Fun in Dallas

So I went to the Dallas area on Friday at the invitation of St. Anthony parish in Wylie, TX. Reader Mark Windsor picked me up at DFW (the gigantickest airport in the US of A). Mark used to be a travel agent and so was ideally suited to navigate the Byzantine complexities of DFW and get us out into the real world.

When we walked out into the evening I was surprised because it was 5:20 PM and a) still broad daylight (it’s already dark up here in the dank fastnesses of Seattle) and b) it was really warm. Like, 78 degrees warm. Like a lovely day in spring warm. “Ah! The South!” I thought to myself. Lovely to get away from the bone-chilling fog of My Native Land on the shores of Puget Sound.

So we drive off to Dallas. The big plan is to get together with Rod Dreher (who I have never actually met) and, weenieish as it sounds when you are in Texas, go not to some barbecue pit or steak house, but to a sushi place called the Hibachi Grill (a concession to my weakness for seafood that will earn everybody involved some sort of merits in purgatory). So off we go, with Mark and I getting to know each other (he obviously knows a lot more about me since he reads the blog, so I do most of the questioning and he does most of the answering). Texas is (for a Seattleite) amazingly flat and brown. It’s hard for us Puget Sounders to get our bearing when you don’t have two mountain ranges on either side of you to tell you where east and west are. So I got totally lost. But the general direction seems to have been east and then north.

We get to the restaurant and it is still lovely, albeit night has fallen. But zephyr breezes fan our faces as we go in the joint and find Dreher and a friend (who turns out to also be a friend of Barb Nicolosi‘s) already tippling beers and chatting. We have a fine meal (though somewhat intimidating since, you know, there I am sitting across the table from the Pope of Crunchy Con-dom! I not only need to be conversant about newsy stuff and theology stuff, but I have to give the illusion that I know what I’m doing when I order good food. Muscling down my impulse to order a cheeseburger and fries, I get the shrimp and scallop dish and feel that I’ve dodged a bullet.

Then, the incalculable happens: chopsticks! They don’t have silverware here! Summoning remote body memory from the depths of the past, I casually break the chopsticks apart and begin to eat (after we have said a proper grace, of course). The conversation goes swimmingly, from Nicolosi to various adventures in eating to sundry hilarious anecdotes to Rod’s recollections of an exorcist he once knew and various speculations about whether places can be particularly infested with demons or fortified with angels and the Presence of God. We were there for a couple of hours and had a jolly time. The main thing that struck me about Rod was how not-from-Louisiana he sounds. Perhaps he can explain what happened. Maybe living in the Northeast corridor for a long time has a corrosive effect on local Southern dialects. Anyway, he’s a nice guy and it was fun to finally meet at last. If he noticed my raw ineptitude with the chopsticks he never let on, so I opted to pat myself on the back for a ruse well accomplished.

As we left, I noticed a chill in the air for the first time, and when we got to Wylie, it was getting downright cold. We went in the house where I was staying (the gracious Cole family) and, after a short visit I turned in.

Next morning, it was 32 freakin’ degree outside! A 46 degree drop! And it stayed that way all day. I couldn’t believe it! And it turns out this is normal for Dallas!

Anyway, we went off to St. Anthony’s to get set up. We celebrated Mass and then did the talks. During the day I had the privilege of meeting several readers, including Bull Schuck, Tim Brandenburg, Kevin (I didn’t get his last name) and Julie Davis, the Happy Catholic. The talks seemed to go well (though I’m a poor judge) and the day was over before I knew it. St. Anthony’s is a great parish. If you live in the Dallas area and are looking for a committed and well-catechized bunch of Catholics, check it out.

After we were done, I had a lot of time to kill before flying home. So Mark asked what I’d like to see in Dallas. Being an American history buff, and being somebody who knows nothing about Dallas, I thought of the only thing I could think of: Dealey Plaza where JFK was assassinated.

So we went to Dealey Plaza, a very surreal experience. Growing up in the shadow of JFK’s assassination, I knew the basic layout of the place before we got there, but I never really grasped how *small* it is. You park in a lot next to the Schoolbook Depository (now renamed something less evocative of November 22, 1963) and you walk over to the plaza, which looks pretty much like it did on that day. Before you get there you are assailed by a big black guy who is bundled up against the cold and talking in rapid fire, hawking a special edition something or other newspaper thingie for five bucks and rapidly rattling off the “sights” you can see (“first X on the road is the throat shot, second X is the head shot, over there is the grassy knoll, if you step over here you can see the window that was the sniper’s nest…”). It was rather ghastly and weird and you realize what a ghoul you are for coming to this place of death. But you still walk over there. How could you not? I remember that weekend even though I was only five. Mark W. could remember it and he was only two. This is a Historic Place. It commands attention.

We strolled over to the spot where Abraham Zapruder was standing with his movie camera that afternoon. What was driven home to me was the sheer implausibility of the vast network of conspiracy mythos that grew up like a jungle around this particular event. The grassy knoll and the fence where the supposed second gunman was supposed to be lurking were *extremely* close at hand on my right. I mean spitting distance on a breezy day. I mean you don’t have to raise your voice to talk to somebody over that fence if you were Abraham Zapruder. A rifle fired from there would leave you deaf in your right ear. Zapruder noticed nothing. That’s because there was no second gunman. All you needed to do the deed was a guy with Marine Corps Marksman training and a big chip on his shoulder. Oswald had both.

Mark tells me that every few years, somebody with a new conspiracy theory manages to convince the powers that be to shut down Dealey Plaza and run some new forensic or acoustics test. It’s a nightmare for traffic. And, I am now certain, it’s a total waste of time.

I think there’s something in the human psyche that is not prepared for the fact that technology makes it possible for a relatively small number of people to inflict enormous pain on millions. We want the cause to be proportionate to the effect. So some people can’t rest with the idea that Oswald acted alone. One man can’t have cause so much suffering for so many.

But he could and, I am convinced, he did. God rest the soul of JFK and God have mercy on the wretch who killed him.