There is a unique monument in Comfort, Texas - the only memorial dedicated to Unionists, south of the Mason-Dixon line, and one of only a handful of places where the 36-star American flag flies at half-staff, in perpetuity.  Virginia split into two states, and Missouri and Kansas bled over the matter of secession and slavery - but who would ever have thought that right in the middle of a stoutly Confederate state, there would be a large population of stubborn Unionists? But there were, and what is odder still is that most those Union loyalists were only recent immigrants to Texas and the new world.

When Texas departed the Union, it was over the objections of a substantial minority, including those German settlers who had come to the Hill Country and built towns like Fredericksburg, Comfort and New Braunfels in the years immediately before the war. When a general conscription law was passed, essentially declaring that every white male between the age of eighteen and thirty-five were liable for military service, feelings in the Hill Country were bitterly resentful; opposed to slavery and secession, many found it deeply insulting to be forced to fight in the defense of an institution they despised, and for a political body whose existence they had opposed. And, too - Gillespie County was very much still a part of the frontier. Fighting off war-parties of Indians was a much more immediate concern.

This resulted in Gillespie and Kerr County being put under martial law, in the spring of 1862, and all men over the age of 16 ordered to register with the local provost marshal and take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy.  Suspicion followed by repression bred resentment and further defiance, which in turn bred violence... and resistance. Men of draft age took to hiding out in the brush. A company of Confederate partisans under the command of Captain James Duff were sent to keep order. By summer, Captain Duff ordered the arrest of any man who had not taken the loyalty oath. His troopers waged a savage campaign; flogging men they had arrested until they told his troopers what they wanted to hear, wrecking settler's homes, arresting whole families and confiscating foodstuffs and livestock.

Late in the fall, thinking that they had been offered a thirty-day amnesty by the Governor of Texas and the opportunity to depart Texas unmolested, rather than take the loyalty oath, a party of sixty men gathered together, led by a settler from Comfort named Fritz Tegener. They intended to travel westward towards the Mexican border; most intended to  join the Union Army. But there was no such amnesty in effect, and they were pursued and fought a pitched and bloody battle with a contingent of Duff's troopers. About half the party was killed outright in the resulting fight, another twenty wounded were executed upon capture; one survivor was taken to San Antonio and executed there. The others scattered; some over the border and some to the Hill Country, where their families brought food to them as they hid in the fields near their homes. Captain Duff refused to allow the families of the dead to retrieve the bodies. Their remains lay unburied until 1866 when their families brought them to Comfort, and buried them in a mass grave, on a low hillside on what then would have been the outskirts of town. The stone obelisk is plain and stark, shaded by a massive oak tree: panels on three sides list the names of the 36 men of Tegener's party, all of whom were True to the Union.

Family Car

There is a saying that the difference between the English and the Americans is that to an American, a hundred years is a long time ago, and to an Englishman, a hundred miles is a great distance. Apt - and in a fair way to be true. All across the Southwest, our very oldest existing buildings, aside from various Indian pueblos, are the missions; at best a couple of centuries and change, pale and makeshift reflections of the great cathedrals of Spain.  A drive of a hundred miles is nothing special at all.

Growing up we spent a lot of time in the family car, my brother JP and sister Pippy and I, in the commodious back seat of  "Old Betsy" - a jade-green 1952 Plymouth Station wagon, which my Dad bought slightly used and which my mother drove for thirty years. Dad eventually bought, and dismembered another ‘52 Plymouth to keep the first in parts:  door panels, windows and engine parts and all, although the split windshield was inadvertently wrecked by our horse, blundering into the garage in search of his specialty horse-food, and stepping flat onto the glass panes.

Old Betsy got a new coat of paint every couple of years, and our best-remembered road trips was when Dad took us to Mexico, to get a new headliner installed at a cut-rate body and interior-work shop. While Betsy was being worked on, we watched a glass-blower demonstration, and looked at painted pottery and coarse hairy serapes and other touristy junk. We so wanted to go to a bullfight, the arena had the most interesting posters outside! In a bakery-grocery, Dad bought us fresh rolls, fruit, and bottled soft-drinks, nothing that would tax our delicate, first-world digestive systems. Our great adventure, the first time we had ever been to a foreign country. JP and Pippy and I could look around and think, "Not American." But not entirely foreign, not as long as we were looking at it from the back seat of Old Betsy.

