Let the People In by Jan Reid

Author:Jan Reid
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2012-10-19T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

The Rodeo

For the rest of their lives, Ann and Bud explained their relationship with the high school expression “going steady.” In April 1990, when she was struggling to put away Mattox in the runoff, Bud wrote, “My prayers are with you (and also my cosmic powers which are better left undefined, sort of like Mad Dog). I can’t even imagine how tired you must be, and how in need of . . . I started to say solace, but that’s not the word. Maybe a good hug is all I mean.”

“So far, so bueno” was Bud’s droll, semioptimistic maxim of life. But even he acknowledged how bleak the situation appeared that summer. Amid reflections on the press’s tepid response to her environmental policy plan—the one I wrote—and Saddam Hussein’s provocative comparison of Britain’s creation of Kuwait to a nipple carved from the breast of Mother Iraq, Bud offered an anecdotal detour and parable.

Dear Ann,

. . . I was kind of tired and my ankle hurt this morning, so I gave myself a day off. The dogs jumped in the car and I went to a long breakfast at Maudie’s Cafe, where I read the Dallas Morning News and listened to Ab, Maudie’s husband, the cook on Saturday mornings, as he would occasionally come out of the kitchen and make pronouncements. Once after he had been making a racket he came out and said, “No problem, folks. I’m just communicating with my ancestors.”

Later Ab sat down and said, “It’s a beautiful day in Chicago.”

I looked up from the paper to listen.

“Back on the farm at four in the morning, doing the chores and freezing to death, milking the cows and slopping the hogs, I would be listening to this old radio in the barn, and every morning a man came on the air and said, ‘It’s a beautiful day in Chicago.’ That’s always stuck in my mind. No matter how bad it looks to me, it’s always a beautiful day in Chicago.”

Ann had been in the race for a year now, and like a long-distance runner, somehow she had to find the kick, the sprint to the finish. Bud’s days of trying to overcome his crises had not all been beautiful, either, and she helped guide him toward AA. In those days, movies and AA meetings were how they often dated. In late June, she wrote him:

I’d love to go AA-ing with you but I am off to Washington, New York, and Miami this week. Home on Friday. I had such a good time listening to the saga of your father at the nursing home that I can’t wait to hear chapters 2-3-4. . . . I’ll call when I can play. Hope you’ll go to AA without me—great people.

Love, Ann

Late that summer, Bud accompanied Ann to a benefit that Willie Nelson put on for her at the Austin Opry House. There was a good deal of laughter and much good music that night, but we had the air of people bunched up under siege.

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