Pearsall

The United States Postal Service now, for reasons best known to itself, automatically photographs your mail prior to delivery, allowing my wife to go online and take a quick look at what the mailman will  bring later on. Unfortunately we see that one of our letters will be a citation for something or other from the city and a case number is just visible through the thin paper of the envelope. We were driving to Pearsall today, but now we're waiting in for the mail, trying to work out what our stupid neighbour has found to complain about this time. We guess it must be something to do with our trees, but mainly because we can't think of anything else; unless he's completely lost it and now suspects that we're collaborating with an underground race of mole people and have built a structurally illegal staircase within our own home so as to facilitate their proposed war against the surface dwellers. The mail usually arrives by eleven on Saturday, but there's been nothing. Eventually we leave anyway, assuming it to be one of those occasional Saturdays when the mail doesn't show up until late afternoon; so we drive over to Target and buy ourselves a little American flag for a couple of dollars.

To start at the beginning, I never met my wife's grandfather. He was gone before I could get here, but he's one person I wish I could have met because I think I would have liked him. His name was Harlan and he was nicknamed Fuzz, originally in reference to his copious blonde hair, but retained with an ironic twist once he went bald on top. As soon as my wife told me this I thought of the old boys I knew at work, the generation who lived through the second world war and whose sense of humour was apparently an international phenomenon. Asked about his nationality when crossing back over into the States from Mexico, Fuzz would say Texan with what I imagine to have been a wry but resolute smile. He was quiet and not given to ostentatious displays of emotion, yet when his favourite chicken went missing - whom he'd named Miss Chicken - the depth of his affection was exposed in his smile when she came back, despite previous protestations that she was only a chicken and sometimes they wander off.

He's buried in the cemetery in Pearsall, a small town surrounded by a lot of wide open space some fifty miles south of San Antonio. My wife grew up there, and that's where her family are from. Its main industry seems to have been either oil or peanuts, depending on which bit of the internet you're looking at. There's a monumental peanut on the side of the highway as you leave town bearing the legend, world's largest peanut, 55.000.000 lbs marketed annually; but the peanut has clearly seen better days, and its claim seems to raise more questions than it answers. The town had a population of around ten-thousand last time anyone counted, but I get the feeling the figure may since have reduced somewhat. The house in which so many of my wife's family were born was once in an orchard but is now surrounded by trailer homes. We went to have a look. There was a wild pig kept inside a tiny cage outside one of them so we didn't stick around.

Each Memorial Day, Fuzz used to visit the cemetery to embellish the headstones of his fellow veterans with small flags, just as a gesture of respect and camaraderie. Edi - his daughter and my wife's aunt - had been to Pearsall to visit the family plot and noticed that someone had continued this practice, although the spot where Fuzz's remains are now buried had been missed; so that's why we're driving to Pearsall. I've already pointed out that Edi could surely have popped into the local Walmart, picked up one of those little flags for a dollar or two and addressed the oversight rather than just telling the rest of us about it; but Bess has taken it upon herself to plant a flag on her grandfather's grave simply because it's something she wants to do, because that's what Fuzz did for others.

Besides, it's a day out when we've hardly been anywhere for the last two months due to the lockdown. Our part of Texas hasn't been hit too bad by COVID-19, possibly because everything is kind of spread out and we have a decent mayor who does his job properly and listens to epidemiologists rather than angry fucknuggets who regard being required to wear a face mask and skip church for a week or two as a violation of their civil rights. A few places are starting to open up at reduced capacity, but both Bess and myself are still wearing masks in public, and will probably continue to do so for the forseeable future. I still don't understand why anyone would consider it an inconvenience, given the reason for wearing them.

Pearsall is as I remember it from a couple of previous visits, hot, quiet, and spread out with not many people around during the day. There seem to be a lot of high street stores now closed down, even boarded up - sometimes three in a row, one after the other. I have an unfortunate feeling this may simply be a sign of the times for Pearsall rather than anyone's business specifically going under as a result of the lockdown.

We drive to the cemetery, plant our little flag, then stand around and think about the dead for a while. Most of the names in the Arnold plot are familiar to me by now, although there are still a few empty plots where blank stones await carving in honour of those presumably still living. I may even be one of them. I don't know.

Job done, we head back onto the highway, then stop off at Triple C being as it's past lunchtime. Triple C is a diner which you could probably justifiably call a restaurant, a steak place. I never really saw what the fuss was with steak until I ate at Triple C, yet the last time we came it wasn't that great - which was weird and unexpected and hopefully a one-off dip in the graph. The waitress points a gun which reads temperature at my forehead so as to ascertain whether or not I have the coronavirus, and we are shown to a table. We order salad and steak.

The walls are covered in square panels of wood bearing the brands of different ranchers, some of whom have presumably supplied Triple C with its meat. Each brand is embellished with the name of the rancher and the location of the ranch, mostly Texas, but a few further afield, Kentucky and the like. I study the designs and realise that they are burned into the wood, and were therefore most likely made with an actual brand, which is probably about as far as I need to go with that train of thought. Most of them are identifiable as letters, the initials of the rancher - JR, TJ and the like; but some comprise more esoteric symbols, stars, squiggles, heavily stylised versions of the initials and so on. A couple of them remind me of symbols reputedly seen on the side of flying saucers, notably one famously reported by Lonnie Zamora in Socorro, New Mexico, 1964. I'm able to recall the name Lonnie Zamora without having to look it up, and I don't know whether I should be proud of this fact or slightly saddened.

The salad is amazing. The steak is okay, but nothing special compared to what is served at either Charlie's or the Hungry Farmer in San Antonio. Oh well...

We arrive home and the mail has been. The citation turns out to be a routine thing which comes around every year. Our trees and bushes are obstructing the alley at the back, so it's thankfully nothing to do with our stupid neighbour. It will take about an hour to trim it all back, just as it did last time and the time before, and so it's really nothing to worry about.

It's difficult to say quite what connects all of the above beyond belonging to the same day, but I'm sure there's something.