Off To New Mexico

Season's Greetings, plus one sad, sick bastard

B52 Strikes and Armed Pro-Lifers

Linx

"Judge To Hear Key Motions In Kan. Murder Trial," by Kathy Lohr, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121746158&ft=1&f=1003

"Judge says no to 'necessity defense' for George Tiller's alleged killer," by Justin Kendall, http://blogs.pitch.com/plog/2009/12/judge_says_no_to_necessity_defense_for_george_tillers_alleged_killer.php

hair cuts from the west

the linx

Texas parents, school tangle over boy's long locks — http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jHTRVxrCriQ0q9mjS5cP9NkcjONgD9CL6PO02

Texas parents battle school over son's long locks — http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-12-17-texas-school-hair_N.htm

Texas parents battle school over son's long locks — http://news.yahoo.com/video/us-15749625/texas-parents-battle-school-over-son-s-long-locks-17178226

New Mexico #9: Sadness

New Mexico #9: Sadness


So, once again, I turn to New Mexico.

This one isn't going to be so funny, either.

It will start out light-hearted…or, at least, merely melancholy. But, then, gradually, it will slide away into the dark.

This is just to warn you.

*


You will recall that I'm writing a series about my trip to New Mexico last summer. Last time we had just gone to lunch at a restaurant at Santa Fe. My father had, with his sly humor, vast intelligence, and endless reserve of low-level sadism had just terrified a snotty, self-important woman of the sort described in song and fable as a Rich Bitch. A pleasant time was had by all. Except for the Bitch. But, then, she asked for what she got. And deserved worse.

Anyway, we ate. The sandwiches were good. We finished and then Martha and I spent some time on our own looking for a graduation present for my son—he was, you'll recall, just about to get his degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

So, Martha and I shopped. We didn't find anything we thought he'd really like. In the end, we got him a genuinely beautiful copper wall hanging form artist who lives in Albuquerque. I think he liked it. But who can tell? You give the gift and hope. It is a wise child that knows its mother. There is no parent quite wise enough to understand the child.

Anyway, so browsed a few more shops and, next we knew, it was time to catch the train. We met up with my parents and took the little van to the station.

Again, everything was magical. The station was wondrously clean. The conductors were young and cheerful. The cars were comfortable and new. We boarded and, shortly after, we were on our way.

At first, the magic continued as we went on our way. The sun was only then beginning its slow slant toward the horizon, and we'd have full daylight all the way to Albuquerque. Yet, still, everything…the mountains, the towns, the Pueblos, the adobe buildings we passed…began to take on that rose-honey color you see, sometimes, in the late afternoons of summer.

There was a crowd in the car, but, at first, people were quiet…as though no one dared to break the peace of the moment, or look away from the windows, for fear of missing something. The mountains and hills went past us, faintly glowing in the light, then we were in the Pueblos again, their streets peaceful and empty, the beautiful dome-shaped ovens beside the homes…

And then…

HE started talking.


*

You may remember way back, several New Mexico episodes ago, I mentioned that on our return from Santa Fe, we encountered a young lawyer on the train who began to lecture a pair of perfect strangers on the train about the bread ovens…and then wouldn't shut up.

Well, it was right then that the chap put in his appearance. We were not far out of Santa Fe when all of a sudden, we heard him address the party in the seat next to him. "Those are ovens," he said, cheerfully. "They bake bread in them."

His voice had a collegiate sound to it…the kind of voice you hear in a sports bar, or a bus and he's on the cell phone… loud, maddeningly chipper, and as inescapable as gamma rays at Chernobyl. He was the kind of guy to whom you'd love to respond in an appropriate way, but he's too big to hit and you don't have a chainsaw.

Somehow, he'd decided that the two women and one man next to him were tourists who desperately needed his wisdom. "It's great. You ought to try it while you're here. They call it fry bread and…"

The people tried to get a word in edgewise, "Well, that is, we—"

"But it's very rich. They cook it with butter or lard so you can't eat too much of it. And…"

"Well, we know, because—"

"And sometimes you can't get it in Albuquerque. But I think they sell it in Old Town. You really have to visit Old Town. It's…

"Because we—"

"It's a great spot if you're just starting out in New Mexico. Or if you…"

"WE KNOW! WE LIVE HERE!"

"Really?" And then, without missing a beat or displaying a trace of embarrassment, he changed the subject and was off on yet another lecture, this one on how convenient it was for him to commute from his home to Santa Fe…thanks to the train.

The three miserable souls beside him sank slowly in their seats, knowing the grim fate that awaited them.

*

He talked non-stop all the way to the station. I don't remember most of what he said…thank goodness…but pieces did stick in my memory. There was the long discourse on how boring the train ride really was, "I mean, all you have to look at is the scenery." But, he assured his victims, he could usually check email with his iPhone, so that made it a little better. So he could "get work done," instead of just "stare at rocks."

But, he continued, the train was a great way to commute. He got up at five in the morning, was at the train by six, and be in the office by seven. And then he'd catch the train home and be back by no later than nine. "It's great!"

He was on the way home early tonight because his daughter was having her birthday and he wanted to be there for it. She was, I gathered, six or seven. Usually he got home after she'd gone to bed, but today he was going to make an exception. "We're having a pony," he explained, "and a clown."

From there he was off on to the topic of child-rearing…on which, it seemed, he was a great authority. He'd seen some video on the subject, and read a book, and it was going to make everything just ducky for him while raising his daughter—the same one, that is, who was asleep when he left the house, and then was back in bed when he got home.

The theme of the book was that all human interactions are, in fact, based on commercial relations—business, in other words. So, "she doesn't get an allowance," he said proudly. "She gets commissions."

This, he explained, made all the difference. How so, it wasn't clear to me, but he assured his listeners that it did. And, besides, it would teach her to exist in a world in which nothing happens until someone sells something. Even better, "it eliminates all the tears." The girl would keep track of her commissions, and when they went to the toy store or where ever, she could buy only what she had enough commissions to purchase.

I listened. I wondered, Should I Warn Him? Should I, the father of a 25-year-old man (who knows the score) tell him what was coming? What will happen in ten years, when that girl would be sixteen, full of hormones, chasing boys, always on the phone, and telling her father exactly where he could stick his commissions?

I thought about it.

No. He'd never believe me.

In the words of the poet, there are some things that cannot be explained to virgins in either words or pictures.

*

Now, we begin our journey away from the light…


*

As I look at the material above, I realize I've been trying to be funny in this posting. At least a little. But, it hasn't felt quite right. It seemed forced.

Partly, of course, it was because of the lawyer—tall and blond, successful, every bit what this culture says a successful man should be. Or, woman, for that matter.

And, yet, in the end, he was sort of tragic. How little he understood of the world! How little it touched him. That great and magnificent world, with its mountains and desert, stretching off to infinity, and which he could have seen if only he'd looked.

And his child! I was joking—sort of—when I talked about what would happen when she was sixteen. But, it was perfectly true. Indeed, I understated the case. What will she think of this man, in ten years or twenty, when she looks back on him? The father who only appeared with a pony and a clown?

And what of him? What will he feel in forty years? When he is old? And he suddenly discovers that, by God, life is not like a corporation? That you cannot hold stock in it? Nor get a promotion by being in the office at seven? That, in the end, he who dies with the most toys, is still dead?

*

Ah, but there's the rub. We are taught this. We are taught to sacrifice all …everything in our lives!...if we "want to get ahead." It is unmanly to do otherwise. It is un-feminist to do otherwise ("you wouldn't say that if she were a man"). It is virtuous to be in the office at seven (or even six-thirty) and stay there deep into the night, your flesh growing pasty and pale under the fluorescents. Or minty green in the light of spread sheets and the powerpoints.


*


How much braver, stronger, wiser is the man or woman who defers their pleasures, their accomplishments, yes, even their fondest dreams. Who, once having the child, understands that this…the infant!...is their future, their destiny, their career. Who knows that the promotions will not come, the move to "the coast" and the corner office will be denied, because that is the nature of the bargain we have with life.

We are offered children, we are given the option of parenthood, and if we accept, then, well, the price is high. It is not happy. It is not easy. But it is the price.

The alternative is to be a stranger to your own children, and to court their justifiable hatred.

*

Let us then admit the greatness of the Small: the husbands, the wives, the stayers at homes, the worker-bees, the million-millions of men and women who are held in such thorough contempt by Hollywood and Manhattan and New England college towns.

And without whom the world would end in misery and dust.


*

Now… we move to the next part of my story. Less happy still.

*

The young professional wasn't the only reason for my sadness that day.

As we moved closer to my boyhood home, to Albuquerque, the delicate magic of the country, and the plastic wonder of the theme park known as Santa Fe, began to evaporate. The empty lots, the abandoned buildings, the dirty building, the long walls of concrete with the vast burden of gang graffiti and spray-painted obscenities…the features of a real city in this post-industrial age began to appear.

Then, we were back in the station at downtown Albuquerque. The declining light, which had seemed gentle and kind in the desert, was now merely dim. It played whitely over the concrete and the brick of the empty city, deserted on a Sunday evening.

Only the street people—and the police—were there.


*

We pulled into the station. We gathered up our jackets and purchases. The lawyer…thank heavens!...was gone.

We headed for the door. I led the way, for some reason. I don't remember why. Martha was behind me. My mother and father were behind her.