How many weeks and months of my life were spent in the back seat of that car? Going to my grandparents' houses, to church, countless trips to school when the weather was bad, out to the desert or into the mountains with Dad for camping trips, to summer-camp in the mountains, to swimming lessons; how many weeks and months would that work out to be; JP and I on either side and Pippy in the middle, being the littlest, and least inconvenienced by the hump of the transmission in the middle of the floor? Looking out the window, daydreaming as the cityscape and the countryside swept by, seeing the hills upholstered in crunchy golden grass and spotted by dark green live oaks, watching for landmarks as the grey highway unspooled in front of us, the landmarks that let us know how close we were to wherever?

I was apt to get car-sick; the preventive was to have a window open and the fresh air blowing in, and to sing. We had a wide repertoire of folk songs, of hymns, of campfire songs, all sung in tight family harmony, and we would talk. So many things we talked about- the back of the Plymouth is where we first heard that we were going to have a baby brother, where Great-Aunt Nan talked about her half-brother, so many family moments. The back of the car, on the way to so many places - that's where family is, the place that memories are made.

When Getting There Was Glorious

Once there was a time - and that time is long out of memory for anyone alive in the United States today - when traveling on land was an arduous, uncomfortable business, and dependent upon muscle-power, either one's own muscles or those of draft animals. To go as far as fifty or five-hundred miles was a considerable project, well up to the mid-19^th century - and then it seemed that the nation and the world itself were suddenly spanned by steel rails and steam engines. The railway had arrived - and a journey from the upper-Midwest to the West Coast, which once took six months of grueling travel, could be accomplished in comfort over a matter of days. Going by train became the way to go - and at the very high end, one could travel in considerable luxury, in a private parlor car. Even the ordinary traveler could feel like a person of consequence, walking through a railway station the likes of Grand Central Station in New York, or Paris' Gare de Lyon.

And burgeoning cities everywhere paid homage to the railway by constructing ever more magnificent temples to progress in the form of railway stations; combining comfort and efficiency with every possible technological advance - and no small display of architectural grandeur. Late 19^th and early 20^th century architects copied elements of everything from Roman baths, Greek Temples, Italianate towers and Moorish palaces. San Antonio's own Sunset Station was done in Spanish Mission Revival style; completed in 1902, it is an absolute period jewel, although combatively modest in size. It was the pride of San Antonio, when completed: along the upstairs galleries in the old Depot building there are pictures of a lavish banquet being held to celebrate it's completion - a banquet held to coincide with the arrival of the first train. For more than half a century, the Depot building was the waiting room and arrival hall for passengers departing and arriving. Presently it serves as a banquet hall again - and the current Amtrack station doesn't pack anything like the same glamorous and historical wallop of the grand old Depot.

The old station is the anchor of the slowly reviving historical St. Paul Square district, a cluster of various turn-of-the-last-century buildings which once housed a number of lively and vital businesses dependent upon rail transport and traffic - warehouses, hotels, grocery stores, cafes and the like. One senses that it might have revived a little sooner if the highway had not so brutally amputated that part of downtown from the rest of it. Still and all, it's a lovely place on a warm spring day, to explore the old neighborhood - and to marvel again at how elaborate a public facility like a railway station could be, in the days when the railway was the only way to go.

Click photos to enlarge

Then it's time to make dandelion wine. When my Granny Jessie passed on, in the early 1990's, one of the things that came to me was a little square wooden box full of recipe cards, although to be frank and fair, Granny Jessie probably did not use the recipes in it; some pre-printed on standard stock, cut out from magazines, others hand-copied in pencil, or merely cut from newspaper pages - and most of those are as brittle as ashes. No, I think she saved them because they intrigued her, or someone at a church pot-luck supper who brought something that she liked the taste of, scribbled it down for her, and she thought that she might make them someday. Some of the recipes cut from the newspaper have dates on them - from the 1970s mostly. Some of them, of course, may be older. But Granny Jessie wasn't that much of an adventurous cook - even before Grandpa Jim died; Grandpa Jim being one of those who thought salt and pepper was about as far out on the culinary edge of things as any human being ought to go. No, Granny Jessie did basic, early 20th century American cooking - which, when it was good, was very good. Her rice pudding (with raisins in it!) and her version of shoo-fly pie was sublime.

