Why I vacationed in Dallas

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 24 seconds

Last month I asked if I could leave work a little early because I had an early morning flight to catch.

"Oh yeah? Where are you going?"

"Dallas."

He literally laughed. "Seriously?"

I was serious. I can understand why he found my answer humorous. Although a fine city nonetheless, people don't really see Dallas as a vacation hotspot. It's like Boise or Kansas City or Cleveland.

I gave him the short answer. We have friends there. Here's the long answer:

In April, 2001, we lived in Corpus Christi, Texas and had zero friends living within a 1,000-mile radius. New town, new jobs. It was understandable. Within six months, things started to change.

First came along Tapril, a combination of two people named Tate and April. Erin taught with April at Calallen High School. Tate was her husband, a lawyer. They turned out to be our first couple friend.

From my experience, couple friends create an inherently volatile situation where two people who enjoy each other's company decide to sit their spouses across from one another at a restaurant for a round of uninspired and painfully clumsy small talk while they laugh and talk it up like nothing unusual. Luckily, we and Tapril were able to avoid these follies.

Next, the baron landscape of friendship that was my workplace started to transform. It seemed that every few weeks, a new face would arrive and we would become friends. As people arrived, the circle got bigger and within a year, we had at least seven good friends (I define a good friend as someone you could hang out with by yourself, without the social buffer of another person to take the pressure of the awkwardness of dull conversations and the incompatibility you share).

It was the first time I had that many good friends since my fourth birthday party and that was only because my mom invited everyone on our street and the next street down.

Because of the size of our city, nobody lived farther than 15 minutes drive from anyone else. And our similar work schedules made it not uncommon to push two, even three tables together for post-work drinks and/or unnecessary face-stuffing.

If you wanted someone to hang out with, one person and usually more were up for it. This meant brunch at John and Helen's, Chinese lunch buffet with Ryan and John, camping with Karson (or Tapril), beading with Helen and Kari (that was Erin, of course, not me), reality TV with John, hillbilly concerts with Tapril, coffee before work with Karson, volleyball, karaoke, the beach, pool(s), IHOP and so on.

I don’t know if any of us realized how amazingly odd this was at the time.

But people early in their careers, especially anyone who works in newspapers likely will have somewhat of a transient life. You find a newspaper, work there for a year or three than move on, usually to a bigger paper, a bigger city.

Slowly, the same forces that lured everyone to Corpus Christi sent them away. We all began to go our separate ways. Except something funny happened, something odd and unimaginable. For their own unrelated reasons, all of our friends ended up in the same city again. Except us. We moved as far away as you could without applying for a work visa. And then moved again, just as far in another direction.

And that's what brought us to Dallas/Fort Worth. Besides trips to Denver to see family, it was the first trip where experiencing something new – a new city, a new culture, a new landscape – was not on the list.

We came with no plans, no sights to see. We came to do what we used to do on a near daily basis. Talk, laugh, drink, gossip and laugh some more. And we flew a thousand miles to do it.

The highlight of our trip for me was a single moment. Nothing terribly planned. We were all gathered at Karson's and had opened some wine that Ryan brought. Somebody asked whoever to do a toast. It was more for the sappy sentimentality than a group of people taking themselves seriously.

Ryan stepped up and out of nowhere, with glass held high and a gaze toward the ceiling for comedic effect, he said, "There are wood ships, and good ships, and ships that sail the sea. But the best ships are friendships and may they always be."

A classic Irish toast and now a classic moment. It was hilarious, irreverent, sentimental and poignant all at once.

If Ryan had said the same words, holding the same wine, in front of the same people a few years earlier, I probably would have chuckled. But the meaning would have been lost. Because then, I lived 10 minutes away. And we would see each other tomorrow.