I came to the door of the train. There was a sort of bridge that led from the train to the platform. I crossed it, looking down just long enough to see that between the platform and train there was a deep gap. I could see a gravel surface below, the tracks, and the huge wheels of the train.

Martha joined me. Not thinking, we started ahead.

There was a woman's scream behind us.

My father had fallen.

*

I whirled and ran back. He was half on the bridge, one leg was over the side, down into the gap. A woman passenger and a conductor were holding on to him, desperately tight. The conductor pulled him up…finally…and I got to him.

He stood unsteadily in front of me. My mother was at his side, shaking.


*

He was embarrassed. He wouldn't stay. "Just lost my balance there." He led the way out of the crowd, thanking the woman and the conductor, and hurrying away from the scene.

*

How much pain he must have felt— the leg over the edge, the body on the bridge, straining to not to fall, the muscles contacting and tight.

He would not sit. He would not rest.

*

My father…

*

And that wasn't enough, was it? Not enough for fate and time. Not enough for a symbol. The universe wasn't finished with us.

*

We walked toward the station lobby. To get there, we had to take one route…the pathway that led from the station landing to the lobby building.

And as we turned the corner, we realized that there was a crowd of police and EMTs at the end of the path. In the street, we could see the blinking lights of emergency vehicles.

And they were kneeling and working on something on the ground.


*

We came closer. We had no choice. There was nowhere else to go.


*

It was one of the street people. He was on the ground. On the concrete. They were around him. The EMTS and the police. They circled him.

His flesh was dead white.


*

We went past him. We had no choice. There was nothing else to do.


*

We made our way past the police cars and the ambulance and the EMT truck. We made our way to the car where it was parked in the garage.

I drove us home.


*

We got to their house. We had dinner. It was my father's famous spaghetti. He's a very good cook. He served it cheerfully.

And, then, cheerfully, he asked us if we'd like dessert. Cheerfully, he brought out ice cream and cookies.

*

Then…

*

Then, the next morning, he cheerfully took me aside.

And cheerfully told me where all the family records were.

In case I should ever need them.

*

I didn't weep until later, in the guest room, with the door closed.

So no one would see or hear me.

*

Until next time.
























Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker

Salem 1

trust

snowman kit

The quotes in Question

Among the quotes in question:

1) "If the antiabortion movement took a tenth of the energy they put into noisy theatrics and devoted it to improving the lives of children who have been born into lives of poverty, violence, and neglect, they could make a world shine."


and

2) "...there is no poison on earth more potent, nor half so deadly, as apartial truth mixed with passion."

Quotes

Do a search for "quotes Michael Jay Tucker" and see what you get...

Me, Publishing, Self-pity, good stuff like that

Michael Mugs

I promise I'll stop soon...

a morning walk

A little experiment...in video

New Mexico #8: Fantasy

It's been awhile since I've written about the trip to New Mexico. It wasn't that I didn't want to come here and write. It's just that life has been…complicated…

But you know all about that, don’t you? All our lives are complicated in this curious age—this age in which we live on the run, this job to that, that place to this, and, in the end, we find that (somehow) we are like Alice's Queen. Moving very fast. Yet not moving at all.

So…


*

Last time, I talked about my growing sense of unease as we walked through Santa Fe. I was having memories of people and situations I'd found in that town but which were not particular pleasant.

Also, I was experiencing a certain sense of unreality, as though I were not really there at all, or else the city wasn't.

Actually, on reflection, I realized I had good reason for that. Parts of Santa Fe aren't real. They are as illusionary as the Matrix, and twice as tenacious.

Oh, don't get me wrong. Much of the city—almost all of the city!—is perfectly real. You don't have to walk far from the Square before you come to the real, living Santa Fe. A few meters, and you discover houses and condos, offices and schools, places where people live and work, and send their children to be educated. Admittedly, there are fewer such places than there used to be (with each passing year it becomes more expensive to live in Santa Fe. Property values soar and residents flee to the cheaper suburbs, or even to Albuquerque), but they exist all the same.

But, the Square, and the few blocks around it…they belong to visitors and those who sell to them. And, come let's face facts, that leads to a touch of the fantastic. We do not travel to distant places, nor pay inflated prices, for the joy of dealing with the same discomforts we meet at home. Unless we are an "adventure tourist" (and more about that in a moment), we charge up the Visa cards and suffer through the lines at airport security so that we may escape our lives. For our money, we want to be someplace where the sidewalks are clean, the meals come without our cooking them, the beds are made by magic…well, by maids, but it feels that way…and the help behind the counter is always smiling. In fact, it would be better if the help wasn't human at all. A large cartoon mouse in top hat and tails, his face frozen forever in an idiot's grin, would be best of all.

We pay, in other words, to inhabit an alternative reality, and at those prices, we damn well better get it.

Oh, and the Adventure Tourist? He, or she, inhabits the most unreal reality of all. She, or he, goes off into the wilderness on a pre-packaged thrill ride, dismissing as cowards those who might propose caution, and, then returns home with tails of a life changing experience…of terrors met…of confidence gained.

Except…

If the bungee cord should ever actually break, the bear actually elect to feast, the Iranian border guards really decide to fire…

They are so terribly, terribly offended.

*

And, understand, there is nothing wrong with this. There is nothing wrong with the falseness of tourist bubbles, in spite of the commandments of academics who tell us we should hate Disneyland (and by extension, fairy tales). People who say such things are those whose lives are sufficiently removed from daily struggle, tedium, and Quiet Desperation that they cannot understand the need for relief. They sit in their offices at Universities, grinding out turgid prose and unreadable books, failing always to understand that their comfortable, tenured lives are as fantastic and faintly ridiculous as a college kid in a Goofy suit, working his way through summer vacation.

But, that said, such places…like the Square at Santa Fe…will always have a whiff of the artificial, of unreality, of emptiness. At their best, they are like a thrill ride or an Imax movie. You buy your ticket, you lose yourself for a time, and then you walk away, relieved and exhilarated—but never believing that you have dealt with reality.

Or, at their worst, at their very worst, they leave you with the kind of vague disquiet you have sometimes in fever dreams, when you know you're dreaming, and that all you see is manufactured by Id and Unconscious, yet you do not choose to wake.


*


But…anyway.

We were going from the La Fonda, the hotel where we'd rejoined my parents, to a new restaurant my parents had discovered. My parents hunt restaurants the way that Teddy Roosevelt hunted lions and tigers and bears (oh my). They seek them out, somehow, noticing tracks in the hard soil, testing the air for the scent, and pursue.

And, amazingly, 99 times out of a 100, their discoveries are good. They always have at least three new trophies when we come to visit, the chefs' hats on mounted the wall, the leftovers stuffed and on display over the mantle.

That day, my parents were taking us to a new sandwich place they'd found. My father described it as half restaurant, half art gallery, and he led us out of the Square and up a side street. Soon, we found ourselves outside a smallish establishment with white adobe walls and blue wood trim. It could have been Greek, mysteriously transplanted by UFOs from Aegean shores. We entered. Inside the walls were decorated with various paintings from local artists. Some were good. Some were repellant. But, they were from Santa Fe. Therefore, by definition, they must be wonderful.

Under the paintings were the tables and the chairs. Men and women, and a few children, sat and talked and ate. A tall blond man materialized and asked what we wanted. My father said a table and give the total population of our party. A mere four. The tall man said it shouldn't be long. We stood in the little space before the cash register and waited while other customers came and went.

Martha and my mother fell into some conversation, I don't know about what. My father and I talked about … I believe we talked about physics. He is a physicist. A retired one but still active in the field. We were talking fusion power, and whether it were possible for the country to develop it, and if so at what cost.

And about the time I looked up and saw a woman come into the restaurant. She was, perhaps, in her late 30s or early 40s. Very stylish. Attractive. Well dressed. Large sunglasses. Short skirt. Peasant blouse. Large leather purse. She reeked, in other words, of money.

What sort of money? Who can say? Vice president of marketing on vacation money. Or real estate entrepreneur in New Mexico money. Or corporate lawyer between cases money. Or even, yes, affluent suburban wife from Connecticut money (no. Really. A few still exist. Even in this day of dual incomes and fast-track careers).

But, in any case, money. And she came into the restaurant, glanced at us, swept past, and went to the counter where the tall man stood guard. She spoke to him. I couldn't hear what she said over the sound of the crowd, nor what he replied, but there was some tension in the air. His hands came up as if to communicate something, or defend himself from a blow. Hers remained by her side, hands tight around the strap of her leather purse. Then, somehow, something was resolved. I half-heard, half read the woman's lips well enough to detect "then take-out." The man's face softened in relief. He hurried away toward the kitchen.

She paused for a moment by the counter, then drifted back to where the rest of us stood waiting for our tables. She looked at me. She looked at my father.

Always friendly, always open, he smiled and said, "Hello."

She frowned. She mumbled "'Lo." He was not important. He was old and probably senile and didn't know to speak only when spoken to. She glanced away. She stood, still in her sunglasses in the restaurant's shadowy interior, and looked out into the street.

My father eyed her. He began to smile more broadly. I knew what was coming. It wasn't going to be pretty. But, I thought, she'd brought it on herself.

*

"So," he said to her, smiling, eyes twinkling, as merry as Santa Claus on the day before noel, "isn't it a lovely day?"

She looked at him, half in surprise, half in distaste. Had he really spoken to her? Had this strange, miserable creature actually addressed her?

"I mean," he continued, still cheery, "the light, and everything. But not too hot."

