Joy and Madness

Yesterday, my wife and I took advantage of my client event at the Fort Worth Hilton by using the Hilton as a starting point to visit the Fort Worth Main Street Arts Festival. I had a free valet parking pass, so we zipped on over to Fort
Worth about mid-day, parked at the Hilton, and used it as our base as we wandered around the festival.

We encountered lots of interesting artwork, even more not-so-interesting-artwork, and entertainment of all stripes (e.g., a juggling Elvis impersonator on a unicycle, The Light Crust Doughboys (a folk/country band of real geezers) on one of several stages, and lots of little kids who had their faces painted...that was really entertaining). We never buy much at these arts festivals, mostly because we don't invest significant dollars in art (and the only stuff we're really interested in seems to be valued at many hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars).

We try to get a trinket when we can, though, and yesterday was no exception. My wife bought a piece of garden art, a dragonfly fashioned out of old pieces of flatware, welded onto a nib of re-bar, the results of which were welded to a thin metal rod that's driven into the ground to hold the dragonfly upright. As you can imagine by now, our garden is not one in which you'll find large pieces of stone sculpture. It's not that we wouldn't enjoy having a large-scale sculpture garden, mind you, it's that I chose a line of work that struggles to cover a mortgage, much less permit us to be "consuming" connoisseurs of fine art.


A Dark Turn
While most of the world recoiled at the horrors of the carnage at Virginia Tech last Monday, I watched the news unfold with little opportunity to recoil or even react. I was too intently focused on a major client event to express much. But I felt it. In 1966, when Charles Whitman went to the top of the University of Texas tower and committed his mass murder, one of my sisters was a student at U.T. She was on the U.T. campus that day. She was inside the undergraduate library building, just steps to the west of the tower building. For several hours, the rest of my family and I, most of whom were living in Corpus Christi at the time, had no information about whether she was safe. I was only thirteen at the time, but I remember feeling horribly frightened and so utterly helpless, just waiting to learn whether my sister was OK.

I cannot even fathom how it would have affected me had the outcome, for my family, been different. Once we learned my sister was safe, I began mourning for the victims and their families. I mourn now for those who lost their loved ones or their lives as a result of the tragic madness unleashed by one utterly insane person on the Virginia Tech campus. And I'm still insistent that I will not allow myself the luxury of politicizing that man's madness to suit my own political agenda, though that would be an easy thing to do.