Author Archives: Paul McDonnold

Dappled Things, Mary Queen of Angels issue, 2022

At the town of Centreville, Highway 7 and Interstate 45 intersect perpendicularly, like geometric number lines drawn on Texas in cement. On a July day in 1995, I crossed this origin in a 1978 Buick LeSabre sedan, a lime-green rectangle 18-feet-long and filled with most of what I owned in the world. I’d bought it from my uncle the year before as part of a plan to lower my living expenses. While it won me no style points on the street, my uncle took meticulous care of his rides, and I knew “The Bomb” (what I once heard my cousin sarcastically call it) would move me reliably from point A to B. On this day, point A was Houston, where I’d spent most of my life. Point B was Denton, north of Dallas, where I was moving to start graduate school at the University of North Texas.

The climate transitioned as I drove north. Away from the massive heat-sink of the Gulf of Mexico, the temperature rose and the air dried, and I liked the change. Houston summers could be swampy and damp. Sometimes you weren’t sure if you were breathing or drowning. The sky also looked different in North Texas, a smooth concave surface that seemed to expand over the course of my drive. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but taking the land I was traveling through as a Cartesian plane, I was surrounded physically by the same things that would soon surround me mentally in my coursework—lines, curves and geometric shapes—fundamental elements of calculus.

Six years earlier, I’d graduated from Texas A&M University with a bachelor’s degree in economics. I’d been twenty-one physically, maybe fifteen emotionally…

Click here to access the full essay at Dappled Things