Suburban Renewal by Pamela Morsi Page B

too,” a nearby cowboy added.
    â€œThey’ve started late,” another fellow told us. “They were worried about rain.”
    I finally found a place for Corrie and me to sit down near the edge of the sidewalk on Bowie Street. She was as happy and wide-eyed as a little girl at a parade. Immediately, she made friends with everybody within shouting distance of us. She held people’s babies, listened to their stories. I fully expected all these strangers to show up on next year’s Christmas card list. Two men sitting near her turned out to be employees of a Minnesota transport company who’d been sent down to observe the move.
    They, at least, had some interesting observations on the engineering of the event.
    â€œIt didn’t crack much when they jacked it up,” one explained to me. “That’s really harder on the building than the actual travel distance.”
    â€œThe real question here is the bridge,” his co-worker related. “Bridges are designed with a certain amount of give. Without flexibility they can’t withstand temperature changes and the natural motion of the earth. But flexibility is a negative with this much weight. They are still shoring it up. If it won’t hold, they lose the hotel, the bridge, the road and a whole section of the river. It will be tens of millions of dollars in cleanup.”
    He said the last with such enthusiasm, it was almost as if he relished the thought. I suppose it was like the lure of the auto race. You didn’t really want anyone to crash, still the danger of it was part of what drew you there.
    The comparison of a car race, however, was tenuous. As the hours passed, the rows of tires beneath the seventy-nine-year-old hotel barely rolled around and tooklong breaks between revolutions. We sat in the sunshine watching it move along the pavement at a snail’s pace. It had all the thrill and excitement of watching paint dry.
    The conservation society sold T-shirts and lemonade. I purchased both for myself and Corrie.
    She was playing Frisbee with some teenage kids and their dog. She fit right in, looking to be as young as they were. Even with the rough start to our marriage and two kids. Things were now going great. And Corrie was the major part of that. She made the whole family thing work as well as it did. And she managed it without acquiring so much as a line on her face. I knew guys in the oil business who dumped their wives to get an expensive piece of eye candy that made them look more successful. I was lucky to have a great mom for my kids who was a looker as well.
    My thoughts along this line were interrupted when a middle-aged Hispanic woman approached me carrying a big red-and-white cooler.
    â€œIs that beer you’ve got there?” I asked her.
    â€œNo sir,” she answered. “These are homemade tamales.”
    â€œOh, yeah?”
    â€œThe ladies of our church are selling them,” she said. “Three dollars a dozen.”
    I was hungry, and at three dollars, even if they were terrible, it wasn’t much of a loss.
    â€œGive me a dozen,” I told her, reaching into my hip pocket for my wallet. She set the cooler on the grass and opened it to hand me a brown paper bag.
    â€œWe make the best tamales in San Antonio,” she assured me as I paid her.
    â€œWhat’s your secret?” I asked her.
    She laughed and pointed to her temple. “Cabeza,” she said.
    I assumed she was referring to her own brilliance.
    Smiling, I thanked her and opened my little brown bag. I’d eaten tamales before. They came in cans and they were wrapped in thin white paper. You removed the paper, smothered them in ketchup and they weren’t half bad.
    The contents of my brown paper sack did not in any way resemble what I’d previously eaten. For one thing, they were not nearly as wet. They were warm and wrapped in corn shucks, and though I looked through the sack, there was no ketchup