There were days I wanted desperately to jump into Lake Ray Hubbard. I was willing to ditch my shoes, climb up on the rail and dive like I did as a kid off the low board at Carolina Golf Club.
It was a hundred degrees and nothing looked cooler than that silver expanse of shimmering lake as I crossed over on the bridge in the afternoons. I was in a new city and I was hot.
Dallas' summer of '80 became historical. I'll bet some of you still have your t-shirts claiming "I survived the summer of 1980!" Sixty-nine days of three-digit highs, forty-two of them consecutive. On my June birthday it hit 113 degrees. That must have been the summer I began my search for snowflake glasses.
I love and am fascinated by how we define and categorize our years with things remembered; music, movies, romance, vacations, pets, cars, cities, deaths...
The years just before and just after that heat wave I've defined in my mind as the Annie Hall years. Sharing drinks with friends in glasses etched with white snowflakes on sizzling summer days in Dallas struck me as a very Annie Hallish thing to do.
I never did find any glasses. I'd long forgotten about them as I opened the gift box from Elizabeth during a recent Christmas. Thirty years later; snowflake flutes!
So, for the past few summers, long about July, I pull out the flutes. Spoke pours me some bubbly and I symbolically toast Elizabeth. Later he refills my glass and suddenly triple digits are not so bad after all.
If he pours me a third, I kiss his cheek and oops... I call him Alvy!
written, sipping
champagne on a 103*
day in dallas
"to your health, beth"
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