A Couple of Street Corners and Imagination

A few weeks ago Butch and I took a road trip to Colorado. We’ve spent a lot of time in the southwest so when we go we try to take a route that will take us to a new place. The challenge is that, from where we live, it takes a full day to get out of Texas, unless we head for Mexico. Going west there is not much to choose from; towns are few and far between. As my husband likes to say about west Texas, “It’s not the end of the world, but you can see if from there”. For this journey we decided to take a detour through Midland and Odessa; then shoot across to Roswell and up through Santa Fe to Colorado.

As the trip time neared, we narrowed it down to just Odessa for two reasons. One, Butch has never been to Odessa, not that it’s a garden spot, but it’s something new. I’ve been there once, in high school. My dad took us there when another high school in my district went to the state football championship and played Odessa Permian. In the spirit of the event, we even decorated the windows of the car with shoe polish. At the time I wondered why my dad wanted to go to that particular game. Odessa is a long way from where we lived. I didn’t say anything about it because asking him why he did anything usually didn’t turn out well.

The second reason is that my dad grew up in Odessa. When he retired, Daddy did some genealogy work and had written a short biography of himself which included the location of his boyhood homes. When they first moved to Odessa they lived outside of town; he didn’t give any landmarks or road names. When he was six, they moved to town and lived at S. 6th and Lincoln. His dad’s plumbing and sheet metal shop was at S. 1st across from the T&P railroad depot. He also wrote a paragraph about himself for a book when Odessa High School was having a milestone reunion. In that piece he gave a different cross street (7th Street) for his boyhood home. I anticipated that it wouldn’t be difficult to find the places with these directions. The buildings might not be standing after all this time, but surely the streets will still be there.

We drove into Odessa in the late afternoon of July 22, tired from driving, but excited about finally starting our trip. We checked into a Holiday Inn Express along with sixty or seventy Halliburton workers. The oil boom has once again come to life in west Texas and it has become a busy place.

The next morning we started out. The desk clerk at the hotel gave us a map. We had studied it and got our bearings. With the aid of our GPS, known to us as GyPSy, we drove right to Lincoln and S. 6th.

The intersection is now located downtown. A Baptist church spreads across two corners with its parking lot on a third. This seemed appropriate since my dad and mom were members of a Baptist church for over 50 years when they died. An AT&T office building stands on the fourth corner.

Leaving our car in the Baptist church lot, we walked the block to the intersection of Lincoln and S. 7th. This intersection had a Disciples of Christ church and some other office buildings. After taking photos of all the corners, we went to search for Granddaddy’s shop.

S. 1st was nearby and we quickly spotted the railroad tracks. A few buildings lined the tracks, but nothing that looked like a depot and none that looked old enough to have been standing in the 1930’s. Butch went into a shop and asked about the depot. He was directed to another business that had been there much longer. The owner there knew exactly what we were looking for. In fact, the shop had stood across behind his shop. The depot was across the street by the tracks and had been torn down long ago leaving the lot vacant.

Standing where the shop probably had been and turning towards the north and downtown, we spotted a tall building, probably the tallest one in Odessa. I had noticed it when we were at the boyhood home site. That landmark gave me a sense of the distance my dad had traveled when he went from his house to his dad’s shop, just a few blocks. In those days, without the buildings and the traffic, he could have walked or run–he was a boy after all–the distance in a few minutes.

So this is where my dad grew up from about about six or seven years old until  he was in 10th grade and his family moved to Abilene. Daddy has always been a mystery to me. I never understood what made him like he was: non-communicative, independent, emotionally cold, quick to anger. Standing there on those corners in Odessa, I imagined what it must have been like growing up in flat, dry and dusty west Texas. He told me stories about when they lived in the country, stories about climbing up the windmill in high winds and setting the brake and times when he ran away from home. But he didn’t tell any stories about living in town, at least not that I remember.

My dad is gone now. He passed away in 2004. All I have is a couple of street corners and imagination. In Odessa I learned something. All the questions I have about my dad, all the things I don’t understand about him, it’s time to let those things go. He loved me the best he could. It’s up to me to be open and vulnerable with those I love, to let them really know me and not leave them with only a couple of street corners and imagination.