She looked him up and down. I knew what she saw. He is a small man, now (how did that happen? I remember him being so tall). His hair is white, long, and wild, seeking new discoveries around his ears, his forehead, the back of his neck, uncontrolled and vastly energetic, if somewhat thinner than it once was. And he has a beard now. Also white. Pointed. Not quite a goatee, but not quite anything else either. In one light it makes him look a little like Colonel Sanders. Ah, but in another, like Mephistopheles.

Her cosmetic tinted lenses flicked up to his face. You could see her logic as clearly as if her head were made of glass. "If I say nothing," she thought, "will he go away?"

But he didn't. I knew that light in his eyes. The eyes so cheery. So merry. So mild. So…inexplicably bright and hard.

"Well," he continued, "where are you from? We're from Albuquerque. My son and his wife"—indicating me—"they came all the way from Boston."

Even through her sunglasses, you could see the discomfort. "I…ah…I'm from California."

"Really? Where-abouts? North or south?"

The cosmetic lenses panned down, like a camera trying for a Dutch Angle. I knew what she was seeing then, too. His clothing. He affects satiny sports jackets, unzipped to reveal the white t-shirt. His pants? Inevitably jeans or khakis, just a size or two off, just a decade or so out of fashion. Athletic shoes, beaten soft from long use.

"Um…south. Las Angeles."

"Ah," beaming like a street light on a winter night, "we have relatives in Las Angeles. Maybe you know them…" He named one of my uncles.

The woman took a step back, a slight tremor shaking her body.

"No, wait," he continued. "Johnny's been dead for about two years ago now. I keep forgetting that. And, besides, he moved to Reno in '79. Have you ever been to Reno?"

Even through her sunglasses, you could see the panic in her eyes.

"Well, doesn't matter. You're from L.A.? We used to drive there…when he was little" —he indicated me. "That was a lot of fun." He turned to me again. "Remember that time we went in 1968? We where in that green van." He looked at her again, explaining. "No insulation in it. You ever try to drive across Arizona in the middle of summer without air conditioning? Yes siree! It was soooo hot…"

Her back was now literally against the wall. She held her purse tightly in front of her, like a shield. You could see her fingers digging into the leather.

"And we got to the border with California. They stopped us at the state line. Do they still do that? They used to check your car to make certain you didn't have fruits or vegetables that might bring in plant diseases. Anyway, I can always remember, the guard looking into our van, me in my t-shirt, my wife in shorts, and him"—me—"not looking much better."

She swallowed. Her teeth were clinched.

"And we hadn't had a bath for a while. I mean, we were camping, so how could we?"

Little drops of sweat were forming on her forehead.

"And the guard looked into the van and said, 'Oh, my God.' We must have looked awfu—…"

The tall blond man appeared with a take-out bag. The woman dashed past my father with her credit card already out. A moment after that, she was running toward the door.

"Have a nice day," my father said, as she went. "Great talking to you."

The door closed behind her with a bang.

My father smiled once more.

*

And lunch was quite good actually. We ate with a healthy appetite.

Then, we went to a couple more galleries. And, after that, it was time to head for the train, and home.

What we did not know was what would be waiting for us at the station.

But that's for next time.

*

Onward and upward.


















Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker

I confess

Yes, I confess it. I have been dreadfully remiss about my blog. Xcargo has not seen me for 'lo these many weeks.

Forgive me? My only excuse is that I've been teaching three classes and I'm a bit overwhelmed by the grading. But, I promise, I'll return with yet more of Santa Fe.

That said, here's a little something to keep us going.

Have you noticed? All the clamor and fear about health care continues unabated …but, most mysteriously, the stories of men and women coming to town meetings with guns have gone away. Oh, yes, there's still yelling and screaming, but not guns, and not the more or less overt threats of violence.

It's almost as if someone flipped a switch. As if someone, somewhere, realized that this tactic was actually having negative effects… that it was frightening people.

Which makes one wonder, does it not? If someone could turn it off that way, then doesn't that mean someone turned it on in the first place? That someone, somewhere, created the whole thing… for their own selfish purposes…with lies and deceit.

Which, in turn, makes one wonder just exactly what they will do next.

And how dreadful it will be…

New Mexico #7: La Fonda

Right, so, last time, I'd gotten us to Santa Fe. We had come by train (almost magically) from the dead heart of downtown Albuquerque on a weekend morning, to the bright and sunny and oh-so-clear world of Santa Fe square.

And, just as we left off last time, we encountered a sleek young woman, almost a girl, careless and thoughtless, indifferent to others, in the way that only a certain class of wealth may allow.

Today, we move to the La Fonda.

*

The La Fonda is a hotel on the square, that is, the Plaza of Santa Fe. It is quite old. There has been an inn, or rather innS at the same location for something like 400 years. But, the La Fonda that sits now on East San Francisco Street dates from the 1920s, when Fred Harvey, whose restaurants and hostelries were once the stuff of legend, established his own hotel on the sight. It remained a " Harvey House" for generations until (at least according to the hotel's current website) it was purchased by a local businessman in the late 1960s.

It's quite beautiful, really—a large adobe structure, seemingly as ancient as the city itself, and with the graceful curves of a pueblo church. It is quite and cool, a little shadowy at times, but pleasant. I've stayed in it once. The rooms, too, a pleasant enough…a little expensive, perhaps, for the usual middle class, family crowd, but not too bad. And besides, that's Santa Fe. You wouldn't be in the city if you didn't expect to pay just a little bit more.

More often, I've eaten there. There was a restaurant on the first floor we would go to when I was a child and my parents would take me on a visit to the city. I believe it was there that I first tried something like Nouvelle cuisine, 'lo these many years ago. But it is hard for me to remember.

In the last few years, I have usually only gone to the café that's attached to the hotel. You can get quite good espresso there. It is one of the few places in the Plaza where you can. And you can see interesting people while you drink it.

But, there is a odd thing about my relationship with the La Fonda. On on hand, I very much like it, and I would recommend it to any one traveling to the city.

On the other…we have a history.


*

Martha and I made our way to the La Fonda where we would be meeting our parents. From there, we would go to lunch.

We turned the corner and there was the hotel…warm and white, and, on the inside, all worked wood and Spanish tile. We went through the doors and up into the lobby. I looked around. I saw the huge fireplaces that burn, as the saying goes, merrily in the winter. During cold weather, visitors come from the world over to ski at Santa Fe and the Taos, and then, they come here for wine and wood smoke.

And it was then that I had my memory.

I took my first degree at a University in New Mexico. To the annoyance of my poor father, I was an English major. And, while I worked my way through Early American Lit and Late European Poetry, I took Creative Writing Classes.

One of these classes was a disaster. It was taught by a writer whose name I will not reveal, but suffice to say that he was the first professor I had ever encountered who used his classroom as a weapon. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was a bully. I have met his kind many times since then, but he was my first experience of that particular breed. He surrounded himself with an elite crew of sycophantic students and, each class, would amuse himself by selecting one of those not in his band of groupies for ritual dismemberment. We would submit our stories and he would, with a robust and eager cruelty, rip them (and us) to shreds.

I am happy to say that he was, himself, not a particularly great writer. Oh, he was published and all that, but there was something missing in his work. There was something cold about it. He would write about emotions, but somehow, they did not reach you. They floated in the abstract, just beyond your reach, so that you felt you ought to feel sadness or joy or grief…but couldn't.

He was quite worldly. He'd been a journalist in Washington and Vietnam. That should have made him wise and insightful…but it didn't. He became one of those men and women who have Seen The Unvarnished Truth, and never let you forget it. You, they silently inform you with a sneer and supercilious look, haven't seen the Real World. You haven't seen people Die In Battle. You haven't Toughed It Out. You haven't heard the helicopters over Khe Sanh. You haven't seen the B52s in the sky.

The fact that his war had been, for the most part, spent a comfortable distance behind the lines, and that he left Saigon long before the choppers made their final, desperate flights…well, that was beside the point.

I've sometimes wondered what happened to him. I've Googled his name, now and then. There are a few references to him in the 1970s and 1980s. But, then, he's gone. It is as if he'd never been real.

But the one thing he left for me, for my memory, was…the La Fonda.

*

This man, my former professor, came from a well-to-do family that lived in the Santa Fe area. His father (or so he said) had come West after World War I and started a large sheep ranch. The sheep must have done very well indeed for the Dad, because the Son (my professor) was duly sent to an expensive college in the East…a college, in fact, only a short drive from where I sit now, in Winchester, MA.

After his time as a global journalist and (to quote the immortal Jethro Bodine) international playboy, my professor had moved back to Santa Fe. The city had, in fact, a considerable role in his fiction and his personal anecdotes, both of which we who were his students came to know rather well.

The thing I remember most about his picture of Santa Fe was that it really wasn't a city at all. His Santa Fe was a great comfortable place, almost an extended family, in which everyone (or, at least, everyone who mattered) was accepted and cherished. In a scene in one of his fictions, he presents us with him and his family and his friends, gathered around one of the great fireplaces of the La Fonda, celebrating the holiday season on a cold evening just before Christmas. A lovely image, indeed.

Ah, but there's the rub. It was not a scene into which just anyone was admitted. As he, himself, was quick to admit, HIS Santa Fe was not everyone's Santa Fe. There are other Santa Fes. There was the Santa Fe of the politicians who came and passed laws in the capital building. There was the Santa Fe of the locals, the men and women whose families had been in the city for generations. There was the Santa Fe of the tourists and the visiting movie stars. And, there was the Santa Fe of the servants, the men and women who staffed the hotels and restaurants.

