In this collection of humorous and poignant stories, Tudey Teten, a fifth-generation Austinite, has captured the essence of his hometown. The characters in the book are not the oddities that Keep Austin Weird: they are salt-of-the-earth people from disparate backgrounds and circumstances who make the Capital City an endearing and singular place to live. The author is proud that their lives and his life have intersected. After reading this book, maybe you will feel the same way.
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Excerpts
~ The Wonderful World of Wrestling ~
There are lots of ways to view wrestling; the crowd that night had chosen “while drunk.” Adoring fans yelled, “You suck!” and other pithy, unprintable epithets. We couldn’t tell if those words were for Johnny or us, until the first food salvos landed in our ringside section. Our support for Johnny, the evil one, did not sit well with the crowd, so they stood up, because it’s hard to throw things with any accuracy while sitting down. Snow cones, half-empty beer cups, and half-eaten hot dogs with mustard and relish splattered the preppies. Some of the Phis returned fire and I thought, “Yeah, that’ll diffuse the situation.” Like pre-game calisthenics, both sides were just warming up.
From my fourth row seat on the aisle, I noticed an octogenarian woman glaring at me from an adjoining section. She sat on the front row framed by her misanthropic son on the right, her walker and umbrella on the left. Granny was displeased with our choice in wrestlers. Incoming! Soft drinks, nachos, fudgesicles, and M&Ms rained down on us. I sure could have used that umbrella. Between fights we sipped our coats and dined on our shirts, while the crowd rushed to the concession stand to reload.
~ Return to Marywood ~
As the months passed, the Irish woman kept working in the nursery, but she always found time for the blind boy. Despite her doting, he still resided in a world without a mother or a home. If he suffered a nightmare or cried out in despair, she was soon at his side, regardless of the time of day or night. She would lift him from the crib, and the two would sit together in a rocking chair. He would lie on her side with his hands resting on her womb and his head nestled near her shoulder. Her free hand would gently stroke his hair as she kissed his forehead and softly whispered, "God loves you and I love you. Everything's going to be all right." They remained in the rocking chair until the tears and despair evaporated or he fell asleep. And then her feet would lightly tap the floor and they would rock a while longer.
~ Why We Fight/Why I Write ~
Others told Lt. Bob Teten what to expect, so he grabbed his camera and made his way to the train. The first assault on his senses was invisible: a stench that made him stagger as it hit his nostrils and swirled around his mouth, before clinging to his tongue and nose hairs. There were no odors like this back in Nebraska.
As a little boy in Nebraska City, he sat in the grass and watched his father plant trees commemorating the birth of Dad's younger siblings, a German custom the family brought with them from the Fatherland. In the previous century, their ancestors had emigrated from the Friesland area in the northwest, as far removed from Dachau as a German region could be. And as he saw the first bodies lying on the gravel by the tracks Dad wondered how the birthplace of his great-grandparents could, in a few generations, spawn Germans capable of carrying out such an atrocity.
He halted at an open-air boxcar with wooden sides that rose four feet above its wheels. His shoulders were level with its floor as he leaned forward a few inches and peered inside the open door. Slowly, his eyes drifted over the contents of the car's left side, then returned to the center as his mind tried to register what he was seeing. The fingers of his right hand squeezed the camera tightly as he viewed the right side of the car before his eyes returned to the center. Dad stepped back and fixated on an object a few feet away: a face. Its two motionless eyes gazed back at him, the gaping mouth incapable of speech. But the death mask formed a question Bob heard over and over again. "Where were you when this was happening to us? Where were you." And Lt. Teten wept.
- Tudey Teten