Among the adventurous curiosities in the little wooden recipe box was a newspaper clipping which so intrigued me that I copied out all the recipes therein - the topic was dandelions. Everyone knows what dandelions are, and people who are proud of their lawns spend a great deal of effort, expense and toxic chemicals eradicating them . . . and expense and effort which might not be necessary if we considered dandelions as a garden crop, instead. Yes, indeedy, the darned things are edible - at least when they are tender and young, and have not had any of the aforementioned chemicals poured upon them. Instead, what about a salad of dandelion greens - with bacon! Everything goes better with bacon! And what about dandelion wine?

Dandelion Green Salad

Fry until crisp - 3 slices bacon. Arrange in a flat, shallow dish, several cups of clean, dry dandelion greens, and crumble the bacon over it. Garnish with finely chopped chives and parsley. Dress with 2 TBsp vinegar and 1 TBsp olive oil, and a sprinkling of salt and pepper.

Dandelion Crowns

Trim leaves from whole plant, just where they turn green. Trim off root, just below crown, and clean thoroughly. Simmer for 5 minutes in water, then drain and simmer in fresh water another five minutes. Serve with a little melted butter and fresh pepper. Crowns may also be marinated for at least four hours in ½ cup olive oil, ¼ cup vinegar, 1 sliced garlic clove and a thinly sliced onion.

Dandelion Wine

Clean sepals from and wash thoroughly 6 cups dandelion blossoms. Place in a sterilized jar and cover with 3 quarts boiling water. Add rind from 2 lemons and 2 oranges, Cover mouth of jar with plastic wrap and allow to set for 2 days.

Strain liquid into another sterilized jar and stir in: 2 ½ pounds sugar, juice of 2 lemons and 2 oranges, ½ lb raisins, coarsely ground, and ½ package yeast. Cover and set away for one week. Strain into a gallon jug, adding additional water to fill, if necessary. Seal tightly and allow to ferment for 3 months. When it stops fermenting, pour into another jar and allow to stand until clarified. Bottle, and seal, and allow to age.

A Disquisition Upon Jello

Now if I had once thought that the garlic snails at the yearly NIOSA street food event were dubious eats, I had not had a chance to grok the full horror of the guacamole bird - it's the third one down. click here ... Finished shuddering yet? Good. You see, there is Jello and all the horrors that are perpetuated with it, and then there is just plain gelatin mixed with a variety of sweet or savory liquids and poured into an appropriate Jello mold.

There is the stuff whipped up by the staff of women's home magazines trying to catch the eyeballs (or stimulate the nausea reflex) and not coincidently sell more Jello... and of late there is the parody stuff (like the famous brain mold), and a lot of bizarre things put together for contests; I have heard of Jello aquariums with lettuce for seaweed and Goldfish crackers as... er, gold fish swimming in the pale green lime depths.

And then for those who favor less jokey and more toothsome variants of jellied edibles, there are desserts such as my mother's favorite - the wine-orange gelatin dessert, and my own yoghurt cream mold. Mom's was from the 1970s edition of Joy of Cooking, ( p. 745) "Wine Gelatin"

Soak 2 TBsp gelatin in ¼ cup cold water. Dissolve it in ¾ cup boiling water and stir in until dissolved, ½ cup sugar. Allow to cool and add 1 ¾ cup orange juice, 6 TBsp lemon juice and 1 cup well-flavored wine. Sugar amount may be adjusted if the orange juice and/or wine are sweet . Pour into sherbet glasses and chill until firm. Serve with cream, whipped cream or custard sauce. (It strikes me that this might be very nice with blood-orange juice and a nice rose wine)

My own favorite gelatin recipe - Yoghurt-Cream Dessert - was copied from a newspaper clipping (Stars and Stripes?) into a hand-written collection - no idea of where it might have come from before then, although I think there is an Italian sweet dessert something like it called ‘panna cotta'.