Of these other Santa Fes, my professor remained proudly ignorant. Except in so far as they impacted his life or comfort, it was as though they did not exist.

And thus, as he dreamed before the fire and awaited the coming of Christmas morn, he felt quite alone …except for his friends. They and he had (they felt) an almost infinite privacy. No one, other than they, was there. In their room. Before their fire.

Only, lots of other people WERE present. The staff, the tourists, the locals…all of them passed through the lobby on their various missions. But, he did not see them. They did not belong to his circle. And, so, they went by, as transparent as ghosts or gusts of wind, leaving no mark, and making no sound.

*

We entered the hotel. We marveled again, as we always do, at its woodwork and tile. We visited the shops in the lobby and admired the jewelry. Once more I asked Martha if she wanted something. Once more, she declined. (Though, happily, later and in another place, she would allow me to buy something for her.)

We waited for my parents. They duly appeared. We discussed lunch. They had a place they wanted to take us—a restaurant they’d found last time they’d been here. We said it sounded fun and they led the way out the door.

And yet, even as we walked, I began to feel something very strange. Even as we made our way through the Plaza, in the gentle air, feeling the sun on our faces…

I began to feel…

Unreal…

*


But that’s for next time.










Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker

New Mexico #6: Santa Fe

So, last time, I finally got us out of Albuquerque. You recall that last we met I ended on a down note. I had talked about the dead zone which is downtown Albuquerque early on a weekend morning. I talked about the train station that had once been quite beautiful, but which is, now, pleasant enough…yet a little too planned, a little too much the brave effort, a little too utilitarian, a little too much refurbished bus stop with city seals and corporate logos.

You'll recall, too, I mentioned the dying bird and the street people, the latter in masses in the lobby of the station.

Well, today, we'll head for cheerier climes.

At least at first.


*

So, we boarded the train—the Rail Runner—and almost instantly everything was magic. The train is new. Everything about it is new. The seats are not worn. The carpets are clean. The great windows are sparkling and transparent. Young people, the conductors, in new uniforms, move up and down the aisles collecting tickets.

It struck me that it was all a wonderful adventure in the past—a return to the days when train travel was gracious and comfortable, and also, back to my youth, when my family would take me to California to visit my Uncle and Aunt, and we would go to Disneyland, then so bright and shining. And, while it wasn't my favorite ride (my fav was the monorail) we would take at least one circle round the park in the train from Main Street USA. The well-scrubbed conductors and engineers would pose smiling for photos.

It was like that, a little. For just a moment, I was six years old again. Uncle Walt was in his heaven. And all was right with the world.


*

We moved out of the city. The downtown was replaced by light industrial parks, then small homes, then countryside. Around us stretched hill-lands and grasslands, range and mesa, sage and tumbleweed. We could see the mountains in the distance.

We talked. My parents told us about their trip to China. We told them about our son—David—and how he was going to graduate from college. We watched as the crowd of other passengers grew around us.

A pleasant voice came over the intercom and said we were entering Indian lands. We were asked to reframe from taking photos. This out of respect to the sensitivities of the local people.

We pulled then, through, a pueblo…a small town of adobe and empty spaces. Here and there were the dome-shaped brick ovens in which fry bread is made. They are beautiful and strange, those ovens. Organic, almost. As though they grew there, or were thrown smoothly on the mandala wheel of the potter.

On the way back, we would hear a young lawyer (a man who seemed unable to keep his mouth shut) begin to lecture a pair of total strangers in the seat next to his. "They bake bread in those," he said, and went into detail. He assumed they were tourists, eager to hear his wisdom. The man and two women tried repeatedly to get a word in. Finally, when he took a breath, they interrupted. "We know. We are from here."

It didn't stop him from talking all the way to the station.

The train moved on.

*

We moved upward and through hills, past the highway, then away from it. For a moment, we would be an open field, cattle grazing in the distance, a string of barbed wire between them and us. Then, we would be in the hills, empty and steep.

Then, rather suddenly, we were there.

We were in Santa Fe.


*

There are two stations in Santa Fe. We went to the second one. It is in the midst of new buildings—shops, restaurants, offices. All very clean, very fresh, very bright.

We exited the train. Conductors appeared as if by magic at the doors and helped everyone down the steps. The morning sun slanted brightly down from the East and the station platform was soft yellow in the early light.

We walked along the platform and more smiling young people in uniforms appeared. "This way to the free buses…" they motioned us. "This way to the shuttles downtown."

We followed their cheery directions. We found ourselves in a white van where a pleasant man told us the stops of the van and how often it ran. He noted particularly the final run of the evening so that we wouldn't miss our train…assuming, of course, that we didn't stay the night.

And, a few minutes later, we were in the Square.


*

Like most historic cities, Santa Fe is centered on an ancient square. There is a monument in the center of the square, and a bit of grass. Along one side of the square is the Palace of the Governors, from whence the Conquistadors once ruled, and which is now a museum. Along the other sides of the square, and stretching off deep into the city, are shops, restaurants, tourist attractions, art galleries, hotels, sculpture gardens, historic churches, more restaurants, women's clothing shops, handcrafted furniture studios, more art galleries, more hotels, more shops, and then, for change, more restaurants.

My parents suggested that we split up. They didn't want to hold us back, they said. So they said they'd meet us at the La Fonda hotel at noon. We would go to lunch from there. We agreed. They vanished in the direction of the Palace.

We went to the shops. We were, in fact, on a mission. Our son, as I said, was graduating from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. We wanted to find him a gift for the occasion. We weren't quite sure what to get him. He likes Southwestern art. He has a small collection of Kachinas, though he has no room for them at his apartment, so they are at the house with us. Still, they wait for him and for the time when he'll reclaim them. One morning, one future day, Sun and Mudhead, Eagle and Maiden, will fly from us to him.

Which is just as it should be.

But we weren't quite sure what to get him. We had thought about another Kachina, but those are hard to ship. We thought, too, about a Zuni fetish, perhaps the badger or the bear, though I suppose the lion would suit him best.

So, one of the things we wanted to do was just browse…just see if we saw something we thought he'd like.

Honestly, though, I was a little reluctant to get him anything in Santa Fe. It is, after all, a city full of travelers and tourists. And prices go up accordingly.


*

We toured. We shopped. We made our way, with our cameras, among our fellow tourists, with their cameras. We window shopped. We looked at the mannequins wearing "broomstick dresses," and squash blossom necklaces. We went past the Loretto Chapel with its supposedly Miraculous Stair, constructed (it is said) by Saint Joseph himself. It is surely not true. But it makes a rather sweet story. We looked at the jewelry on display by the sidewalk vendors in front of the Palace. Martha refused my repeated suggestions that I buy her something.

We decided we saw nothing that would suit our son. So, we headed for the La Fonda.

And then, we began to notice what we had seen all along, but which we had chosen not to see.

The Wealth.


*

Now, understand me. There is nothing inherently wrong with people who have money. Indeed, I'd very much like to be one.

But, let us face facts; riches are no more a guarantor of virtue than is poverty. More, there is a kind of wealth (careless, indifferent, arrogant) that is most unattractive indeed.

And Santa Fe has money. Not all of Santa Fe, of course. Most of the people there have mid-sized incomes at most. But, recall, this is a city which has drawn to itself the affluent for almost a century—movie stars and best-selling novelists, entrepreneurs in search of simplicity and romance, lawyers of a bohemian bent, oil men from Texas, trust fund babies.

You see them, and their money, periodically, unexpectedly, in a flash…like the parting of clouds that reveals the sun. You'll be in a gallery, you'll glance away from a painting, and there will be a celebrity you know. Or, you'll be at a restaurant, glance at a table, and there will be two women, their clothes more expensive than your car, sampling Chili Rellenos with tentative forks. Or…in our case that morning…the blonde girl, as sleek as a centerfold, so very pleased with herself, and with her hateful little dog whose name was not Toto.

We had decided it was time to head back toward the La Fonda where we would meet my parents. We turned into the square from a side street, and she was there on the sidewalk—a woman somewhere in her twenties, wearing an expensive short white dress, carefully shaped hair, designer sun glasses, quite pretty in her way, yet with that certain self-satisfied hardness that comes from knowing that you are almost always the center of attention.

We heard her before we saw her. She was yelling to some companion across the square that they would meet up later. We heard her cultured but—at that moment—shrill voice as it cut over the traffic.

We turned and looked. She was standing on the walk with a small dog on a leash. I don't remember the breed. Something tiny. It pawed restlessly at the ground. She pulled it forward and they went on a little ways. Then, it halted and would not go on in spite of her urging. It lifted its tiny rear into the air and…

Shit upon the walk.

*

I, too, have a small dog. A Shih Tzu. I walk him every morning. He, too, does his business on the way. I carry a little stash of plastic bags expressly for the purpose of cleaning up after him. Yes, that means I am bourgeois, and I follow the rules, and I wash my hands after I use the john. Doubtless many men and women find me amusing for that.

But, I feel there is something so very crude about leaving excrement in a public place. And, more, that there is something arrogant in thinking that someone else, someone lesser than yourself, will deal with your messes.

And the young woman? With her dog?

She watched, faintly smiling, while it finished its leisurely crap. And then, without a backward glance, she led it away.

