2 Texans Down Under

I’d call it déjà vu shock except that the stimulus has never before been quite like this.

I’m talking about the sheer size of some things I’m seeing here in Texas as we near the end of our holiday return “home.”

It hit me yesterday afternoon in a big-box store in a new shopping center development off Interstate 20 west of Fort Worth. I’d got off the highway and gone first to a home improvement store (Lowes, huge) and then to an adjacent Target store in search of a simple item I’ve been unable to find in Brisbane, Houston, or here in North Texas, rubber rings for the top of glass jars with glass tops.

You know the kind. The top is hinged by a metal wire on one side and the jar has a contraption that lets you pull the top down tight and snap it into place. Then the jar is more or less air tight. If, that is, you have a rubber washer in place where the lid meets the jar.

Those wear out. Back in Brisbane, we have two or three without the washers and I’d thought it would be a simple matter to buy more. Not so in Brisbane. So far, not so here, either. Maybe they’re not sold any more. Maybe I’m suppose to buy new jars with new rubber gaskets when the old gaskets wear out.

Walking around in the “super Target,” (which means it has groceries as well as everything else), I suddenly saw how gigantic that store is. I saw how many different kinds of items were on sale and how many varieties of most of them were on the shelves. At least three Target stores of the size I visit occasionally in Brisbane would have fit inside this one, single store.

I was at once (a) positively impressed by the power of capitalism and wealth, by the concentration of both in this one shopping center which must be matched in scope by at least a hundred more in this one metropolitan area, and (b) dismayed by the obvious excess — by what was to my eyes materialism run rampant.

Two and a half years in Australia must have shifted my perceptions. Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed before. I do recall, though, how overwhelming and intimidating city department stores were to me when I was a young and fresh off the farm, not accustomed to middle-class ways of living.

I identified, then, with the legendary rancher who walked into a Dallas Nieman Marcus store for the first time in his life, looked around, and said, “I ain’t never seen so much stuff a fella can do without.”

That’s the déjà vu part. I’ve been shocked by excessive stuff before, but this time a single store was offering for sale goods that appeared to be sufficient for stocking the entire downtown section of some small towns of a few years ago.

No rubber gaskets for my jars, though, so I left and got back on Interstate 20 headed east at about sundown, making my way to the home of my daughter and her family. For the next hour I was in a flow of trucks, cars, and pickups, most of them appearing tall, wide, and fuel-hungry, all of us moving in a single body like an anaconda.

I hadn’t been in such traffic in quite a while. My rented Prius, though, responded well. At the end of an hour of steady 40 to 60 mph driving, it’s average miles per gallon reading climbed to almost 52.

We love choices and low prices available here, and we have taken advantage of both since we arrived Dec. 8. Our suitcases will be bulging when we get off our Qantas flight Jan. 1. There will be relief, though, in getting back to some smaller-scale ordinariness, to a familiarity that was quite strange to us less than three years ago.
– Bob