11 – Some Things Remain The Same

Some Things Remain The Same

By Nicholas Campanella

Past Houston on Interstate 10, things begin to change.

By the time you get to San Antonio the trees have thinned out and the arid land begins. Just yesterday you were in the bayous. Soon the buttes will rise off the desert floor. If you turn left at Houston and head south, you will come to Corpus Christi. Corpus is now a college spring break haven. Which is too bad. Corpus Christi at one time was a Bohemian paradise.

Inhabited by people getting off the merry-go-round of life and living in campsites on the beach. Building campfires, eating whiting, clams, and crabs caught fresh in the Gulf of Mexico. The police were cool, turning a blind eye to the smoke and beer and stopping to chat with the island residents.

Now it is a spring break disaster zone, where everything imaginable is done except capture the quiet beauty of the timeless feeling that used to live here. Everyone, no matter what walk of life they came from, upon kicking off their shoes and walking the sands of Padre Island, instantly became a Bohemian. Hippie and businessman sat side by side, near their tents, and watched the small Gulf waves lap at the shoreline.

But things change and Padre Island is no more. Which is a shame. If the spring-breakers could ever catch a whiff of the culture which used to dwell here, they would probably take a term off from school and live here on the island.

The little spots that dot Interstate-10, a favorite highway of mine, are now strip malls. It’s getting harder to tell one place from the other, for they all look the same.

Time moves not forward but back. Like a wind blowing the present to the past. As things are done in the moment, the winds of time blow them into the past. Till they are so far gone they are forgotten. We stand still and the winds form a picture in front of us and just as quickly the picture is whisked away, replaced by another. Then another. Until the hurricane force of eternity comes along and takes us with it.

As the winds of time blow, things change. We look forward to new things on the wind. Sometimes we dread what the winds will bring. And sometimes we turn around and gaze upon the land of the forgotten.

While going through some things the other day, sorting out what to throw away, I came upon a picture of you. From long ago. And a little breeze blew up from the past. All of the summer days and moonlit nights, the laughs and the sound of your voice, fell upon my ears. The first and last time I saw you.

And even though things change, some things remain the same. I put the picture in a special place.

Vol. 37 No. 1 – Yesterday’s Magazette – Spring- 2010