coincidental reminiscenses

At one time, in the mid 1970’s, I lived in a small apartment on Herschel Avenue in the Oak Lawn section of Dallas, Texas.  I shared the apartment with a somewhat younger man, Rob Adair, whom I had met in Day Hospital at Timberlawn Psychiatric Hospital in East Dallas.  Timberlawn was the largest, and perhaps the most respected, psychiatric hospital in Dallas at the time.  It has recently (it is now 2018) been shut down by the State as being unsafe from the point of view of unprevented sexual attack.  Rob and I were friends for a number of years, but particularly for the period immediately following our voluntary semi-confinement.  We last spoke on the phone quite a few years ago, and I could probably not locate him now if I wanted to.

Our apartment was across the street from the Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross where I had been active for a short time earlier.  Father Gene Blankenship was the rector of Holy Cross at the time, a very devout man who was generous and helpful with me, and is now passed away after moving to a small parish in East Texas.  Rob and I smoked a fair amount of marijuana and drank beer, and Father B. offered to let me teach Sunday School if I would give up the former.  That was not likely at the time, although I have now been smoke free for fifteen years.

It is of some interest to me that we lived on Herschel Avenue because that street is right up next to the border between Oak Lawn and Highland Park, one of the Park Cities surrounded by Dallas, and a very prestigious address where my Mother grew up in the 1930’s.  Her parents lived at 4511 Livingston in a nice house they had built during the Depression.  They had a yardman named Herschel who had two young sons who assisted him.  That is why I mention the situation.

 Herschel Avenue runs into Oak Lawn Boulevard just east of Lemon Avenue.  There was a Greek restaurant in a retail strip near that intersection called The Torch.  It was a smaller version of a larger restaurant southwest of downtown Dallas in the Oak Cliff section, near a large highway intersection.  The Torch restaurants were very successful, and I went to work at the little Torch as a busboy even though I had an M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley.  I had been something of a washout as an English teacher in recent years.   One of the specialties at the Torch was a lemon soup the name of which I cannot recall much less spell.

Also at that Intersection was a wine tavern called J. Alfred’s, named after the T. S. Eliot poem “The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock” which I was reading earlier this evening.  I hung out at J. Alfred’s from time to time, hardly ever met anyone there but enjoyed the music, the crowd and the wine.   There was also a real estate office in the neighborhood called Prufrock Realty.  I would assume that they were related.

Just before that time I had been working as an office clerk for a life insurance salesman named Pat Houren who was a friend of my father’s.  Pat and his wife Carol and I became great friends and remained so for many years, but they are both now deceased.  It was the Hourens who introduced me to Father Blankenship and Holy Cross.  I once went to a cocktail party at their home in North Dallas where Father B. was present; and when I walked in Carol was curled up on a sofa rather regally, and there was a copy of the Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot on the coffee table.

Those are some of the coincidences that peppered my adventures in Dallas in the mid-1970’s.  My grandmother still lived in East Dallas at that time.  I spent a lot of time with her and sometimes drove her old 49 Ford, once to a Tibetan meditation group related to the teaching of Chogyam Trungpa whose writings I knew from California and New Mexico.

 It was a good time all things considered.  I was in psychotherapy with Dr. Robert Glen on White Rock Lake.  I was recovering from drug addiction and mental illness.  I never did have much of a career, but somehow I survived into old age, outliving my parents and younger brother.  Life is good now.  I live in a comfortable retirement center, and am free to write these memoirs and create collage.

I think I should mention that my former girl friend, the poet Jeanne Lance, came to visit me about that time from California.  We went camping in the Ouachita  mountain wilderness in southwestern Oklahoma.  Jeanne met my family, and the Hourens.  Soon after she returned to California she married Peter Holland.   Jeanne and I are still in touch.