I am recently returned from an 8-day trip to Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas. Work travel resumed with my first trip back to GlassBuild America since 2021. My company owns the show and they’ve been so generous in letting me skip it the past few years. But this year, it was time to get back out there as the face of Window + Door. It also ventured to a new city: Dallas, Texas!

Everything really is bigger in Texas. The airport, the interstates, the longhorns, the dishes of queso and guacamole. Everything. (Including our show: the biggest one in a decade+!)

The Work

Anyone who knows me or has read this blog for a time knows of my speech struggles. Although I’m mostly fluent these days, it’s left me with a lifelong avoidance of really any speaking situation. So it was a pretty big deal when I went into GlassBuild planning to host five podcasts and ended up hosting six onsite. Although I don’t look forward to hearing my voice on air (does anyone?), I’m proud to have done them and remained calm through most of all of them. The glass-enclosed podcast booth had us feeling a bit like fish in a bowl, but it was pretty cool.

I walked miles and miles on the trade show floor and had probably a couple dozen booth visits and meetings, then networking events after hours. It was a lot for my introvert self.

One networking event was on a rooftop bar and was a very relaxed, chill event. It even had caricature drawings available, which was well worth the wait when I showed it to Landon and Bryce. Both got a huge kick out of it.

Another event was at Gilley’s Dallas. The 1980 movie Urban Cowboy took place largely at Gilley’s and it was kind of fun to be in a Gilley’s and watch industry members take a whirl at the mechanical bull. (My aunt and I watched Urban Cowboy a week before I left.) It was all great fun.

The last time I was at a trade show was before Brian passed, and the thousands and thousands of people there alone overwhelmed me. “How can so many people be talking and milling about as though the world isn’t fundamentally altered?” I thought. After my final podcast I was so elated and high-fived no small number of NGA colleagues. But then the grief hit. The grief that I couldn’t call Brian and have him celebrate with me, because I know he would’ve made an almost embarrassingly big deal out of it. That hairy grief monster, always lurking nearby, sometimes jumps onto my back when I least expect it.

But after all that work, the fun part of Texas began.

The Play

In 1990 in first grade, I met my dear friend Andrea. We shared classrooms in 1, 3 and 4 grades and it felt like we spent nearly every weekend at one house or the other. We became each other’s family. In 1996 she and her family moved to California. This was before email, before IM, before texting. It was in the era of expensive landline long-distance calls. We largely communicated via letter writing, often on Lisa Frank stationery at first.

Through middle and high school, we got to spend about a week each summer together, including one memorable summer where I got to fly to California by myself to visit them!

Visits were more infrequent during college and our adult years, but we squeezed them in when able. We’ve had the great fortune to see each other three consecutive years now. Two years ago for a lunch. Last year she visited me. This year I got to visit Andrea and her husband in Texas.

John shared a short video with us he saw online about three things a true friendship can always withstand: time, distance and silence. One of the most memorable quotes from the video is, “You can grow separately without growing apart.” I feel like that defines us to our cores. We withstood huge swaths of time apart, lived a country apart for a long time, even had long spans of time where we didn’t communicate. We grew separately. We didn’t grow apart. In fact, when we’re together we realize how frequently our paths have run parallel.

We spent afternoon at the Fort Worth Stockyards and saw longhorn cattle walking down the street. I also found the cutest Western cowboy shirts for Landon and Bryce. We hiked through 5 miles of Dinosaur Valley State Park, which ended with wading in a river where hundreds of dinosaur footprints are fossilized. I stood in a brontosaurus footprint so deep the water went up to my mid-thigh! (Five miles usually doesn’t phase me, but it was no joke in 90s Texas heat!) We watched movies, did puzzles, went grocery shopping, worked out in her home gym, existed in silence, existed in conversation. I got to spend time with her parents, whom I love dearly.

After 8 days away, I flew home. I’m still physically tired; I think I’ll be physically drained and running on fumes for the rest of my days. But the mental reprieve from the monotony and overwhelm of daily life helped so much.

Back to business as usual with these two!