July (in March)

A friend and I wanted to go somewhere warm for spring break, but couldn’t quite afford the beach umbrella trip of our dreams so we settled for a trip to San Antonio, Texas, where we could be outside most of the time and get in a swimming pool. I asked another friend if she would be interested in joining us and she said yes, so we converged on San Antonio from Ohio and Colorado, ready to explore the riverwalk, drink margaritas, and try some good tex-mex food. We did all of that, plus the pool, the Alamo, and a side trip to Corpus Christi to see the waves in the Gulf of Mexico.

The first day we were there, some very old blogging friends (since 2009!) who live in San Antonio–Amanda and Jason–came out to meet us. They’d proposed a less touristy destination, but when I looked it up, I got the erroneous impression that one of the restaurants we were interested in was at the place they’d suggested, The Pearl. It was not—it was smack in the center of the most crowded and touristy part of the riverwalk. They were good sports, though, and wove their way through the crowds to find us and have a great dinner and a few photos. All the tables were outdoors and we thought the weather was perfect, fair and in the low 80s. Everywhere we looked, there were flowers—the tulips were finished, and pansies and petunias were blooming.

The pool, like most I’ve seen at hotels in the last decade, was only 4 feet deep, so no one except little kids could swim much. We got in and splashed around, and then sat in the lounge chairs and the big wicker “onion” beds. We went on a boat ride around the little river.

The tex-mex food and margaritas were great. We tried the guacamole everywhere we went, and at one place I tried a “tuna” margarita, made with the fruit of a prickly pear. It was fun sitting at a table and watching people go by; I’ve rarely seen so many people in one place in the last three years. We ordered enough to try everything and eat what appealed to us most, like in this poem:

July

The figs we ate wrapped in bacon.
The gelato we consumed greedily:
coconut milk, clove, fresh pear.
How we’d dump hot espresso on it
just to watch it melt, licking our spoons
clean. The potatoes friend in duck fat,
the salt we’d suck off our fingers,
the eggs we’d watch get beaten
‘til they were a dizzying bright yellow,
how their edges crisped in the pan.
The pink salt blossom of prosciutto
we pulled apart with our hands, melted
on our eager tongues. The green herbs
with goat cheese, the aged brie paired
with a small pot of strawberry jam,
the final sour cherry we kept politely
pushing onto each other’s plate, saying,
No, you. But it’s so good. No, it’s yours.
How I finally put an end to it, plucked it
from the plate, and stuck it in my mouth.
How good it tasted: so sweet and so tart.
How good it felt: to want something and
pretend you don’t, and to get it anyway.

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

One day we took an Uber to the airport and I rented an SUV for a trip to Corpus Christi—we’d meant to drive out onto Padre Island, but the flat tire we got about an hour out from San Antonio and the two hours we spent waiting for emergency services to get there meant that I had to drive the SUV to another car rental place and trade it for a pickup truck. What I kept calling “my god-given right to drive 75 mph on the Texas highway” was restored, and we got to Corpus Christi in time for a very late lunch at a very good seafood restaurant, and then a walk on the beach and look at the waves before I had to drive back to the San Antonio airport and turn in the pickup.

We walked through the McNay Art Museum, where I saw a painting about necromancy.

The three of us have been friends for four decades, but we never ran out of conversation. It’s a great thing, when old friends can make the time and take the effort to hang out for a while.