The little pile that it…and she… had left behind remained steaming where it was.


*

It was a little thing. A small thing. A trivial thing. In Manhattan or downtown Boston, you wouldn't give it another glance.

Yet, for me, in this place, it was a metaphor.

*

Martha and I watched her go. Martha said something about the sheer thoughtlessness of her action. I agreed.

We shrugged. Well. Time to head to the La Fonda.

Yet, even as we walked, I began to wrestle with curious ideas…

About the difference between a city and an amusement.

But that's for next time.






Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker

Pickle Hats

Well, I'd originally planned to do issue six of my New Mexico saga this week…but, a couple of things got in the way. First, I worked myself ragged on some other projects. Second, I got a flu shot and that seems to have whacked me a bit. So, put 'em all together, and they spell I-Can't-Keep-My-Freaking-Eyes-Open.

So, instead of New Mex, here's some Intermezzi:

*

As an historian, I'm sometimes astonished by the difference between the present and the past. Things which seemed perfectly sensible then would seem laughable (at best) today. And vice versa, I'm sure.

Take for example, the Pickelhaube. Yes, it does look like Pickle Hat. No, it doesn't have anything to do with forking out cucumbers in brine. Instead, it is the German word for a spiked helmet. That's the one you see in pictures of Prussian troops...the one with what looks like a spear point sticking out of the top.

After the Franco-Prussian War, everyone was so impressed with the Germans that a number of different armies actually adopted or adapted the Pickelhaube for their forces. There were British spiked helmets, Chilean spiked helmets, and even American spiked helmets.

I've never understood that.

I mean, how threatening can you be if it looks like the Jolly Green Giant is, at any moment, going to grab you by the ankles, flip you upside down, and use you as a garden implement?

*

Before someone jumps on me, I ought to mention that the Prussian Pickelhaube was not necessarily a German invention. There have been spiked helmets for centuries (the spike actually deflects a downward slash of a sword) and they may have been first introduced (or re-introduced) to modern European armies by the Russians.

So, the Pickelhaube is ancient and venerable.

But, even so…

Damned but if it's always looked to me like some clown's idea of a way to pick up trash while doing somersaults.

*

But seriously…

For a cool example of a British Pickelhaube, track down the portrait of Sir Frank Swettenham by the American painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). Swettenham was the British governor of what is now Malaysia. Sargent's portrait of him shows a man resplendent in a white uniform, a white spiked helmet in the chair next to him. (See here, for example, http://jssgallery.org/Paintings/Sir_Frank_Swettenham.htm)

Meanwhile, here's a site with images of American Pickelhaube, http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=58&t=17628

And, lest we forget, here's a site that deals with the Prussian original, http://www.kaisersbunker.com/pe/. (BTW, I love dachshund in the Pickelhaube.)


*

Finally, I gather that after World War I, the Pickelhaube died out in military dress (at least, outside the German speaking world) and pretty much vanished entirely after World War II.

Sad for the hat, I suppose, but, in the long run, a good thing. I mean, I have friends in the military. It's hard enough for them to stow their gear as it is. Imagine a modern government issue Pickelhaube. Going though airport security would be a nightmare. And getting it in the overhead compartment?

Sheer hell.

Maybe worse than combat.

New Mexico #5: The Alvarado

Okay, so, this time, I’m finally going to get to the next installment of the tale of my recent trip to New Mexico.

It will involve The Alvarado. Beautiful and gracious.

And gone.


*

I am a little melancholy in this one. So be prepared. But it does end on an up note.

Anyway, when I left off last time, in New Mexico #4, we were heading downtown. My parents wanted to take us on the “Rail Runner.” This is the new, relatively high-speed train that goes from Albuquerque, where they live (and where I grew up) and Santa Fe, which is the capital of the state and perhaps its most famous city. Santa Fe is the romantic city, where movie stars go.

Oh, some other New Mexican communities likewise have their claims to fame. Taos is where D.H. Lawrence and a host of artists and poets went to be very, very trendy and counter-cultural together in the 1920s. Meanwhile, Truth or Consequences (yes, that is its name), may be the only town in America named after a quiz show. Los Alamos is linked forever (if not quite fairly) with the Bomb. Gallup is both loved and hated for its relationship with Native Americans. Roswell has its Aliens, as imaginary as Mickey Mouse and, in their way, as much a part of pop culture.

And Albuquerque? My hometown? Largest city in the state?

Well, it’s where Bugs Bunny inevitably failed to make that left turn on the way to California.


*

My father drove us through the streets of downtown Albuquerque. Last time I talked about that a bit. How the city’s heart is nearly empty on weekends. At least before noon. Oh, you have a few souls here and there. A few business-folk going to their offices for a spot of extra work on Saturday. A few churchgoers on their way to Mass. The very, very, very few…vanishingly few … people who actually live there.

And, of course, the street people. And a few criminals. They are present. They can be found.

We parked in a large garage, took the elevator to the ground, and then walked to the train station. It is new and clean and very much out of place in the city.

I remember it from years ago. As a boy, my parents would take me east to visit my grandparents on the El Capitan or The Superchief—travelers’ trains, comfortable, elegant, exciting. Some of the last such in America. I have never forgiven the auto, the plane, and larger American culture for allowing them to die.

The station, too, is vastly changed from what it was. When I was very young, it was a magnificent place. It was, to be precise, The Alvarado. Say that word in a whisper, as though you were invoking magic. For, in fact, you are. It was glorious. A complex of buildings and shops, all in the Mission Revival style (look it up). It was a hotel, a station, a place of transport yet, also, a destination famed for its luxury. People came expressly to stay there because it was an attraction in itself.

It was lovely and elegant and …and…it is all gone now.

In 1970, Those Who Knew Best demolished it. They ripped it to pieces and carted it away as trash.

When I heard, I wept. At the age of 13, and far too old for that sort of thing, I wept.

*

Oh, God! Those Who Know Best…

May they rot in hell.

*

Today, the “Alvarado Transportation Center” is a much smaller place, more utilitarian, more in the spirit of the bus station and the commuter rail stop. It isn’t bad, really. In fact, it is much better than what was there just a few years ago.

You see, when they tore down the old Alvarado, nothing much took its place for quite some time. It was nothing but an unpaved parking lot for decades. The dust would rise from it at rush hour and settle over the streets of downtown.

I’m not sure what it was that motivated the vandals in three-piece suits who murdered the Alvarado. But, if it was their intent to profit from their actions then they gained nothing. No new and expensive office buildings took the place of the station. No business renaissance revived the area. It just sat and withered, or else attempted to give itself back to the desert from whence it came.

Or, maybe, that was the point all along. Maybe those who moved with such unseemly haste to destroy the Alvarado (sending in the bulldozers before the building’s defenders could organize or even know the crime was coming) had no intention of constructing something new. Maybe it was all simply a message. Maybe it was the way that Post-Industrial America explained itself, said Behold, the day of the train is over. The day of comfort is over. The day of your being a “passenger” is over. From hence forward, you are live freight, at best.

Get used to it.


*

Anyway…

We made our way to the new station. It required we move through the first real crowd since we’d gotten downtown. The homeless and street people of the area use the station as a refuge. Through their numbers we made our way.

My father bought us tickets. I looked around the place, intrigued by the renewal of the area. We used the restrooms and bought a cup of coffee. Then, my father said we really ought to be heading out.

We followed him outside and up a set of stairs. Then, we were on a concrete platform beside the tracks. A small but respectable group of fellow travelers were with us. We all enjoyed the sun and the felt the air.

I had memories. I remembered coming there with them when I was oh…so painfully young. I remembered waiting in the lobby. I remembered going with them to the gift shops, the restaurants…all of it. I remembered walking with my father to the newsstand. He showed me the first issue of _ Playboy _ I’d ever seen. I remember right then and right there, realizing that I was —in spite of what the coaches said during PE— very heterosexual. And that, by Heaven! my childhood was drawing towards its close.

*

I saw a sign next the stairway that led back down to the station. I can’t remember exactly what it said, but it was something along the lines of, “Okay, you’re in Albuquerque…what now?” Below that was a list of things to do in the city.

I had a vision of tourists . . . perhaps Europeans …who had come to Santa Fe and then thought, What the Heck? Let’s see Albuquerque as well.

So, one Saturday, they take the train and find themselves…

Here. In the midst of concrete and steel. And echoes. And the nearest attraction is a half hour’s taxi ride away. If you can find the taxi in the first place.

*

And, then, the perfect symbol. No director of melodrama could have planned it better. No prophet could have provided a better sign of things to come...

Of would wait for us upon our return to Albuquerque after our time in Santa Fe.


*

There were pigeons in the place. They flew in circles around us, taking rest for a moment on the roofs of the buildings, then dashing to the concrete platform to see if we’d dropped anything worth eating.

A woman beside me said, “Look! His leg!”

I looked where she pointed. One of the birds had landed beside us. He limped, dragging one leg uselessly behind him.

“He’s got a thread around it.”

She was right. There was a length of something around his leg—thread, or fish line, or something plastic, I couldn’t tell for certain. All I could see was that it cut deep into his flesh.

“Can we get it off him?” she asked.

I lied. “I don’t know.” I knew we couldn’t. I knew he’d fly the minute we got near. I knew that he was dying. The leg would wither and become infected. He’d perish. It was only a matter of time.

We heard the train in the distance. It was coming toward us.

