The hotel was three blocks from the Alamo, six in the morning, nobody else on the sidewalk, the city still deciding whether to wake up. The marquee stopped me first. MAJESTIC, gold on red, neon ropes looped along the underside like a county fair nobody took down — forty, fifty years running. And on the reader board, where you’d expect coming attractions: STEVE MARTIN & MARTIN SHORT IN A VERY STUPID CONVERSATION. JULY 10. 8PM.
Someone had sat down and typed that into the letters on purpose, knowing it would just hang there above the sidewalk all month, making people smile before their coffee.
A woman was bent over a rolling suitcase in front of the dark theater doors, untangling a scarf, a strap, something — the absorbed patience of someone catching an early flight. She didn’t look up at the sign. She’d probably walked past it a hundred times. That’s the thing about the landmarks you live near: they go invisible. It takes someone who flew in this morning to actually read the marquee.
I kept walking and found the Alamo doing the thing the Alamo does — holding still under the weight of everything people have decided it means. Texas independence, the thirteen days, Travis’s line in the sand that may or may not have happened the way the movies say. Solemn, in spite of the gift shop. I stood in the plaza and felt the appropriate things. Then I thought about the marquee again, three blocks back, still making its joke to an empty street.
The Alamo has to mean something. The marquee just has to make you laugh on your way to the thing that’s supposed to mean something. Reverence is a posture you adopt on command, the way you lower your voice in a church whether or not you believe in anything. The joke asked nothing of me.
I still think about the woman with the suitcase more than the cannon emplacements. Untangling a scarf under a hundred-year-old sign advertising a stupid conversation, three blocks from where men died arguing about a flag. Both buildings still standing. Both still pulling people in off the same street. One asks you to be quiet. The other asks you to keep walking and see what’s funny about being alive in a particular city on a particular morning, before the heat sets in, before anyone else is up to see it with you.
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