Rockwall, Texas

That trip to Paris with David was many years ago.  I couldn’t do it today.  I can’t travel anywhere.  With dialysis three days a week, going to Fort Worth becomes a big deal. On days when I don’t have dialysis, I often have to see other doctors.

My medical bills cost more than $100,000 a year.  The government and insurance pay for all of it.  Republicans say we must cut Medicare.   Without Medicare I could not pay the rent on even a small apartment.  Without dialysis I would be dead within a week. 

On Thursday I saw another doctor.  This specialist comes to Garland on Wednesdays, when I have dialysis.  For this appointment I had to go to Rockwall. 

As a child I went with my grandmother to visit her sister in Rockwall.  From Fort Worth we drove on a two-lane highway past fields of cotton and pastures where cows grazed.  There was a traffic light at the little town of Arlington, and another at Grand Prairie. 

We crossed Dallas, right through downtown on Elm Street, where 30 years later crowds would cheer as Kennedy’s motorcade passed going to his death.  From there it was another 25 miles, past more cotton fields and cows – Garland was a filling station and a hamburger stand – until we crossed the river and went up the hill, passing the cemetery where my great-grandparents are buried, to the village of Rockwall.

It was such a long trip that we always stayed for several days, sleeping on the glassed-in back porch of Aunt Lou’s little Victorian house, a few blocks from the Rockwall County Court House. Aunt Lou’s husband, Uncle Lon, was the only doctor in Rockwall County.  One day he went out to a farm to deliver a baby.  When he came home, Aunt Lou asked, “Did you get paid?”

“Yes,” Uncle Lon said, “I got two chickens.”
We had fried chicken for supper.

My grandmother, age 89, died in Fort Worth in1974.  I held my mother’s hand in the car following her hearse along Interstate 30.  It took little more than an hour to reach the family plot in Rockwall’s the old hillside cemetery.

Today Fort Worth and Dallas are welded together in a giant Metroplex.  Beside the interstate at Arlington are Six Flags Over Texas and stadiums where the Texas Rangers and Dallas Cowboys play.  Arlington and Garland are cities, each with as many people as Fort Worth had when I was a child.  Rockwall is now a Dallas suburb.

To see my doctor I drove east on Interstate 30.  I crossed the long bridge over Joe Pool Lake, which separates Garland from Rockwall.  On the other side was a part of Rockwall, far south of the village I knew as a child.  There were shopping malls and franchise restaurants and a four-lane road leading to a medical complex with a big Presbyterian Hospital and several multistoried buildings with doctors’ offices and clinics. 

I am glad doctors are no longer paid with chickens.  I also an glad someone developed the dialysis machine that keeps me alive.  But all these changes I’ve seen in my lifetime make my mind spin.  We live in a different World.