I took off my coat and held it up. I hoped I could throw it over him, like a net. Then, if I could hold him still, maybe I could get the line off him.

The woman took the other side. We circled him. He eyed us uncertainly. I prepared to throw the coat.

The train pulled into the station.

The bird was gone in a flutter of wings. We watched it fly away towards its inevitable destruction.


*

Now, forget that small tragedy. Forget the bird and his fate.

For a moment…that is.

We will, however, return to it later.

But that’s for later.


*

The train pulled into the station. It was bright and new, as shiny and wonderful as a toy. Except, of course, that it was real, and so all the more magical for that.

Young people in conductor’s uniforms appeared and greeted us. We trooped inside and found seats upstairs on the second story of the train. Great windows opened up and we could see out and everywhere. The sun seemed already brighter.

I felt my spirits rising.

And, a moment later, we were on our way.


*

Until next time…






Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker

Kennedy, The Radical Right, Mein Kampf

As you know, Senator Ted Kennedy passed on last week. I’ve spent much of the last few days watching his funeral on TV or following it on the Web.

I was particularly struck by the celebration of his life that was held at the John F. Kennedy Library. As an aside, I know the building. I’ve done rather a lot of research in the archives there. And it is a magnificent site to recall the last surviving member of that particular generation of Kennedys.

It was interesting, and moving, to hear leading Republicans appear and express their admiration for the man. Orrin Hatch and John McCain made it clear that they had respected Kennedy, liked him, and, in a way, even loved him. Hatch put it best, I think, when he said (here paraphrasing) that he would miss most fighting with Kennedy in public and joking with him in private.

Those men were good and true.

But, Hatch and McCain are conservatives. They seek to “conserve” something they feel to be of value in America. Such men do not control the Republican Party any more, even as they are its most famous sons. The GOP today is the property of men like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, as well as the Radio Radicals—Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Michael Savage, and so many others. These men are not conservatives. They find nothing to preserve in America as it has been these last two hundred years. They seek, instead, to sweep that America away and replace it with one of their own creation…an intolerant and regimented America—an America “managed” by a small cadre of executives and the population manipulated by cynically political Churches (Protestant and Catholic alike) and talk-show demagogues.

And already, these men and women have begun their Swift Boating of Ted Kennedy’s memory. The columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson has noted that within days of his death a Google search for radical right criticisms of Kennedy turned up two million hits. (“Hatin’ on Ted Kennedy,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/hatin-on-ted-kennedy_b_270830.html)

Why this sudden and determined attack on a man who worked with Republicans and was admired by them? On, indeed, someone who is already dead?

Because the extremists cannot do otherwise. They cannot possibly be gracious or chivalrous. They must speak ill of the dead or their followers might begin to wonder if all liberals are really so terrible … if, perhaps, it was possible for two sides to argue and debate, and not regard the other as treasonous.

To illustrate, consider this sage advice from a famed work on political action: “Inasmuch as ones own propaganda recognized a shadow of right upon the opponents side, the ground is prepared for questioning ones own right. The masses are not in a position to distinguish where the opponent’s right ends and ones own begins. In such a case they become uncertain and mistrustful…”

The book? Mein Kampf. The author you know. The consequences, you will recall.


Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker

Al-Megrahi

We were at breakfast with a friend of ours and Martha began talking about the news. Specifically, she was angered at the Scots for releasing Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Libyan agent convicted of the Lockerbie bombing. You’ll recall that in that attack 270 innocent people died in the sky. Al-Megrahi has never expressed remorse. Yet, he is being released as an act of compassion. He is dying of cancer—or so, anyway, we are told.

Martha was furious. Why should the Scots demonstrate compassion when this man had shown none for his victims? But, our friend gently rebuked us. It was the Christian thing, she said, to release the terrorist that he might spend his final days at home. All the more Christian since it required real emotional effort. One had, that is, to look into the twisted face of the murderer and still perceive the features of suffering humanity.

I suppose she’s right.

Yet, what concerns me is not so much what happened to al-Megrahi in Scotland, but afterwards. Upon arrival in Tripoli, he was greeted as something of a hero. High officials, including Gaddafi’s son, met him at the airport. “Several thousand” young men cheered him from the tarmac.

The pundits who cover such things write that one shouldn’t take this too seriously. The return of al-Megrahi was actually, they say, a low-key affair. The Libyan government might have easily made the man’s return a national celebration. The fact that it didn’t shows that Gaddafi and his heirs are working hard not to antagonize the West. Thus, they say, it is All Good. If anything, the release of al-Megrahi, who is going to die anyway, may have been an excellent trade. It cost the West nothing and betters our relations with Libya.

Which is all probably true. But I’m troubled by those “several thousand” young men at the airport. They came, it seems, quite without prompting. It was not their government’s idea to assemble on the runways, but their own. And that makes sense. For decades now, leaders throughout the Arab World, and the Islamic world beyond, have used Anti-Americanism as a conscious part of their statecraft. It, along an orchestrated hatred of Israel, has been the ever-effective means by which political elites distracted their subjects’ attention from their own corruption and incompetence.

Today, that popular loathing of all which we represent is as much a part of the political psyche of the Middle East as are national flags and monuments to fallen liberators. It has been long nourished, and now flowers energetically.

Thus, I worry. Even if Gaddafi and his imitators want to better their standing with the West, is it too late? Have they done their work too well? So that, no matter what governments may want and Fearless Leaders decree, we will still have to confront someday the people who so energetically danced and sang when the Towers fell…and thousands died in horror and flame?


Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker

Men With Guns

I had not seen MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show until a week or so ago. It wasn't that I had avoided her. I simply don't watch lot of TV.

But, a while back I did tune. It was quite impressive. In this particular episode, she listed the seemingly endless stream of insults, injuries, and even violence that Democratic (and some Republican) Congressmen have suffered at the hands of the Right Wing during the ongoing Health Care debate. She concluded with the remarkable case of the man who appeared at an appearance of Barack Obama with a gun strapped to his leg and carrying a sign that was a more or less overt death threat to the President. (He was later presented, rather sympathetically, by certain elements of the conservative press.)

That most of this chaos has been orchestrated by a combination of corporations that would be impacted by any health reform and the GOP is more or less universally known. That the leading "moderate" elements of the Republican party have stood apart from the excesses of the "Birthers" and the "Deathers," while being more than willing to encourage, organize, and exploit it, is also well known. It is, in fact, nothing more than the standard program of dirty tricks, lies, hysteria, demagoguery, smear, and blatant disregard for civility which has been characteristic of certain (albeit, not all) circles within the Republican party since Joseph McCarthy's witch hunts of the 1950s.

What I had not thought, but which Maddow pointed out, is that there is something new going on here. The GOP is now using proxies who are not just confrontational, but who more or less openly calling for violence against elected officials. They are not just calling for impeachments or recall elections. They are openly talking about killing people. And, more, they are doing this with the support of not only fringe politicians but senators and representatives. Maddow went on to compare the current situation to the Abortion debate, which is now no longer a debate but rather a controlled war in which anyone supporting the procedure may well find themselves in the cross hairs of a sniper rifle.

She noted that the pro-life/pro-choice discussion too began in relative civility, then moved to aggressive confrontation, and then ended with firearms as anti-abortion mainstream activists discovered that they could use "extremists" to silence dissent while still remaining on the moral high ground. (In a genuinely just society, those who incite violence would share the blame with those who carry it out. As such, indictments for the murder George Tiller would begin in Rome and the offices of Operation Rescue and work their way down.)

Maddow concluded that it is all too likely that we shall see the Rightists following exactly the same course. I fear there is some truth in it. Simply put, terrorism works and certain people within the GOP have discovered that fact. If you cannot "Swiftboat" your rival, or cheat him of his electoral victory by manipulating the vote, or shout him into silence at town hall meetings, then encouraging an extremist (and then disavowing his actions) is cheap, effective, and relatively risk free. It's all too likely that within 20 years or so, we will see violence (or at least the threat of it) implemented as a regular part of Republican strategy.

Which is frightening—for all of us, and, indeed, even the Rightists who today employ the technique. It is a game anyone can play. Eventually, Democrats, too, will follow the Republican lead. And, after them, still other actors, perhaps more dangerous than we can imagine.

For you see, the Bible is quite right. The Republicans have sown the wind. The peril is that they, and we, shall harvest the storm.




Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker

New Mexico #4

Okay, so, this time, I’m finally going to get to the next installment of the tale of my recent trip to New Mexico.

This time we’re going to have Rail Runners, filthy rich dingbats, dogs that poop in the night (or, anyway, in the street), and a whole bunch of other fun stuff.

Plus…

A death.


*

Okay, I’m going to skip over a lot of things now. I’m not going to tell you a lot about my visit to my parents or their home in Albuquerque. That’s because we had a good time. And good times are good…but, well, they don’t make for interesting writing. I suppose that’s not particularly profound. Everyone from Tolstoy to Tolkien has already said something like it. But, it’s amazing how true it is all the same.

So, I won’t tell you about the flight there, nor our arrival, nor meeting my parents and finding them fit and hale—which is good news for me, really. At the age when many people are barely able to move, they are up and active, eager to travel and explore. Every year they drive (with their two dogs, Sarah and Princeton) to and from their beach house on South Padre Island on the Texas coast, which is not a small journey, particularly when you have two full-grown Welsh Corgis with you.