Soften 4 tsp unflavored gelatin in ¼ cup cold water. Combine in a saucepan over low heat, 1 ½ cup heavy cream and ¼ cup sugar, stirring until cream is warm and sugar dissolves. Add softened gelatin and stir until that dissolves also. Remove from heat, allow to cool, and stir in 2 ¼ cups plain unflavored yoghurt and 1 tsp vanilla. Pour into a 1-quart mold and chill for at least one hour. Un-mold and serve with fresh fruit or fruit compote.

I usually make a sauce of ¾ water, and 6 Tbsp water, cooked with about 1 cup of fresh blackberries until berries are softened and syrup slightly thickened. Then I add another cup of fresh raspberries and 2 Tbsp raspberry vodka.

Gelatin molds - not just for Lutheran church suppers!

I love the old mansion, and the landscaped grounds at the McNay - sometimes it seems that any town or city with a certain level of accumulation of old money admixed with cultural appreciation has such a museum: a sprawling mansion, in a park-like setting, an eclectic art collection - or a collection of something - purchased by an original owner with sufficient taste and income. Southern California, for instance, has the Huntingdon, Descanso Gardens, and Indianapolis has the Lilly House  - and San Antonio has the McNay, at the corner of New Braunfels and the Austin Highway.

The mansion that Jessie Marion Koogler McNay Atkinson built is one of those splendid Jazz-age Spanish-style colonial piles, pale ivory plastered walls with a roof of pale rust-colored tiles, with lots of interesting little porches, balconies and loggias, built around an interior courtyard, and ornamented with all the hand-painted tiles and lacy iron-work. The grounds and the courtyards were further adorned with fountains and semi-tropical plants - this was the ultimate in residential style in 1920, especially in the southern part of the US.

The inside was adorned with her collection of original art, some 700 pieces of 19^th and 20^th century European and American pieces. Alas, the extension of the McNay, and the means of displaying even more art - is one of those brute modern arrangements of glass and geometric slabs, appended on to the back of the house, like some kind of ugly orthopedic brace. I have never figured out why those in charge of expanding aesthetically pleasing period buildings prefer to deface them by slapping on something so eye-bleedingly different in style. Didn't anyone ever consider that extension built of similar materials, with the signature ornamental elements pared down a notch or two might be sufficient and aesthetically pleasing?

She came from Ohio originally - a fabulously wealthy heiress to an oil fortune, with excellent taste and an accomplished artist in her own right. But she came to San Antonio first in 1918 - not as an artist or a traveler, certainly not as an art collector - but as a war bride to Sergeant Don Denton McNay. Alas, very shortly afterwards, he died in the horrific influenza epidemic which most particularly scourged military camps in that year. She married again, in the mid 1920's - but when that marriage ended, she reverted to using her first husband's surname.

That was the name she used for the rest of her life. One wonders if it were a tragic and romantic gesture, a little way of holding on to a memory of love. Eventually the art collection, the house and more than twenty acres surrounding it, and a substantial endowment to support it were left to establish a museum of modern art, open to the public. It is a lovely and peaceful oasis, in the middle of the suburbs. My daughter's favorite is one of the ornamental ponds - in which there lives a collection of perfectly monstrous ornamental carp. My own favorite is the interior courtyard, which reminds me of those old houses in Spain, all built around just such a courtyard, with a trickling fountain and a bounty of plants in urns.

Adventures in Old Lamps

I can't remember when I discovered that it wasn't very hard to re-wire table lamps, or replace plugs and swap out one-way sockets for three-way, so that an ordinary lamp would become reading lamp. Stripping half an inch of insulation off the ends of the wires, threading them through the lamp-base and securing the bare wires around the little screws in the socket base; it's not rocket science.

