My days working at A Auto Supply became timeless. I worked on my Dodge, making changes weekly. It looked more like mine than the car passed on from my mother. I really missed the friends I had back home at the campground. I had heard that my cousin Tom bought a camper and he was coming up to East Canaan regularly. The greatest friends I had ever had, were all up there, having a great time. I lived on a different planet.
I met many people in Port Aransas and they were all great. It was the kind of town that you write a book about, in a Tom Bodette End of the Road sort of way. I loved how people were many times identified by their first names and what they did. For example, TV Fred was the resident television sales and repairman on the island. Unless you ran a souvenir shop, restaurant, bar, or boat, you had no competition in Port A.
There was a force at play here in Port Aransas. It was known as Island Time. Life north of the ship channel ceased to exist. The South Jetty, the main newspaper in town, did not print news from outside the island, and the sports section was robust in photos of sunburned people standing on the docks, posing next to hanging fish that were often taller than they were. All holding cans of beer in cozies, smiling.
The people who were here had an island-time pace. If Fred fixed your TV, there was an hour or two sipping cold beer and catching up. I began to notice that everyone here seemed to be from somewhere else. There were an unlimited number of reasons why they fled their former lives and came here where time did not move at the same pace. There seemed to be a barrier around this island that appeared to keep it out of time with the rest of the world.
The summer was busy as the beach, which was a drive-on beach, brought so many from north, central, and west Texas. It was incredibly disorienting. With the summer bouncing along like an MTV music video of the day, it was hard to see yourself without the whirlwind around you. Life was an amusement park ride. I woke up never knowing who I would meet that day or what was going to happen. Not every day was like this, but many were.
Island Time was an unseen force, powerful, and like a long hurricane. I was different from my contemporaries, I wore calf-high frye boots with the squared toe, boot-cut jeans, tee shirt. Males here wore shorts, rarely wore shirts, barefoot, or at least wore flaps, slaps, or as they were known in the north, flip flops. You could walk into the grocery stores here even in the nineties without a shirt or shoes, smoking a cigarette.
My strength to resist was sufficient, or so I thought. After a year of fighting, the force would break me. The island would effect those changes that I never thought possible, the muffler would fall off my car, my hair sun-bleached and grow out, and I would lose the shirt and boots. I only wore shoes and long pants if I was working. Eventually, the island did to me what it did to everyone. The island would eventually teach me to relax, inside and out. I mention this here because I seemed to be fighting it here in my first few months in Port Aransas.
During these summer months, the relationship between Dad and I grew. One of our favorite hobbies was music. We would trek over to Craig’s Record Factory over in Corpus Christie and each come back with a couple of vinyl treasures to go home and play.
One of the Friday nights late in the summer I decided to head over to Corpus to buy something at Craigs. Dad said he only had $60 on him till payday and felt that he should hold onto it. Later that night, Dad fell asleep with a lit cigarette and dropped it into a stack of wicker paper plate holders that someone had given to us. This resulted in a fire in the early morning hours that I completely slept through. Dad carried pans of water from the kitchen, past my sofa on which I slept, to put out the fire.
The fire had burned up the wicker holders and the cut-off jean shorts Dad had worn the day before. For the most part, the shorts survived, except the left front pocket, and the $60 inside it. As we sipped coffee the following morning Dad looked at me and laughed. “I wish I went to Corpus with you last night, at least I would have something to show for that $60.”
In late August, Dad and I called up to Connecticut and learned that my Grandmother and my sister Brooke were going to visit next February. We knew that in the little cottage, we were living in, we would absolutely not have room for them whatsoever. We needed to do something else.
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