Every year, too, they travel at least once to Las Vegas. They do not gamble. They never have. But it amuses them to go and watch the shows, eat in the casino restaurants (where the food is cheap to encourage the gamblers), and, at most, play the “penny slots” where they can find them. These are a dying species of slot machine, designed not to take quarters, or the heavy dollar coins that the Treasury still promotes in a futile attempt to placate the makers of vending machines, but rather (obviously) mere pennies. A penny a pop, in other words, to watch the little wheels go round. Payments, in the unlikely event of a jackpot, are of course tiny. But, that doesn’t matter, particularly. And so my parents will take a dollar and play it away in an hour or so. Then they’ll go do something else.

Sometimes, too, I think, they go to watch the other players—the men and women their own age or older, who have no interest in the pennies. Rather, they are at the big machines, the quarter slots and above, and who you can see squatting in their wheel chairs, smoking but connected by long and transparent tubes to the tanks of oxygen beside them, pulling the handle or punching the button of the Machine, as compulsively as a heartbeat, watching their social security checks vanish in the flash and fury of simulated ecstasy.

*

And I won’t tell you, finally, about our time at my parents’ house…the place they have in what’s called the North East Heights. It is suburban but not exactly in a suburb. That may need to be explained. Easterners, and some from California, misunderstand Western cities. They expect a city core, like New York’s or Boston’s, and then a circle of microtowns around it—the Dariens and Greenwichs, or, on a more modest scale, the Lexingtons and Concords…or even, in its way, little Winchester, Massachusetts (where I am now).

But Western cities—Albuquerque, El Paso, Dallas, others in Texas and Arizona and beyond—aren’t like that. Or, at least, aren’t yet. They may be someday. But, for the moment, they sprawl vast across the land, advancing their borders with each new subdivision or development, and their suburbs are not bedroom villages but rather the oh-so-better sort of neighborhood, middle class and quiet, as opposed to the (said in faint tones of distaste) the “other” ones. The ones downtown, or on the river, where one can find the crystal and the crack, the gangs and the decay, the Illegals in their thousands…

Another thing that Easterners don’t understand is Western downtowns. They expect Western cities to have cores, again, like New York. They expect to go “into the city,” and find Life…people living in high-rise apartments, or brownstones…theaters, stores, crowds, restaurants. But, with a few exceptions (and those mostly on the Pacific coast), that’s not the case. Rather, Western cities have dead, concrete, and empty hearts—the inevitable consequence of the fact that they had their major growth in the auto-centric 1950s and 1960s, rather than the horse and the trolley of the nineteenth century.

And so, Western cities are full enough on weekdays. Everyone works downtown in office buildings and courthouses. But they work there only. At night, on holidays, or weekends, they go home. The city core empties out almost completely. To walk downtown on, say, a Saturday is to be alone. Your footsteps will literally echo between the cement facades of office complexes.

That’s if you’re lucky. If you are not, you will have company—the gangs and their knives, the junkies and their needles, the homeless and their untreated schizophrenia…

And, indeed, it was exactly into that world of concrete and emptiness that we were about to … albeit briefly…descend.

*

My parents were eager to do something new with us. And, newest of all the state’s attractions was the “Rail Runner.” This is an innovation in New Mexican affairs. It is a train that runs from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. As a rule, riders include both tourists eager to see to New Mexican countryside without having to drive through it, and commuters who work in Santa Fe but cannot afford to live there.

No one can live in Santa Fe. Well, that’s an exaggeration. But, it has become an expensive place, indeed. In my boyhood, it was simply one more city in the state—the capital of the state, yes, a tourist city, and recognizably a prettier city than Albuquerque, but a city all the same. Middle class people could live there easily, and working class people, too. At one point, my parents considered moving there. It was only a matter of luck that I did not spend my youth as a Santa Fe boy.

But, as I say, Santa Fe had been uniquely burdened. For one thing, it really is beautiful. More, it has long had a certain cache among artists and intellectuals. It isn’t quite Taos, with that town’s associations with D.H. Lawrence and all the rest, but Santa Fe does sport a considerable colony of painters and sculptors and writers. The wealthy, for whatever reason, followed as a kind of intellectual tourist class. These formed a diverse and weirdly interlinked community of money and the arts—a mix more common than you might think. (Recall Cape Cod.)

By the 1960s, movie stars had begun to settle there as well. Seeking relief from Hollywood, and association with the presumed purity of the desert and its more exotic (if stereotypical) inhabitants, they came in droves…first to stay in the ancient and romantic hotels in the center of the city, then to buy (ever more costly) homes within and round it.

The result of all of this has been to drive real estate prices through the roof and REAL people with REAL incomes find it increasingly difficult to discover places to live in the city. So, they take up residence in little towns that have sprung up around Santa Fe, or else live in Albuquerque.

If Santa Fe isn’t careful, it will eventually become one of those places that have somehow drifted off the map. They are, that is, no longer quite real, like the sort of seaside community that attracts yachts like flies to garbage, or ski towns in pristine mountains where even the snow-machines project Perrier. Once that happens, it can be very difficult turning back. You become artificial and irrelevant, at best an entertainment, like Main Street U.S.A., and, at worst, an insult to human intelligence, like certain college towns, where tenured professors in air conditioned offices proclaim reality an illusion, and add that you don’t understand this fact because, after all, you (unlike them) are too stupid to see it.

But, still, perhaps Santa Fe will escape that awful fate. There are, you see, still places in town—at least away from the city center—where you can find dust in the streets. That is a hopeful thing.

*

Two things strike me on re-reading that last. First, I realize that Santa Fe and cities like it are suburbs in reverse. That is, the typical Levittown is the place to which the middle class (and, sometimes, the rich) flee the poverty and dangers of the city. What’s happened in Santa Fe and its cousins is that the affluent have occupied the town’s center and driven everyone middle class or below to communities outside city limits. It is not, actually, without precedent. In the Paris built by Napoleon III, the working class was re-settled in suburbs just outside the city proper. The idea was to make certain that proletarians wouldn’t be able to threaten the state by occupying its capital. So, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Paris was circled by the “Red Belts,” working class neighborhoods that voted consistently for the Left and terrified All Right Thinking People.

Second, I have made cutting remarks about those cities or towns which become fashionable and wealthy because of their ability to attract celebrity, fame, and (as in the case of some college towns) the children of the rich. Perhaps I have exaggerated. Well, of course I have exaggerated.

Yet, there is some truth to it. There really are communities whose entire existence depends on the fact that they find themselves celebrated by association. Aspen’s place in the world is as much a product of Hunter S. Thompson and John Denver as of its ski areas. Sundance would not be what it is without Robert Redford and his film festival.

And, one wonders, what happens when fame ebbs away? When some other community or coastline becomes THE cool place for cool people to be? When the famous and the infamous discover that, by George, all the REALLY interesting artists and Neo-Vorticist potters and Reformed Tonalist HTML novelists have gone somewhere else? And beckon them to follow?

What then?

An aside: North of Boston there is a string of little seaside communities. At one time, they were the toast of New England, and perhaps New York City as well. To them, came the rich and the mighty, as well as the creative and the artistic. You can still see the huge wooden structures of their mansions and their hotels up and down the coast.

They are dead.

The rich and powerful long ago departed for other places. The wooden hotels and resorts emptied out, were abandoned to decay, or burned in mysterious fires. The communities became bankrupt and empty. Only today, and only in certain places, have these towns begun to return, and then only as suburbs and bedroom villages, or tourist traps by the coast, where visitors on buses can get fried clams and fake Scrimshaw and tasteful souvenirs of superglue and seashells.

There is a prophecy there, somewhere.

*

But getting back to my parents…

They wanted to take us someplace fun and new…and to go there a new way…

So, one morning, we clambered into their mini-van, and headed off to the depths of the city on a Saturday, all concrete and silence.

And from there we would make our way to roads of steel.

But that’s for next time.







Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker

DC Beer Summit...

So, like a lot of people I’ve been watching with interest President Obama’s attempt to smooth over the small but national crisis that grew out of the confrontation between Harvard professor Skip Gates (who’s Black) and James Crowley, the (White) Cambridge policeman who arrested him. You’ll recall that Obama invited the two of them to the White House for a beer and a tranquil chat.

It seems to have worked. The two men “agreed to disagree” and said nice things about one another. The crisis itself has receded from the headlines. If society’s underlying assumptions that led to the confrontation in the first place haven’t been overcome, at least they’re being discussed.

And yet, a day or so ago, there appeared in our local paper an angry letter from an outraged woman critiquing the Beer Summit from a Feminist perspective. She informed her readers that it was a shameful display of patriarchal attitudes, with sexist good old boys working out their typically shady deals over alcoholic beverages.

There is, of course, a message here, to wit: whatever you do, no matter how benign, benevolent, humane, and successful, there will always be someone—usually, albeit not always an academic or an intellectual—eager to tell you that it was shameful, and you, yourself, ought to be hanged, drawn, and quartered on public TV.

Oh, and disemboweled after that.

But not before you apologize. In a nice way. Ever so contritely. And in triplicate.

In Washington...

I have been fascinated to discover that the GOP in this country has already put its sleeze machine into high gear. Right now, on Townhall.com you can find banner headlines accusing Obama of “corruption.”

There is something amazing in this…even breathtaking. One has to admire any organization that can accuse a sitting president of graft, with no evidence, while itself having presided over an eight-year span when the only thing not for sale in Washington was Tom DeLay’s hairpiece.

