Harlingen TX

Harlingen.

Wow. North Expressway 77. “Mama and Daddy put their roots down here cause this is where the car broke down”.  That’s a line from a Kenny Chesney song and it has a special meaning to me because I believe it is how my parents came to reside in south Texas.

My parents moved to Harlingen back in the 80's. They had sold their house in Bethel Connecticut and set about traversing the nation in a brandy new, shiny red, Ford F-250 pickup- Holiday Rambler travel trailer attached, in search of a place to retire.

Harlingen was one of the locations on that search, which ringed the nation east of the Rockies, and another of the places on the quest where mom had fallen ill and spent several days in the hospital.  According to sister lore, mom decided Harlingen would do because she didn't want to get back in the truck anymore to continue the search. 

So while their car hadn’t broken down Mom’s spirit for trailer traveling adventure and sickness did. They were looking at condo’s in Port Isabel a half an hour east but somehow decided to live in another albeit larger more permanent trailer in landlocked Bumfuck Texas.

I’ve been to Harlingen twice now since Mom and Dad left us. I think that probably a third of the amount of times I can count where I’ve ever been there. The first time was in January of 2014. I was on IOE which stands for Initial Operating Experience and its where the airline takes a guy fresh out of the school house and teaches them to fly on the line. I did IOE with Josh Z, and affable thirty something check airman at my company. We spent a night in Harlingen at the residence inn eating the managers reception food and drinking their cheap draft beer . I never got to look around though because we got in late and left early, and it being winter, it was dark on arrival and dark on departure.

We flew down here from Houston last night arriving into Valley Regional Airport. By valley they mean the Rio Grande valley which seems hardly a valley at all. In contrast, I live near the Hudson River Valley and that my friends is a valley. Nestled between the Berkshires and the Catskill ranges the Hudson flows mightily throughout a cut between those densely forested mountains. 

That's nothing like the thin strip of muck and trickle of water that serves as a border between the Texas and Mexico.  But looking down from altitude at the featureless terrain, dotted with scrub sand and stones, briefly interrupted by farmer’s fields, pad malls, homes and highways one really has to stretch to arrive at the definition of Valley. The greenery is supported by irrigation systems put in place by Texas A&M back in the last century, and fifty years ago there was nothing here but agriculture

Prior to the airline trips I was last here on November 27th 1994. I travelled to HRL alone to visit my folks and have thanksgiving dinner with them.  The date sticks out because it was when Dan Marino faked a spike and threw the winning touchdown to Mark Ingram beating the Jets.

It was in a RV park called Paradise Park, which was anything but Paradise. For the first several years they lived there Mom really liked the sun and the pool. Every time you would see her or pictures of her she was well tanned. Something happened and she stopped going out to the pool and she told me the sun was aging her skin. At fifty five, I don’t sit in direct sunlight that much anymore so it does seem plausible, but it was likely the south Texas heat and humidity combining with her emphysema didn’t afford her good breathing as that horrible disease progressed.

And thirty some odd years later, here I am sitting in Starbucks, waiting out a rainstorm, drinking coffee and wondering how far I am from where they lived and would they recognize it now. I briefly considered stopping into the Whataburger! on the corner, where my dad used to spend hours drinking burnt coffee and smoking cigarettes. I clearly remember his stained white plastic Whataburger! cup with its faded orange logo that he bought once, and brought each time for free refills at the senior discount. 

I also recall the smell of the place, dirty fryer oil mixed with burger grease, old coffee and cigarette smoke mingling to create a disgusting mélange that stuck to your clothes like camp fire smoke.  It was here that Dad would hold court whiling away the hour’s bullshitting about all things aviation and nautical, clouding up the place, surrounded by his posse of retirees proudly serving in the Confederate Air Force, Coast Guard Auxiliary, or like him -both.

I chose Starbucks - something familiar and am sitting tapping away, writing this on my phone, a large coffee complete with my Irish milk, just checking out the people in the place. This could be anywhere in the country, it looks like the Starbucks in New Fairfield where I live. The students replete with spiral bound notebooks conferring over laptops with fru-fru coffee drinks, business people interviewing prospective employees, women in workout garb and business suits, construction managers meeting with subcontractors,  going over schedules, realtors half listening to mortgage people detailing products all the while they imagine themselves in flagrante delicto with either the girl in the workout garb or the one in the business suit.  

