SCHVITZBLOGGING

Back in Houston, Sweat City, again, after an uneventful ride on the Great Silver Aerial Bus.

There’s something about stepping off an airplane into Tropical Heat. No matter where you are in the world, the aroma is pretty much the same, a kind of hothouse funk mixed with the delicate pong of kerosene. It’s buried in memories forty-five years old and more, from our family’s annual peregrinations to South Florida. I’ve inhaled that same heady perfume in Mexico City, Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taipei...not to mention Jakarta. Except in Jakarta, there’s also a layer of burning cloves, the contribution of millions of kretek smokers.

And it smacks me in the face every time I get off the plane in Houston. Except, maybe, in the dead of winter - all twenty minutes of it, that is.

It was thirty-one years ago this month that I made my first major trek to Houston. Previous visits, transitory in nature, had been undertaken for the purpose of nailing down employment - but in August of 1974, I made that titanic drive from the suburbs of New York with the intention of settling here. I had a gig with the Great Corporate Salt Mine in hand, and I was ready to begin my Full-Blown Adult Life, eighteen hundred miles from home.

What was I thinking?

To arrive in Houston in August is to see Sweat City at its sweatiest. It is, to use the local parlance, hotter than the hubs of hell...and, unlike, say, Atlanta, it never cools off. I remember walking the thirty feet from front door to curb at six a.m. to retrieve the daily fishwrap and finding it hot enough to moisten the brow.

And then, there are the Texas Roaches, big as your thumb. The day I discovered that those sumbitches can fly, I nearly crapped a load in my britches right then and there. WTF!??!

They don’t kill ’em around here...they name ’em.

No, this place is not to be prized for its climate, or for the colorful Local Fauna, all of which have likely served to toughen the average Texan to a fare-thee-well. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, they say, and therefore the people who grow up here are Pillars of Fortitude.

But they are good people. I have lived here in Texas - more specifically, Houston - for thirteen out of the last 31 years, and the experience has left me richer in so many ways. Not least, of course, because that is where I discovered True Love.

That True Love waits for me, back in our home in Atlanta. I hate to be away, but it makes it that much sweeter to be back.