April 20, 2010 – The Dozy Docent – Grapevine, Texas

At most every American museum the guides are labeled “docent”. This word comes from the Latin docere, which means to teach. Look it up.

Stan Greeble is an elderly docent at the tourist information bureau and archives of Grapevine, Texas a suburb of Dallas. Stan has worked for the city of Grapevine for 47 years, the past 32 as docent at the visitor’s bureau.

When we stepped in the door we were initially met by a pleasant, smiling, simple woman in her 60’s who nurtured us with brochures on a number of interesting local must-sees such as the Grapevine clock tower and the adjacent small-gauge railway. She made an earnest effort to enlighten us about these and other astounding historical features of Grapevine.

Then Stan waded in. As neophyte Canadian tourists we were caught unaware by Stan’s vocal endurance. When Stan appeared, in his aging calf-hide Texas-cut suit and morning-after fragrance we were caught unaware; just simple, typical bemused tourists.

As Stan began his ramble the other tourist-bureau staff members quietly and quickly slipped away. Stan is a fountain of information. He advised us, without reservation or fear of contradiction, and in no particular order, that central Texas is “where the continental plates first collided, thus providing the world’s hardest rock”, and “where we first learned that dinosaurs walked upright.”

“Really.” I replied in an ineffectual display of indifference. After forty-five minutes of “Stan-factuals” we needed to pee.

Stan continued, unabated. “I am fortunate to live in the single, largest, contiguous suburb of Dallas”, comprising over 200,000 individuals”.

“C’mon Stan,” I tried in a vain effort to end the monologue.

He would surely have continued on ad infinitum except that the other, knowledgeable staff eventually appeared and carted Stan away for a diaper change. We made a quick escape. We headed into the heart of Dallas, Dealey Plaza, the site of JFK’s assassination.

I can say without bullshitting that I remember precisely where I was when JFK was shot. It was November, 1963. I was in Grade One at Saint Paul’s School in Edmonton. I walked home for lunch. Teresa was crying. She told me the president of the United States had been shot. I remember Walter Cronkite breaking down when he announced that the president was dead and, later, the pictures from Life Magazine showing young John Jr. saluting his father’s casket.

And I have now completed my own personal, in-depth forensic examination of the actual site of the shooting. Following an exhaustive 45-minute audio tour of Oswald’s sniper nest I can irrefutably contradict the Warren Commission’s findings that Lee Harvey acted alone by posing a couple of simple questions:

Why was it called the Texas School Book Suppository? What’s up with that?
Was there a second shooter on the Grassy Knowler? And why did that little bump of turf have the same moniker as my mother’s maiden name?

The redundancy of abundancy is o’erwhelmed by the urbanity of humanity. The excessive flight paths of existence continually confront us.

But I digress.

We met Audrey and her quiet, polite stuttering husband as the sun was setting at the stunningly gorgeous Inks Lake State Park northwest of Austin in the justifiably famous Texas Hill country.

The colorful explosion of spring in Texas Hill country is remarkable. The ditches are filled to overflowing with lavender bluebonnets interspersed casually with coral-collared Indian paintbrush. Nothing in our experience rivals the hues or beauty of these short-lived April annuals other than perhaps the sub-alpine flowers of a mid-summer Rocky Mountain day.

“Did y’all hear the implosion?” Audrey inquired.

“The what?” I answered, demonstrating an earnest level of interest, despite the fact that it was cocktail hour and she had stopped us, sans rum and coke, two hundred short yards from our van.

“Well you said you was in Dallas yesterday so you must have heard the explosion when they took down Jerry Jones’ beloved building. Growin’ up in Texas we was forever connected to the Cowboy’s home, Texas Stadium. We always said that the hole in top of the stadium was there so that God could watch over his team.”

What a fool I am. I had always presumed that God was looking out for the Kansas City Chiefs. Or the people of Iraq.

Now here is a test to determine whether you have read this far or simply jumped ahead. Dozy Docent refers to a:

sleepy individual who offers boring information at a museum in Grapevine, Texas; or
a very slow barn dance.

Gerry & Florence