More recently, I discovered that all the little bits that hold a lamp together and attach a shade are a standard size and thread. We've bought lamps at the thrift-shop or at yard-sales because they have a pretty base, and been gratified with how much better they look with new hardware and a nicer shade - and upgraded wiring. A while ago my daughter bought a pair of inexpensive 1930's era decorative lamps that I didn't dare plug in. The wiring was so crumbly; it looked like a picture of an example of dangerously faulty wiring in a brochure handed out by the fire department. New hardware, new wiring, new sockets, all the way around; amazing how much nicer they looked!

I have a whole basket full of essential lamp pieces, scrounged from various broken lamps. Never know when you will need an essential bit, you see. Since I took up the carpets and painted the concrete floors in the house, some of my favorite lamps have bit the dust - including one made from a blue and white Korean bowl I spotted in a market in Itaewan and had converted to a lamp.  Not to fear - I salvaged all the non-china parts, the bases, tops and shades, with the socket and all the metal bits.

Almost at once, my daughter, the Queen of All Yard Sales, spied three replacement lamps, at a San Antonio neighborhood garage sale - all blue and white painted china bases, all vaguely Oriental in design, in good shape and all three for a mere pittance. One of them most particularly resembled the Korean bowl, and as it was approximately the same dimensions, I thought I would be able to remove the brass base and top to it, and replace them with the wooden base and fittings from the Korean lamp - and I would have something that came very close in looks to it.

Only the hex-nut that held the whole thing together at the bottom was apparently tightened on at the factory by Godzilla himself. Not even with a crescent-wrench could we get it to budge - and Blondie and I tried separately and together, and with a spritz of liquid wrench.

There was only one thing to do. And that was to take it to Pep Boys. Really, any garage would have done, but Pep-Boys was open on Sunday. Where else do you find the strength and the technology to separate metal bolts from the threads they are apparently frozen onto, than at an auto mechanics? But the manager did look at me and ask, warily, "This is at your own risk of course. It's not a priceless Ming vase, is it?"

"Five-dollar yard-sale special," I said, "Have at it."  It took one of the mechanics about two minutes and all the other mechanics came to look, shaking their heads.

The manager did say afterwards that it was the weirdest request that anyone has ever come to Pep-Boys with.

(Some pictures of what an easy job this can be. Of course, I had feline supervision. The lamp pictured was picked out of a trash can - because the cord was damaged, and the light socket knocked askew.)

The Twig - Planted in a New Place

If you call San Antonio home and love books, and cherish independent bookstores, want children to love books - then of course, you know the Twig Bookstore and it's twiglet offshoot, the Red Balloon. They were on of Broadway, north of the HEB Central Market, but now they are in new and roomier quarters in the Full Goods Building at the Pearl Brewery. I always loved the Twig - especially since I had done signings for my books there - but the premises they were in on Broadway always seemed a bit cramped, three eccentrically shaped rooms with the shelves of books crammed in wherever they fitted. At the Pearl, they have one large, airy room - and it didn't seem to be the least cramped, even though it was full of children and parents, and books, upon books upon books. The odds of being re-ended as you back out of one of the parking places in front are probably reduced, although perhaps Saturday traffic at the Farmers' Market may still afford the same fender-crunching thrills previously experienced when trying to back out into traffic on Broadway.

Yes, the Twig is now adjacent to the weekly Farmers' Market at the Pearl, which we visited a while back. We paid a return visit, purchasing some relatively inexpensive food items - a loaf of dense and luscious bread, some olive tapenade, which made me seriously re-think my decades-long dislike of olives, and a pound of incredibly fresh mushrooms. Yes, some very fine artisan foodstuffs on offer; but not what I became accustomed to in the regular farmers' market/street market in Greece and in Spain. There, the freshness was glorious, the fruits and vegetables, eggs and specialty foods were straight from the farm, and piled up in plenty - but they were also appreciably cheaper than a supermarket - a large part of the appeal to the ordinary shopper. Buy straight from the producer, shave off a few pennies by cutting a distributor and retailer out of the loop - alas, the goods at the Pearl Farmers' Market are wonderful, top-quality, but not all that much of a bargain. It's a sort of HEB Central Market in the open air and with live music and lots of dogs on leashes.