A few caught my eye. A couple, study buddies, or actual boyfriend girlfriend, I can’t tell the difference. He is a little meatball of a man, dark skinned, of Mexican heritage with a mustache, t-shirt, ball cap, cargo shorts and flip-flops. She is a statuesque stacked Asian or perhaps Hispanic with long straight brown hair that comes halfway down her back, in form fitting grey stretch pants, and a white cropped sports top that displayed her ample wares. A pair of large round faux tortoise shell glasses made her look studious while they discuss something they are working on, him with a laptop and her with a thick well used spiral bound multi subject notebook  

Across from that pair is an aging hipster, with an equally aging white Sony Vaio in his lap.  A black Beat’s headset placed over black bug eye ray ban shades with a mop of black curly greying hair connected by sideburns to an equally greying beard. He’s attired in black jeans and t-shirt and a members only style leather jacket in the comfy chair in the corner. His head is nodding rhythmically to some unheard music clearly out of time with the coffee shop eclectic blend of non offensive yet suitably hip music playing quietly in the background.

I was distracted by a cute forty-something, thin, foiled blond hair tied in a short ponytail, pink spaghetti strap top covering a black sports bra and yoga pants, She was picking up an enormous extra sweet green iced tea from the heavily inked barista. Her sculpted left shoulder and arm is a tapestry of color, tastefully tattooed to her elbow. She looks amazing without makeup on and I have to avert my gaze, else appear to be leering.

An interview is going on at the table next to me where an overweight dowdy woman in her best ill fitting business suit is telling a nattily dressed woman with a diamond wedding ring the size of a car headlight, earrings to match, why she is the best candidate for the job, why should she be hired, and what a great addition she would make to “the team”.

Team, what an overused horrible description of what most work associations actually are. I guess it is used to tell prospective hires that companies are looking for people who can get along, and don’t want to hire anyone stands out, who is strong willed or always needs to have things go their way.

The contrast between the women couldn’t be starker, and there is no doubt the one doing the interviewing is incredibly strong willed, and from reading the body language of the pair,  she is 100% sure everything will go her way.  She ended the interview with “we have many other candidates to look at, if you are the best match, we’ll be sure to get in touch”. I’ve been on a lot of job interviews in my life and when you hear that at the end of the meeting you want to say “Fuck you very much”

The nattily dressed woman gets up and leaves while the dowdy one sits and finishes her coffee, pulling out her calendar and making some notes.  I’d like to see what the notes are and I’m hoping that it’s not how many more days she has left before she runs out of cash.

Witnessing all of this just makes me think. I start snapping pictures of the surrounding scenery on my way back to the hotel. The single story flat roofed stucco buildings painted in weird pastels that housed the old local based businesses are being torn down and replaced with strip malls replete with national branded stores of standardized design, funded by wall street’s insatiable desire for growth.

My mom would have loved to be able to go and shop at some of these places I think. She always complained about how it was so backward here. 

My Dad, probably not so much. He would have hated the idea of fresh expensive coffee thrown away after thirty minutes, that you order in anything other than small medium and large. Getting my dad to order a venti or a grande coffee would have set him off on a tirade about how Italians were cowards only slightly higher on the human food chain than the French   A WW2 vet he liked it old burned and bad. It was a sign of manliness and courage, and went well with the harsh smoke from his Camels.

 As a coffee drinker I’ve had the opportunity to hang out at quite a number of Starbucks. No matter where these stores are located  the customers are always the same. Sure their hairstyles and clothing and accents may differ slightly, but their demeanor and purpose is the same.

The gig economy and agile working has created a concept that work is no longer a place you go but a thing you do. Messaging enabled smartphones and other business mobility tools made the agile revolution possible. Companies across america have been ditching their expensive office buildings and allowing workers the freedom to live their lives interspersed with their work effort, saving millions in real estate costs and creating ghost-towns of empty office space in suburbia nationwide.  To support that Starbucks, Panera’s with their free wifi and tolerance for people sitting with the same cup of coffee for hours, holding meetings, stewarding commerce, and the like have sprouted up practically everywhere.

But at what cost? The loss of a regions character, no matter how primitive backward or awkward it may be perceived to some, is akin to extinction of a species. It can never be replaced, the genie cannot be put back in the bottle.

Seeing locally owned Taquerias  being replaced with Chipotle’s and Taco Bell’s in an area where Mexican and Tex-Mex cuisine has been the staple diet for a hundred years or more, is a horrific distortion of culture. And frankly that’s just not right.

Step right up for another steaming cup of Corporate Monoculture served by the new american workforce of non-agile $7.35 an hour restaurant servers.

I'm thinking I’m glad Mom and Dad didn’t get to see this, or the unbridled business expansion that decimated of their other adult home towns in Bethel Connecticut, Bayshore New York or South Boston Massachusetts.

I wonder what I’ll think in another twenty five years.