Chapter 67: History

Monday, March 15, 1982

After breakfast — I indulged with pancakes — we went off to visit the National Museum of the Pacific War. It amuses me that the only museum in the mainland United States dedicated to the story of World War II in the Pacific is located in a tiny, landlocked Texas town. Fredericksburg was the boyhood home of Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of Allied Forces in the Pacific Theater. The museum’s main building is the former Nimitz Hotel.

To their credit, the curators, who started out in 1965 with a relatively typical ‘boyhood home of’ exhibition, strove to upgrade their collection and expanded their focus to the entire war and beyond. There are replicas of battlefields, pieces of military equipment, and a great deal of information about the history of the war — not just what happened, but why. I knew they’d continued to develop and grow over the ensuing decades, but what was there now, in 1982, was impressive in its own right.

Perhaps the most interesting, or intriguing, part of the museum in the here and now was the Japanese Garden of Peace. Donated by the Japanese in 1975, it’s based on the private garden of Admiral Togo, who Nimitz greatly admired. The two men had been good friends. In several ways, the museum conveys a story about both sides of the war and an appreciation of both the cost of war and the value of peace.

The museum itself took hours to explore, and we could have spent longer. The garden? Ang and I sat quietly holding hands for an hour or more, soaking in the feeling. Mom and Dad did the same. I think it was particularly significant for Mom. Uncle Ryan had spent almost two years serving in the Pacific Theater. He seldom, if ever, spoke of what he’d seen and done there. A slight change in fortune or a different order working its way down from Admiral Nimitz might have resulted in him never coming home.

Dad summed it up on the way back to the motel. “I expected that to be good, and it was better than that.”

Mom nodded. “It brings home to me some of what Ryan must have seen, those years he spent out there.”

From there, we traveled to a local winery, which specialized in — of course — German varietals. Mom and Dad made sure we could take part in tasting. They had no problem with it as long as Mom or Dad did the serving. To people not from Texas, seeing a working vineyard with acres of grapevines is not what you expect, but Texas has some very good wines and wineries. I don’t know how good these wines were — first go-round me was not a wine connoisseur and, obviously, fifteen-year-old me was even less so — but I know what I like, and I liked these. Angie did, too.

We had German food for dinner, again. Mom said she was embracing her culture, which got a laugh from everyone, though it was, of course, quite true. She’d often joked that her grandfather was a German shepherd. He’d been a shepherd both in Germany and in America, after all. After dinner, we played a couple games we’d brought.

For the third night in a row, we decided against taking things very far. Neither of us felt that it fit with the day we’d had. Snuggling, smooching, and sleeping were the order of the evening.

Tuesday, March 16, 1982

“Morning, big bro.”

“Morning, little sis.”

“Know what day it is?”

I bit my lip, then I had it. “A year ago, we met each other fully.”

She smiled widely and nodded, meeting my lips with a quick kiss. “I like how you put that.”

“A momentous occasion we can only share with Jane.”

She giggled. “Yeah. Can you imagine, one year ago, I woke up ready to tear you a new one?”

“And I woke up praying that neither of us would say something we couldn’t take back.”

She giggled more. “And I did.”

“Well ... true ... but not how I meant it.”

“I know, but that’s what happened. I said the one thing I could never take back. Thank God I did, too!”

“We’re going to laugh so hard when we finally see ‘Heathers’ again and that line turns up.”

“Oh, God, yes!” she said, grinning.

“I suppose we need to get up.”

“Sadly. Though ... I’m really hungry, so ... maybe not so sadly!”

I hadn’t known what to expect on today’s trip, but this was not it. It should have been. It really should have. I think I just hadn’t quite thought through what this would feel like.

We got up, had breakfast, and hit the road, as before, heading north, all the way to Burnet, which is an hour and a bit north of Fredericksburg. I can go on and on with pronunciation lessons, but Burnet’s is fun — ‘Burn it, durn it, learn it’. It’s hardly the least-obvious pronunciation around the area — that award probably goes to Manchaca (‘Man-chack’) — but it’s amusing.

From Burnet, we turned southwest, and that’s when things started getting ... weird. Not bad; just... weird. I suppose it’s appropriate; Austin’s motto is ‘Keep Austin Weird’, after all.

Our path took us down through the tiny little town of Cedar Park. A tiny little town that Dave Winton and his wife would move to, thirty-five years from now, when it wasn’t nearly so tiny. We passed the place where they’d build the road that would lead to their house. That, right there, was the real start of the weirdness.

From there on, it was non-stop. Here was the place a mall would be built; there was the place a freeway would go. Here was where a building I’d worked in for five years would go. There’s where my favorite restaurant would be. The road that led — in a meandering route, right now — to the house I’d lived in for over twenty years was right there. If we took it, that house would be there; it’d been built a year ago.

We passed the place where a crazy guy would crash a plane into an office building — yet to be built — in the 2000s (no, it didn’t do significant damage, except to him, of course), and the place where a car of mine would die on the road. Places my wife had worked. We came in sight of a building I’d worked in for over a decade — yes, already built — and then we drove past a motel I’d stayed in at least once every decade from the 1970s to the 2010s.

It was, again, just... weird. This was, broadly, where I’d lived for over two decades. Far, far more recently than I’d lived in the house in Houston except for my brief stay in 2020-2021; only the fact that they’d never moved had kept it as fresh as it’d been when I came back. I’d been here, driving these roads — or the much-improved 2021 versions of them — just a couple of years ago. Everything was wrong, because Austin had changed so very much in those forty years. For every building that was the same, there were 10 that were totally off.

Ang and I were holding hands, as usual, and a firmer squeeze than usual alerted me to the fact that I must have been squeezing her hand enough to hurt a bit. She looked at me; I flicked my eyes this way and that. We hadn’t talked about it in enough detail for her to really understand what I was feeling, but I thought she was getting it, though likely not all of it.

She squeezed again, and I backed off. Dad and Mom were unaware; Dad would occasionally talk about something from his trips up here, and I nodded and mostly made appropriate noises, I think. Angie was covering more of the conversation than I was.

We wound up — no surprise; I’d seen it coming many miles ago — at the University of Texas. My alma mater, my home for years, a place I’d visited many times. As with everything else, it, too, was different. We could — and did — drive on roads that had been closed to traffic for decades in my former life. We visited the main drag — Guadalupe street (‘Gwad-uh-loop’ — yes, it’s an awful butchering of Spanish, but pronounce it any other way and you stand out like a sore thumb) and parked near the Texas Union, or student center.

We piled out of the car and embarked on a walking tour, Angie and I holding hands. The campus was very quiet; UT’s spring break overlapped ours. I kept up with them, fighting my desire to talk to Angie and thwarting her equal desire to talk to me, for several blocks. After a while, I dropped back, once we could do so without it seeming weird.

“What’s wrong, Steve? Something out of place?”

“No ... yes ... I mean, nothing’s ... it’s ... everything is as it should be in 1982, I think. It’s just ... I lived here for over twenty years, and that’s just two years ago. And it’s all so wrong for 2021. It’s like one never-ending, bizarre déjà vu.”