There Are No Cats In Texas

For Christmas, we attempted our first trip out of Alaska with Megan, and the first for Kristen and me since June. We flew to Dallas to spend a week with my family after managing to reserve the least painful commercially-available itinerary, which still involved a 1:45 AM departure from Anchorage and two 3+ hour flights separated by a too-short-for-breakfast layover in Seattle. Before leaving, I had mentally sketched the framework of a potential post about whatever embarrassing/exhausting/infuriating/hilarious things might come of spending more than 13 (nonconsecutive) hours flying with a lap-bound infant, one who admittedly is calm relative to what she could be but is nonetheless the most volatile thing I have ever carried onto an airplane. Four incident-free flights later, the four-and-a-half-month-old version of her appears to be an excellent and very sleepy traveler, which is great except that now I need to find something else to write about.

But there are no cats in America
And the streets are paved with cheese
Oh there are no cats in America
So set your mind at ease 

I do not have distinct personal memories of An American Tail as a notable part of my youth, despite its ostensible entrenchment in the sweet spot for being one: an animated film with anthropomorphic singing animals, released when I was five years old and featuring voice work by Dom Deluise, who in 1986 was a mere seven years from establishing himself as a favorite amongst my brothers and me for his virtuoso work in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, appearing as Don Giovanni in a single Godfather-spoofing scene which we could not possibly have fully appreciated at the time (having not seen the original) but still thought was hilarious because he is holding a plastic lizard. I probably did see An American Tail at some point - I think I vaguely remember watching part of it in school - but ours was a family of loyal Disney animation elitists, with Ferngully and The Land Before Time and All Dogs Go To Heaven all missing the cut for an otherwise extensive VHS collection.

But Kristen grew up watching and loving it, so much so that she can recall the slightly deeper tracks from the soundtrack (non-"Somewhere Out There" division) even after years since last seeing it. So the fact that "There Are No Cats In America" came to her mind leading up to and during the trip is perhaps not as random as I originally found it to be. It is sung in the movie by the European mice as they embark for the United States, having so exaggerated to themselves the virtues of America that they expect to arrive in a utopian wonderland, absent everything they hate about where they come from but overflowing with the good stuff. 

This was an entirely appropriate parallel to us in the weeks leading up to our trip. A couple of Papa Mousekewitzes, counting down the days until we could escape this morose winter isolation and flee to the place universally recognized as Earth's most magnificent paradise: the north suburbs of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. We'll spend time with all of those people we miss! No snow! It will be warm enough for Megan to wear a sundress and lay on the grass outside! We can eat Chick-Fil-A and great Mexican food and fresh, moderately-priced fruit! [Prominent national retailer] has [more than zero] locations within fifty miles of your location! We can check out that park they built over the highway downtown! It was going to be amazing.

Of course, it turns out that there are cats in America, a fact alluded to in the latter half of the original movie and later capitalized upon as a surprisingly bleak plot turn in the sequel, Fievel Goes West, the second act of which concludes with the protagonist being gruesomely devoured by a cougar in Arizona. [This may not be true. I never saw it because it came out in 1993, same as both the aforementioned RH:MIT and the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, so my twelve-year-old self was fully occupied that year with one of those bizarre adolescent confluences of interests, alternately quoting lines from a Dave Chappelle character in a Mel Brooks movie and fine-tuning a French accent for an impression of a cartoon candelabra.]

But I'm pretty there were some cats, just like we didn't quite get to see everybody we wanted to see for as long as we hoped to see them, and the Mexican food was not quite as many notches above its non-Texan competition as I had remembered, and we never made it down to that park but it looked smaller than I expected when we drove past it, and it definitely wasn't warm:

Snow in the front yard of my parents' house on Christmas day. In Texas. It was 80 degrees there on December 18. COME ON.

I do not mean to suggest that the trip was not fulfilling - it was fantastic. You could say it was everything that we should have hoped it would be. But it turns out that voraciously anticipating a thing for weeks on end is a pretty good way to ensure that the thing can't possibly meet every ridiculous expectation you have made for it, which inevitably tempers your fun a bit and is totally unfair to the thing. It's not Dallas's fault that we had been romanticizing it for the last two months, so I suppose we should cut it some slack if people there drive a little worse than we had chosen to remember or if one of its many superior shopping malls closes earlier on Sundays than we had hoped. I even caught myself thinking about Alaska a few times, once wishing for a coffee from our local shop and later missing the mountains. And while we were gone, as snow was falling in Dallas, a rare December warm front even blew through Anchorage, melting enough of the accumulated snow here that we could actually see some green grass in our yard when we got back.

If given the option, would we live somewhere other than Alaska? Definitely. Will we be just as excited the next time we leave here during the winter? Almost certainly, yes. Will that again bring on unrealistic expectations for our destination? I assume so. Have I derailed my first metaphor about the song from the immigrant mouse movie by introducing a second and more tenuous one about the grass being greener elsewhere? It appears that I have. Am I a serious- and skilled-enough writer, then, to eloquently divert this conclusion back into the context of the original theme? Probably not.