Lone Star Dreams

Summer haze and fading memories.

I hate summer heat. It’s almost unfathomable to me that I ever managed to live in tropical places, let alone somewhere like Texas, where I spent my formative years. Even before the effects of climate change started ratcheting up over the last decade or so, I swore never to move any further south than North Carolina. To my surprise though, something about the Texas heat is more pleasant than what I’ve been enduring in the DC area this summer. This is, of course, a famously dry heat, but it’s more than that: the haze and the mood it creates feels comforting somehow.

I’ve been on a remote working trip to visit my friend Caleb in Fort Worth and this nostalgic feeling has been pervasive. Even without knowing most street names and remembering fewer landmarks than I used to, I feel comfortable on the roads here, despite it being the first time I’ve personally driven on them. The heavy food is comforting even though I can’t eat it like I used to. I’m an urbanist, which means Texas’ utter lack of walkability should drive me crazy. And it does! Yet somehow, I feel at ease moving around here.

My visit to the missionary center I grew up on before moving overseas brought the first twinge of unease. There’s a common evangelical refrain is about being “in the world but not of it”, and for a long time the centers (which we stayed at whenever we were stateside) felt this way, like islands safe from the outside world. This time it felt like stepping into a fading memory, more akin to those Japanese towns you hear about that are run for and by old people – places where no one knows what will happen once those people die.

The bones of the place I knew are still there but are either hardly occupied or serve as residence for other religious non-profits. There are missionary families staying there, presumably on furlough, but the old dining hall was hardly bustling when I stopped in for lunch. Most of the office space is rented out and the old childcare and activity centers are loaned out to churches. The old suite of mobile homes, including the one I grew up in, are set to be razed and replaced with tiny homes (this, to be fair, is no huge loss – they were old and dingy when my parents moved in back in the early nineties).

As I pass by the reception building on my way out, the lady at the front desk is happy to not only make conversation but spill on all the changes that have happened in the decade plus since I was last here. As with the organization’s headquarters in Florida and the center in North Carolina that my mom is preparing to retire from, covid and other economic realities have sparked a massive scaling back of operations. The people running the show increasingly come from outside the missionary world, but the people keeping it chugging along are the same folks who have been there since its inception. From my admittedly limited vantage point it doesn’t seem sustainable. For years I’ve been disconnected from this world apart from the occasional update from my mom, so I guess I can’t say whether this distinctly 20^th century feeling missionary model is collapsing or being made into something new, but my time there recalled The Grand Budapest Hotel – an illusion of a vanished world sustained with marvelous grace.

Back in the outside world, I head to a Barnes and Noble to finish out the workday. Teens at the table next to me babble about crushes and going to Whataburger (pronounced Wah-duh-burger). I meet another missionary kid friend for dinner at another burger joint that I used to love, with old arcade machines still beeping in the corner, and he tells me about his parents these days and the drones he uses at his job now. I drive back the winding roads to Caleb’s place, where we’ll chat House of the Dragon and cool theaters he wants to show me, as well as the burgeoning arts and food scenes in Fort Worth. The Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex is one of the fastest-growing in the country.