This odyssey may yet turn into a botanical garden tour. This morning we spent a delightful couple of hours at Austin’s Zilker Botanical Gardens. It had some delightful touches, including a beautiful pond with purple pond lilies and a magnificent and aromatic rose garden. I especially enjoyed a walk along the Japanese garden with its colorful koi fish. The fish represents harmony and happiness, and a pair is supposed to be a good luck symbol for a happy marriage. There were three scheduled today at the gardens, and the place was filled with harried brides, grooms, little boys dressed in matching suits who obviously would have preferred to be skipping along the stones lining the koi pond, and tiny flower girls in princess outfits.
It certainly was a perfect day to be in the Austin gardens. A woman who lived in Austin told me some of her friends were looking forward to cooler weather (low 80s today), but she agreed with me that it was perfect. I told her I was soaking up as much warmth as possible to prepare for the Maine winter. “How cold does it get?” she asked, the usual question people pose. When I say it can reach 0 or below, they literally shiver (as do I).
We left the gardens to meet my friends’ son Erik and his girlfriend Caitlin (please excuse me if I’m spelling it wrong!) for lunch at a little Mexican place nearby. They recently moved to Austin, where Caitlin is doing her nursing residency. Erik said he’s still a bit overwhelmed trying to find things in the city (before this, the biggest city he lived in was Biddeford, ME), but he and Caitlin have grown to love it in Austin, whose slogan is 
“Keep Austin Weird.” They certainly like the weather better than in Maine, though the 100 plus temps of August were a bit hard to take.
The restaurant was crowded and the dining was casual. The salsa was HOT and good, the portions giant. We all left part of our meals uneaten, except Erik, of course. In the way of all young men I know, he managed to clean his plate (good, that means he liked the food and has a healthy appetite). Instead of presenting a check, the waitress said just to tell the guy on the way out that we were ready to pay our check. Somehow he knew exactly what we had and told us the amount due. Amazing memory, either that or they have a recording device at each table.
Erik’s mom and dad, our friends Al and Marilyn, are doing the reverse of my trip, staying in Iowa this week and traveling to Austin next week. We won’t even pass on the way through, since I’m taking the western route and they’ll be traveling to the east of me. They’ll be traveling in a motor home, on their first long trip since buying the rig. John always threatened to get an RV and park it just outside Sam’s dorm when he was in college to embarrass him. We still might do that, but it will probably have to be our grandkids and they’ll probably be immune to embarrassment from their grandparents by that time. Or they’ll pretend they don’t know us.
I devoted the rest of the day to the purpose of my trip to Austin—to visit the LBJ Library and Museum. Lyndon Johnson has long been a hero of mine because of the major legislation he engineered and pushed through Congress that benefited all Americans. The Swirly Eyed Sister will now show her stuff, so be prepared for a rant.
Among Johnson’s accomplishments: Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Head Start, VISTA, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Public TV and Radio, Fair Housing Act, appointed first black man to the Supreme Court, provided funding for schools and loans for college students, set up the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, oversaw the space program that ultimately took Americans to the moon, opened immigration to Africans and Asians, legislation to protect air and water, National Trails Act . . . The list goes on.
Sure, Johnson made mistakes in Vietnam, he could be crass and crude. But he accomplished more in five years and two months than practically all the other presidents who have served this country.
When I was a student at Brandeis, my roommate had one of the few TVs in our dorm. In 1968, when Johnson—beaten down by Vietnam—announced that he would not run for reelection, people crowded into our room and cheered. I said they should honor him for his accomplishments in civil rights. When the cheering continued, I kicked them out. They were certainly entitled to their own views—outside my room.
Rant over. Safe to come out now.
Just in case you missed it though, Johnson’s my man.
The LBJ Library has done an awesome job of presenting the man and his times (my times as well) amazingly well. As we walked through the exhibits, we hummed along to the likes of the Supremes, the Beatles, and Dylan. I had tears in my eyes (others did, too) at the memory of the assassinations of JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. They were the best of times and the worst of times.