  After Tucumcari comes El Paso, with a little stop along the way for an overnight in Cloudcroft and a hike along Rim Trail. I’ll remind you that Cloudcroft is along the way because we had to backtrack east to Lubbock, where our car was towed when it broke down in Amarillo because VW in its infinite wisdom cannot alter their policy of towing to the nearest dealer, even in the case of a death in the family.
All that angst was almost worth it as we hiked near Sunspot high in the mountains and could see from White Sands to the Organs on the horizon. El Paso is evoking all kinds of kindly memories and renewing my faith in my own upbringing. I’m sure I feel these emotions each time I come back here—I lived here off and on from 17-22—it’s just that the emotions are so welcome in light of their dearth of presence in Tucumcari.
There I kept wanting to feel some sentimentality, some desire to go back to old times despite my pleasure in the present. But aside from the little foray my son and I shared at Dunn Park, which in itself was rather wanting, I felt nothing for the place. Not even disgust, just nothing. This was the place I came to be me, where all those significant life experiences happened, or should have happened. At the very least I thought I would feel shame for their memories that still haunt me in moments of self-doubt and at the most I thought I would feel nostalgia and remorse for days long past.
In reality, I felt the same as I feel when driving through any rural southwestern town: appreciation for the quaint life unaffected by the moving chains of progress and a vague familiarity, the feeling that I could guess within three tries at what’s really going on behind any door. Take any of these little, dusty towns and I know which exit on the interstate gets the cheapest gas and which is a trick to lure you into the paltry business district.
I can close my eyes and tie my hands behind my back and still cruise the main drag because stoplights are just a suggestion that traffic could be present and stop signs are really red yields. I know to glance at the police station—or mama’s restaurant—and count for three cars so you know all the available cops are otherwise occupied. I know to look at the football stadium—where inevitably some faded sign notifying onlookers that the team once won a state championship—for the entire town’s population on any given Friday night. And afterward I know to look just outside of the city limits, all of three miles away from the stadium, for a graffitied patch of asphault where the trucks park in a circle to shine their lights on the kids’ drinking parties, but don’t look for the cops to bust it up because 1) everyone’s secretly relieved to know where the kids are, and 2) the parents like the sense of nostalgia the tradition brings about regarding themselves.
And while it’s nice and pretty funny that I know all these things about any of these towns, including Tuc, Tuc itself doesn’t go any further in the memory or feeling department.
Now that my grandfather is dead, I don’t have anything to ever make me stop there again, an empty tank of gas notwithstanding, but that adds me to the general ranks of random Route 66 followers. I wonder if I’ll ever take the kids there and show them where I grew up. After the experiences of this week, it seems a lot more likely that I will take them to El Paso to show them where I went to college, maybe where I really grew up. Because it’s here that I feel heart tugs when I drive down Mesa near the University and it’s here that I have memories that flood back on random street corners or at the sight of business signs. I’m certain that even if I had no familial reason to return to El Paso, I would still find an excuse to take a route through the region from time to time just to relive those fond memories.
The funny thing spending more time in Tucumcari than I have since leaving it at 15 did for me, was really show me how different my life is now. It opened Houston up again in my mind, reminded me of just how lucky I am. Two days before I found myself hurtling toward Tucum-scary, we were sitting in Hermann Park, enjoying an outdoor ballet performance with a picnic of cheese and wine. The day before that we’d had a huge dinner party after the Art Car Parade that included discussions with educated, liberal people of vastly different backgrounds. None of this would ever happen in my life if I still lived in Tucumcari. 
