Hey, Buddy, I See that Butt!

I'm officially part of the Green Mountain Energy Clean-Up Team that participates in the Keep Austin Beautiful program. That means that I spent a couple of hours on Saturday morning picking up litter along a seven block area of Rio Grand Street in Austin. That portion of the street is Green Mountain's litter territory. I was the butt lady. I found that to be poetic justice. Saturday I picked up 800 cigarette butts that had been discarded in the aforementioned 7 block area. My fellow team members picked up another 2000 or so. Isn't that appalling? We collected the cigarette butts separately (in a big zip lock) with a tally sheet taped onto the front. This is apparently an adjunct project of Keep Austin Beautiful (pretty self-explanatory organization and project).


I realized that as a former smoker I was guilty of discarding butts on the street. For some reason there was and still is this amazing disconnect between cigarette butts and litter. I wouldn't drop so much as a gum wrapper on the ground, but thought nothing about casually dropping a butt, grinding it with my foot and walking on. I will admit that I got a bit less casual toward the end of my smoking career, but I can't even count the number I just casually tossed on the ground over the number of years that I smoked.


One thing struck me today. We keep limiting the places it's acceptable to smoke, so that we are forcing the smokers (and there are about 20% of us who do continue to smoke daily) to smoke on the street. However, there's nothing provided for butt disposal. Are you supposed to put it in your pocket? I used to carry a zip lock for my filters - at times - like when I was camping. Even I knew that it wasn't right to toss a butt in the forest.


I can tell you that there are at least two smokers who regularly walk up and down Rio Grand in Austin. How? Well, there were two distinctive brands of cigarettes whose butts were somewhat 'new' cigarette butt litter spaced out along the seven blocks. I can also tell you that the unsmoked tobacco goes away pretty fast, and even the paper that covers the filter goes away pretty fast, but that filter NEVER goes away.


The Green Mountain team picked up not just cigarette butts, but also all the litter along their territory. We managed to fill some pretty big bags which tells me there are still people out there who think it's OK to toss garbage on the ground. Here's a clue: It's not OK to toss anything that's not biodegradeable onto the ground. I can also tell you that picking up litter for two hours will certainly activate your litter radar. As we've walked all around the Austin downtown and South Congress area, I've been seeing litter, especially those damn cigarette butts EVERYWHERE. Give ALL of us a break: Make it your person mission to never throw anything on the ground that someone else has to pick up.

Going Home Again

Returning to Hurst after a year, I wondered how it would feel. The short anwer is that it didn't feel that different. It seemed like we had been on a really long vacation. I suppose that feeling will ebb as we spend more and more time away from the DFW area. We did live there for 20 years, so, even after being away for almost a year, it felt natural to be back there. There were a few changes, but nothing really major.

Coming back to Houston has been a very different experience. We lived in Houston from 1972 to 1983. This is where we became adults. I told Drake I can remember to this day driving into Houston at the peak of rush hour in August of 1972 in our 'new' 1964 Oldsmobile '88 - a big honking white car with red faux leather interior (aka VINYL) I was to discover this was the worst possible interior car material for hot humid Houston. My hands were clutching the steering wheel so hard, and my heart was pounding, and I was sitting bolt upright. I'd never seen this many cars or this many lanes of traffic in my life. It seemed as if everyone but me knew which lanes to be in and when. I had it easy - Drake was driving the U-Haul Truck in the rush hour mess. It was not an auspicious introduction to Houston, but as I was to discover - prophetic.

In 1972 as in 2011 the car and the freeway rule Houston. It was surprising how quickly the configuration of the freeway system came back - especially to Drake. We have had no trouble navigating around town, and we've used quite a bit of the town while we've been here. That said, being here has been somewhat like Alice Through the Looking Glass. Things seem familiar, but they are oh so different. Time marches on, and Houston has subtly changed in many ways in the 25+ years since we've lived here.

First, the freeways - lots of them aren't 'free' anymore. We got onto Interstate 10 on Saturday and drove 30 miles to Katy, Texas - sort of the outer limit of western Houston's bedroom communities. Katy was a sleepy little town, certainly not a suburb of Houston in 1972. Interstate 10 was called 'The Katy Freeway" since if you drove west out of Houston, that was the first town. I-10 in the 21st century was a curious combination of freeway, tollway and HOV lanes. It was a vast improvement over the old 2 lane "Katy Freeway", however; when there are 6 - 8 lanes of traffic, some of them toll and some of them free, it gets a bit overwhelming. Drake's last office in Houston was at "Eldridge Road", a far western exit off the I-10 freeway. His office building was pretty much surrounded by fields and it was darn hard to find a place to eat lunch. Now it would be hard to find a field for 10 miles in any direction, and sleepy little Katy is a bustling suburb with no space between it and Houston.

It's very disconcerting to recognize all the names of the exits on all the freeways, but to discover you have no idea what is there anymore. For instance, The Summit - a very cool NBA venue for the Houston Rockets is now owned by Joel Osteen and is the biggest church in the USA. (How's that for strange?) So many things have been replaced or are just gone that when I saw something I recognized, it was like running into an old friend.

I think the changes in and around Houston have been positive. Their Museum of Fine Arts has evolved into two separate buildings connected with a cool tunnel filled with artwork. We went to three first rate exhibits today - one from the National Gallery of Art and two other modern artists. All three blew me away. (Don't you just love it when you get to see a new artist that blows your skirt up?) The Houston restaurant scene which was always way better than Dallas, Fort Worth or San Antonio is really, really exciting and better than ever. We've gotten to eat at some excellent establishments here - a welcome change after Arizona, home of the chain restaurant and proud of it. Minute Maid Park and the new Houston Rockets Arena is slowly transforming the concrete and glass empty canyons of downtown into a real neighborhood.

Overall I've felt like Rip Van Winkle while I've been here in Houston. Part of me feels I just lived here yesterday, and the changes are shocking. Then, I step back and realize that I've been gone from this town for over 25 years and, of course, it's changed. I feel both at home and a visitor at the same time. This has been a tutorial in the maxim that "Everything changes". In Houston's case, it seems to be for the better.