten famous Cadillacs half-buried heads-down on the side of the highway, as if their drivers would rather smother in the dust than spend another night in the Texas panhandle. Or, for a little history, you might drive by the Amarillo Rock Island Railroad end-of-the-line, literally, rails going nowhere at a crossing abandoned long before Galaxie was born.
For fun, Galaxie and her brother, Orion, used to sit under the shade of the lanai April had built in the backyard. She used only materials native to the area: old railroad ties, fence posts, and rusted sheet metal. On the ceiling, she painted palm fronds. Instead of twinkle lights, April rigged fixtures with LED bulbs inside old oil cans for lampshades and strung them overhead with barbed wire.
Late one Saturday afternoon, Galaxie dreamed of escape to Santa Monica in California with the cute son of the landlord next door, except she pictured him wearing Birkenstocks or Vans instead of cowboy boots. Near the beach, they would eat lunch outdoors, dining on sweet potato fries with aioli and arugula salad with artisanal gorgonzola and the juicy red arils of pomegranate seeds.
While Galaxie traveled in her thoughts to the Pacific Ocean, Orion hopscotched in his head around the globe, thinking of money. Not making it or spending it, but learning what it’s called in every single country on earth. Just when the smitten landlord’s son lowered his sunglasses to tell Galaxie that he loved her dimples, Orion quizzed his sister, “Did you know that the basic monetary unit of Oman and Iran is the Rial?” “No, Starshine, I thought you were still on Europe.” “It didn’t take long, what with the Euro. But did you know that if the Italians still used the Lira, it would take more than 150,000 Lira to equal just a hundred bucks?” At that point, Galaxie boomeranged back from California to the land of the tumble weeds, only to hearher brother exclaim, “Jesus! If you had a nonillion of cattle in Texas, that would be a one followed by 30 zeros, but in England, the one would be followed by 54 zeros. Do you think they could even fit a nonillion cattle in the whole country?” “Good god,”Galaxie spat in disgust, “What would it smell like? Next, you’ll be talking about ordinal numbers. It’s late. I’m going inside.”
The exit was just in time. As Galaxie and her brother headed toward the back door, they passed their parents on the path to the lanai. Simon was wearing a white lab coat and carrying an ice bucket full of Negro Modelo. April was dressed in some sort of busty Sound-of-Music get-up. “Mom! What are you wearing?” Galaxie demanded. “I’m an Austrian milkmaid and this is my dirndl,” April explained, smiling. “Your father is an oral surgeon.”
“That’s revolting,” Galaxie called after her parents, wincing. The kids hurried their retreat but not quickly enough to avoid hearing their father implore, in a laughable German accent,“Bitte, meine Liebe, step into my lair.” When Galaxie slammed shut the door to the house, Leon Bridges was singing Texas Sun into the dusty night.
