Sunday morning, I had a dream about Cindy Vela.
I’ve known Cindy for about 10 years. When I met her, she was a college student entered in a beauty, excuse me, in a scholarship pageant.
Her first professional photo shoot was with me. I guess it started something. After graduating from college, she taught for two years and then decided to give Hollywood a try.
It’s working out for her and she just wrapped up her first starring role in a movie.
In my dream, I was riding in a cab with two women. One was Cindy as she might appear on the street, in a restaurant or modeling.
But the other was a super glamorous Cindy, dressed in a white-pants-and-baremidriff outfit, her hair coifed perfectly.
I wasn’t sure where we were going, but it was somewhere fun.
The super glam Cindy stopped the cab and got out. She had no time for such foolishness. But the other Cindy stayed in the cab and we hugged each other and went on.
I thought about this, and about what it meant. I decided there are two Cindys, the one I know and the career Cindy. It’s much the same with most people, a personal side and a professional one.
The professional Cindy, the model and the actress, has moved on beyond me. She has made another life for herself.
It is only our ego that tells us that people’s lives don’t go on without us. So such a change is only natural.
Only a few days before, I had been talking with two older women in the Las Vegas airport. They were from San Antonio where I grew up. We talked for a while about how the city had changed since I had been living in the Valley.
When I was a kid, Interstate 37 didn’t exist. We were living on the north side near Alamo Heights and my father was working on the south side at a Luby’s in the new McCreless Mall.
Every day after school, my mother, sister and I got in the car and drove 45 minutes to an hour down New Braunfels Avenue to eat with my father at McCreless.
When he took over the Luby’s at North Star Mall, he had a friendly rivalry for years with the McCreless Luby’s. It was run by Jim Goudge, the brother of my father’s best friend Don.
Now it’s a 10- or 15-minute ride down I-37, except in rush hour.
“McCreless?” one of the women said. “Ain’t nothing left of McCreless Mall ‘cept one store and two piles of dirt.”
“Two big ol’ piles of dirt,” the other woman echoed with a shake of her head.
We moved to the suburbs when I was 12. In 1976, Windsor Park Mall was built near our house. At the time, it was the largest mall in town and was constantly packed. It closed the same year as McCreless.
How had this happened? How had the landscape of that city changed so much without me knowing?
But life is like that. People get older. They marry and some divorce. Children grow whether we are there to see it or not.
The more I thought about it, the more that I realized that the Cindy that stayed behind is the Cindy who is my friend. And that part hopefully we never lose, the friendship and the love.
People move on, they grow and some, well, they die. Such is life.
But a part of them stays with us forever and goes wherever our journey takes us. And that is all we can hope for.
