The Daily Brief

Of all the American towns and small cities I have ever had much to do with, two stand out as interesting hybrids of America and the European homeland… well, three if you count Savannah, the other two being Santa Fe, and Fredericksburg. All three are, to be honest, a little self-consciously touristic with the charms, a touch too dressy for the occasion and location… but charming.

Fredericksburg is the smallest and the least-known of these three, and of course it is the one I am the most familiar with, although there are other Hill Country towns just as pleasant— Comfort, Wimberley, Kerrville— tucked into the limestone hills and steep valleys braided with that dear commodity in South Texas— clear, cold streams of water. William and I sat in a small courtyard this last weekend, sharing a bakery cinnamon roll, and marveling at how it had a definitely European feel— a sort of cloisterish ambiance, sheltering buildings along four sides, well and fountain in the middle, nice comfortable benches, stone paths and all… but three of the sheltering buildings around this small courtyard were the generic Texas clapboard and metal-roofed structures, only the fourth building had any claim to stone and mortar permanence.

My mother always said, after visiting the Hill Country, that it looked more like Pennsylvania… not just geographically, all rolling hills and oak treks… but because it was settled by the same sort of people; stolid Anglo-Saxon or Germanic farmers, devoted to hard work but the higher things as well…learning, free-thinking and libraries being amongst them.

The public library in the town of Fredericksburg is on Main Street, right next to the Gillespie County Courthouse, on an open green square— the Marketplatz that is the heart of town. The police and fire departments have a building along one side, most of the old, major churches are not far away, the Pioneer Museum and the Pacific War museum are in walking distance, and one can happily while away an afternoon just walking around and looking at lovely old houses, and shops and sampling local foods and wines. I have done so many times, since I moved to this area ten years ago; William is very fond of the place, and it is only an hour or so drive from my house; we drive up in the springtime, enjoying the fields of wildflowers on the hillsides and highway verge, and a nice meal and meander through some of the shops. (William also takes the opportunity to check out any interesting developments at the War Museum. He is a docent and man of all trades at an air museum on the West Coast— and it is always good to see what is going on in the field.)

The library presents a most arresting appearance— pure and lavish late 19th Century Beaux Arts style, all porches and tall windows, steep-domed towers, ornate iron lacework along the roof ridges and balconies— the whole effect being something that one can imagine would be the Addams’ Family local public library branch. It is all the more amusing, since the courthouse next door is one of those severely 1930ies Moderne efforts, like a table radio of the era, made large. I’ve never been inside either building, but I just know that the courthouse has WPA murals and industrial linoleum floors, and both of the buildings must and should have those heavy, blond oak tables and chairs that used to be an institutional staple before Bauhaus-style clubbed us all over the head and left us all aesthetically the poorer for it. But the library… ah, the library must have something more special.

It must have shelves, and shelves of books, and not on those nasty modern industrial metal-grade bookshelves that dent as soon as you look at them, with shoddy adjustable shelves. No, the Fredericksburg Public Library should have heavy, bespoke built-in shelves, as solid and permanent as the building itself, none of those laminate moveable shelves that will begin to sag after a decade or two under the weight of books and books, and books, and more books. This library should have odd little nooks and corners, with window seats and carrels built into them, where a child could curl up with a book and become lost in another world for hours, given access to a place where every volume is a doorway and a passport to that magic land of imagination. Such a perfect place to read, and read and read, all those wonderful worlds accessed through books.

I told William that the Fredericksburg Public Library would be the perfect venue for a kids’ adventure book. It looks from the outside as if it could contain every one of those elements for a perfectly ripping yarn, juvenile division. A secret room, or hidden passageway, a benevolent ghost, a hidden treasure, a mystery… a story that should encompass friendship and adventure and a sense of the wonderful things that lurk just beyond this all too prosaic world… things that are just barely imaginable just beyond the doorway of a place like the Fredericksburg Public Library… or any other public library, any other town in this seemingly unimpressive but potentially magical world of ours.

Sgt/Cpl. Blondie stumbled across evidence of this, at a local chain grocery—the one I always call the Humongous Big-Ass Grocery. It is truly one of the glories of living in Texas, a local chain which has run practically every other big grocery chain out of town with a combination of unparalleled customer service, quite good prices on their house brands, and an unimaginable variety of fine grocery items for the discriminating foodie. I firmly believe that the Iron Curtain would have slipped off its’ rod and collapsed even sooner if selected members of the Politburo could have been given guided tours of the average HEB store… the sheer lavish glories of American grocery stores are legend, and HEB does that all one or two steps better. They pay really close attention to their local market. I have a theory that you can calculate the average per capita income in a neighborhood (before taxes) by counting up how many varieties of olive oil are on the shelves at the local HEB… so many varieties X so many $ thousands in income, and there you have it. I haven’t worked out the exact figures yet (I’m only an English major, you know!!!!), but the greater the variety of olio d’ olive, the higher the income. The HEB nearest Lackland AFB, I’ll have you know, had only 2, and one of them was that nasty yellow Pompeii brand drek, which was all that was on the major grocery markets for decades, before anyone acquired any taste in the matter at all.

Olive oil— it’s a small thing, but something I noticed, because of being in Greece, where it was the font of all civilization (according to legend), and then in Spain where Alcampo, the Spanish equivalent to Walmart, with every imaginable item under one roof, and at next to wholesale prices, offered an entire aisle of olive oil, of every quantity and quality.
I came home from Spain with six 1.5 liter bottles of a good and faintly greenish brand of the stuff, which lasted me for barely a year.
That’s the trouble with being stationed overseas a lot; eventually you sample the local stuff- something that is a local taste, and hardly ever exported, and when you come home, you are bereft… sometimes. A year or so after I came home from Japan, my friend Marsh (She of the marvelous engine-mount challenged car) were overjoyed to discover a small Japanese-American eatery that offered… Katsudon!

Katsudon; a dish all the more luscious because it is very good, and filling and cheap, and most marvelous of all— available everywhere. (And when you said it, the waiter/waitress understood it!) It was the hamburger, or the meatloaf of Japan, a bowl of rice topped with a breaded and friend pork cutlet, and a savory glob of poached egg and onion, all the juices seeping down to flavor the rice with sweet liquor. You could go— or so said the Japanese lady who taught the “Intro to Japan 1A— into any casual eatery in Japan, and ask for “katsudon” and get some variant of it. There is of late in one of my cooking magazines, a recipe for such, which shows how adventurous the foodie population may have become— two decades ago, practically no one who hadn’t done a tour in Japan had ever heard of it at all. People who have served overseas have heaps of examples— lovely and particularly local foods which they became addicted to, and could never find again, or if they could, at great expense, once they came “home”.

Which gets me back, however circuitously to HEB, and food items from Japan. Blondie found an import item at a local HEB store, and fell on it joyfully; a particular brand of Japanese soda. It came in very distinctive blue-green glass bottles, sealed with a blue-green glass marble in the neck of it. A bulge in the neck, and a pinch molded into the glass on one side kept the bottle from rolling back into the top opening if you drank it holding the bottle in a certain way. Vendors kept a particular punch at their stand, to open it by pushing the marble back into the neck— where it had otherwise made a tight seal against force of carbonation. The soda was otherwise fairly indistinguishable from ginger ale, or some other clear, mildly sweet and carbonated drink… but still. Neither of us expected to see it on the market here, but whattaya know. Here it is.

This pic of me (center) and two other girls from the barracks (Sorry, I can’t recall their names!) was taken during a local festival, about 1977, when all the traffic on Misawa’s main street was cut off, and it was decorated with lanterns and banners, and stalls. All of us have a bottle of this particular soda in hand.