Here we are in Dallas for the second time. We had a delightful time with Deb and Scott at their home. Deb made dinner which we really enjoyed and the wine went very well with it, both the fine California wine with the difficult to remove wax capsule and more local Texas Tempranillo which was a bit thinner and just perfect with the meal.
Finding our way in Dallas is interesting because the construction project on I 635 impacts travel no matter where one is and ramps that the GPS expects to find open are closed (and vice versa). We found our way “home” easily, just not the way we expected to go.
Sunday we decided to go back in time to our senior year in college, Fall 1963, November 22 to be more precise. A day that found me in the John Hay Library getting in some last minute reading before preparing to go home for Thanksgiving. The word that John F. Kennedy had been shot passed through the reading room, whispered from person to person, each then leaving, leaving books on the table, to go out on College Green to try to understand how our world was being jolted. Classes did not resume and we all left for home early. As I drove with my usual car full west on the NY Thruway we were stunned to hear on the radio the gunshot that killed Oswald. Almost every car on the road pulled to a stop on the shoulder to try to absorb yet another body blow.
In all the years since then we have never gone to Dealey Plaza to see the Texas Schoolbook Depository, what need? It happened and our visiting the place would not make it “unhappen.” Today we decided it was time to see the very place that our beloved president, the first president we had come to know as adults, was brought down. We waited in line for tickets and picked up our audio guides and rode the elevator to the 6th floor where we joined a throng of visitors going from site to site following the story from JFK’s time in the Senate through his election and the events of the first three years of his presidency. Then we came to the corner where Lee Harvey Oswald set up his shooting nest, it is boxed off now with clear plastic and the boxes of books are arranged as they might have been then. No one recorded their exact position before the investigating officers tore through the place looking for the assassin. Having absorbed the locale we went down to Elm Street and walked to the “grassy knoll” and past the X in the middle of Elm Street where the car was when the fatal bullet struck. Enough! It is history, history we lived through, but it is past and we must continue to go forward into the future.
Our next stop, after lunch in the cafe, was Dallas Contemporary where the exhibit is “Unplayed Notes Museum” Loris Greaud is the installation artist. This is one each person must see for them self. He has filled the entire huge gallery, five large rooms, with the work. I will leave it at that. Here is one shot of one of the galleries:
We finished our touring at the Dallas Museum of Art where I found a curbside parking space and we walked the park which covers the I 35 highway for several blocks in front of the gallery. We could not bring ourselves to go indoors and leave the 70 degree sunshine and thousands of people to look at more art. We walked the park and we sat in the sun before heading to do a little shopping for clothes for Carol and then back to the coach for dinner and quiet time.