For our bite of lunch we took refuge from yuppies and puppies in an eccentric and divvy place on the other side of 281 - Sam's Burger Joint, at the corner of Grayson and Broadway, or as I realized, at the metaphorical corner of Trendily Expensive and Gloriously Low-Rent. The faint smell from the grill at lunchtime wafted to us from a block away. Although there is plenty of outdoor seating, it was a bit chilly, so we chose to sit inside and appreciate the rustic décor, which seems to have been assembled from yard-sales, thrift-shops and the oil-change place on the corner of Nacogdoches and Judson, which also features a lot of old license plates. Sam's Burgers has live music in the evenings, a line out the door at weekday lunchtimes, swing-dance lessons in the adjoining dance hall out in back, and burgers the size of a restaurant-sized bread and butter plate. Mine arrived so fresh from the grill the meat was still sizzling. My daughter had a chili-dog; no ordinary chili-dog this, but a brat with a scoop of home-made chili poured over it, and the chili wasn't made with that tasteless, cheap skillet-mix meat that usually features in fast-food chili-dogs, either. It was glorious - and neither of us had any appetite whatsoever for dinner that night.

Click photos to enlarge

Possum Kingdom!

Although my Texas back yard is tiny, a veritable scrap, a pocket-handkerchief of a back yard, it somehow feels much larger, because it backs on a green-belt, and is alive with birds; not much out of the ordinary, though; the usual brown sparrows and wrens, great flashy blue-jays- the glam rock-stars of the backyard-bird world- a mocking bird now and again, the returning cardinal pair and a flock of very fat grey doves. If I wanted, I could hunt them from the back porch; it would only be easier if they walked up to the door and committed seppuku on the mat. My own indoor cats see the birds as entertainment; Cat Television, the Bird Channel. And the visiting cats did know their limits; they never tangled with Wellie the opossum.

Wellie came to the back porch one summer afternoon, a couple of years ago, drank deeply from the outdoor cat's water dish, and then ate his fill of kibble, as the visiting cats watched lazily from a sun-warmed place on the rock pathway. Then, he calmly waddled across the porch, underneath the chair that I was sitting in, and curled up in the corner cupboard, among the garden sprayers, containers of plant food and the long loppers and went to sleep. I was never able to decide if he was fearless or as dumb as a box of rock, or why- other than a fearsome collection of needle-sharp teeth and claws-the outdoor cats were tolerant about Wellie. I suspect cats see opossums as merely another sort of ugly mutant cat.

Those cats and Wellie have since moved on  from my San Antoino home, but all year round, wild life in my garden burgeons: the toads come and go, and the lime-sherbet-green lizards inflating their pink throats on the wisteria branches are always there. A couple of evenings ago, I heard something crunching away at the kibble in the cats' dish, a tiny kitten-sized thing that skittered away and hid among the potted plants when I opened the door. Not the neighbors' escaped pet ferret again, but a miniature Wellie, an opossum-kit with a white face and black ears. Yesterday it was there again, joined by a second, and a third, who crept cautiously down the lattice, or from between the pots. They crunched nervously, sometimes balancing on the edge of the dish. Two of them fled when a hungry dove landed, and stalked up and down with an indignant flaring of tail-feathers and wings, but the third kit kept possession of the dish. The disgruntled dove hopped away off the porch and the two shyer kits crept out from between the pots again, and ate and ate until they were quite full. I assume they are living on the flat porch roof, under the shelter of the main roof overhang, and come and go by the lattice and the wisteria vines, and that the cat-opossum truce still holds. The man at the pet store says he had a semi-tamed one for a while, and they will eagerly eat slugs and snails, which is a good reason to tolerate them, even aside from the fact that they are rather amusing to watch.

I do wish I had a turtle in the garden, though. I have rescued two from various busy streets, but both times I was too far away from the house to take the time to bring either one of them home. I left them both in green pastures, out of the traffic. But a turtle would be cool - the next one I find in the road is coming straight home and joining my own little wild kingdom.

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