Nun of the above

So I read in the newspaper (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/us/02nuns.html?_r=1) that American nuns may be coming under a bit of scrutiny by the Vatican. It seems that the folks in Rome may feel that American nuns are being a bit too modern, too forward, too non-traditional…

Now, let’s put this in perspective, shall we? While all this is going on, the Church is still dealing with the fallout of the child abuse scandals of the ‘90s. And, then there were all those damning revelations about nuns AND monks AND priests running horrific orphanage-sweatshops in Ireland. Then, of course, there was that embarrassing affair last year when the Pope invited members of a schismatic sect, The Society of Pius X, back into the Church . . . without, apparently, bothering to check on the little fact that the Society was chock-o-block full of Holocaust deniers.

Oh, and, then outside the Church, the world bears its usual cross of war, famine, disease, despotism, murder, rape, pillage, poverty, and, well, you know, pretty much everything the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse can dish out in a single serving, and which the Church could actually be trying to work against.

And, in the face of all this… all these horrors and terrors and scandals and shames . . . the Church responds by launching a war … against nuns.

Groovy.

Tune in next week, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages…when the Holy Father will announce papal bans …

Against warm fuzzy puppies, Teddy Bears, kittens with mittens, girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes, and, of course, Saint Francis of A-freaking-ssisi…

Intermezzo -- Michael Jackson

I will remain silent on the sudden death (and rather tragic life) of Michael Jackson. However, something has begun to concern me. Specifically, after his death, his CDs flew off the shelves. Or, to put it another way, he—like Elvis—is as important economically in his grave as he was alive.

What worries me is that this may be part of a major larger trend. People have already noted that a successful celebrity is less a person than a business. But, more, the celebrity has become an object. Whether or not he lives or dies is irrelevant so long as his image remains to be animated and marketed.

Thus, it is all too likely that, eventually, the human will be extracted entirely the system, and discarded. Our idle hours, what few remain to us, will be consumed by shimmering artificialities—whether generated Matrix-fashion in the soul of a new machine, or else materially, as creaking automata, chill and predictable, like plastic presidents in theme park attractions.

Intermezzo

Questions that haunt me…

If something can be inert, does that mean that somewhere there’s an ert that’s out?

New Mexico #3

Okay, so this week we get to three a.m. flights, killer burritos, and Michael The Walking Attack Bloat.

Got that? Good. It’s going to be SO much fun.


*

Okay, catching up, I’m in the middle of an extended memoir of my trip to visit my parents over the summer.

You’ll recall also, however, that this particular trip has to happen under some fairly strict parameters. We had to leave on Friday morning and be back on the following Wednesday so I could teach a history class on Thursday and so that Martha could teach a class on Friday and we both could get to our son’s graduation on Sunday. If anything goes wrong on our trip…anything at all! … and we should get delayed… then, we are, uh, er, how to put this?

Ah, I’ve got it. Scr*wed. Yes, I think that sums it up. We’d be sc*ewed. Maybe Philips-head scr*wed at that. Or, hell, let’s go all the way up to Pozidriv. Or Tri-wing triangular slotted. Or hex socket. Look ‘em up. I did. Google. That’s how I knew about ‘em in the first place. Very useful when you’re talking about getting scr*wed. Gives it that note of DIY in his age of diminished economic expectations.

Where was I? Oh, yes, so we’re off to New Mexico. But, we’ve already had all sorts of problems even before we got off the ground—like the car overheating, the traffic jams, and the fact that I had to lecture on LBJ and the Vietnam War to a collection of students for whom those things are ancient history and for them Ipods and PCs are antiques and I’m feeling really, really old and if my hair turns one more shade of whiter than white (and I mean white, not gray) I’m going to have a major hissy fit. So stand back. Wouldn’t want you to get caught in the blast and the fallout.

But, finally, we got to the hotel. Our plane left Boston’s Logan airport very, very early in the morning. I’ve forgotten exactly what time in the morning. So let’s just say it was gawdawful o’clock and leave it at that.

So, given the fact that we had to deal with all sorts of parking issues otherwise, we just took a room at a hotel near the airport. We could park at the hotel itself (quite reasonable fees) and then take a shuttle into the airport.

So, soon, we made it to the hotel and checked in. The next question was dinner. Well, it turned out that there was a Mexican restaurant in the hotel itself. There’s not much in the way of Mexican food in Boston … unless you count Taco Bell … so it was kind of a surprise to find some there. “Let’s just eat downstairs,” Martha says. “It’ll get us ready for New Mexico.”

“Sure, okay, fine,” I smile. I also start to sweat. And shiver. And tremble. And turn a lovely shade of ashen green. Or maybe “gray” is the word I’m after. Or asparagus. Boiled and then canned. So that it has lost all taste and has a texture roughly the same as that of garden slugs.

Why? you ask? Ah, I answer. There in lies a tale. Or if not a tale, then a tail. Here’s what I mean.

I’m a poor traveler. Oh, I don’t mind flying. I can deal with the crowding and the lines and the taking off your sneakers for airport security. I’ve even grown reconciled to the fact that airline food now means peanuts at a penny a pop.

But…

My guts bubble.


*

Yes, I know, that sounds pretty damn unattractive and if your span filter is set to max this whole email probably just went whizzing off to into bulk mail hell…there to rub shoulders with offers for cheap mortgages, Canadian pharmacies, fake Rolexes and wing-wangs the size of a Louisville slugger.

But … alas…it’s true. When I get above a certain altitude, the old tummy just expands like a beach ball on the wrong end of a power washer. I’ve been asked if I was pregnant. Or, failing that, if I’d ever thought of Jenny Craig. Or failing both of those, pursuing a career in the fast paced, high paying world of marketing. Say, at Thanksgiving. Outside of Macy’s. As a blimp.

Most of the time I can kind of keep things in shape if I don’t eat heavy before I get on the plane. Or, if I do eat heavy, then something not too … um…gaseous.

Okay, now, that’s background.

And we’ve already talked about the Mexican restaurant in the Hotel.

Do we need any more foreshadowing?

Didn’t think so.

*

So, that night, we show up at the restaurant. Martha orders a Margarita, and since I like tequila drinks, and because, well, I didn’t want to look like a wimp, I had to order one too. And there may have been another drink (“after all, you’re not driving). And then she had an enchilada, and since I didn’t want to look like a drip, I had to order a burrito. And then there was dessert. I don’t think there was Irish coffee involved. But, on the other hand, I can’t exactly say otherwise either. Not for sure, anyway. Tragic loss of memory, etc.

Then we were upstairs, and then I seemed to be very, very much asleep. And then…

And then…

And then…

By some very mysterious process (not wholly subject to rational analysis)…

It seemed to be…

Oh. God.

Morning.


*

Well, technically it was morning. I mean, it was after midnight. So that made it “a.m.” And that meant it was morning. In theory. In a chill, dark, dank, cold, gray black, middle-of-the-gawdamn-night kind of way. But morning just the same.

And, of course, there was the small, tiny, itty-bitty complication that I didn’t feel quite right. I don’t mean I was ill, exactly. And I’d never say I was hung over. Oh, no. Never that. Not on just one drink. No siree. So, let’s just say that I had a headache that was…er…ah ….do you remember the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the bad guys’ heads explode? Sort of like that.

And we won’t go into just exactly what the inside of my mouth felt or tasted like. Suffice to say that I’ve met dyspeptic wart hogs with better breath that I had right then.

Well, okay, I’ve never met a dyspeptic wart hog, but you get the point.

But, I’m happy to say that in spite of everything…I still had a goal. And an end. And dream I needed to realize.

Specifically, I wanted to lie down and die.

But, quietly, so as not to disturb anyone. Nothing worse than a noisy cadaver.


*

Martha, of course, is up and at ‘em. In fact, she’s chirping like a gawdamn canary back in the days when they still put pot seed in bird food. (They did. Look that up, too). “This is going to be great,” she says, brightly.

I think about putting her in one of the suitcases and shipping her to New Mexico that way. But, well, it doesn’t seem quite fitting with my image as a sterling husband and modern day gallant. So, instead, we gather up our suitcases and go trotting off downstairs. Or, rather, she trots. I wobble.

The hotel maintains a free shuttle to the airport and, a moment later, we’re on the thing. It’s a little van with room for about ten people plus their luggage. Martha and I sit in the back and a number of early travelers file after us.

The van is just about to leave when one last traveler dashes onto the van and parks his leather luggage in the aisle. I get a glimpse of him in the light from the lobby. He’s a guy about my age in a very expensive suit. He has a hair cut that probably cost more than my computer. He has a cell phone. He’s yelling into it, “And make sure my Beamer gets a tune up.” He has an MP3 player with one ear bud in his head and the other out so he can talk on his phone. The ear bud which is out is playing Abba. Loud. He shouts at the driver, “Don’t leave until I get back.” Then he’s off the van and into the lobby again.

I realize I have just seen a Yuppie. A Yuppie my age. Which means he’s no longer young. Which means he’s not, strictly speaking, a Yuppie, which stands for Young Urban Professional and was something everybody was. About twenty years ago. Now they’re Aging Urban Professionals (Auppies). Or Middle Aged Urban Professionals (Maupies). Or just Just Pains In the Ass (JPITAs).

We realize that he is one of the latter, when he doesn’t come back. His luggage sits in the aisle and people stumble over it on their way in and out of the van. And we wait. And we wait. And we wait. And we’re all getting worried because we’ve got planes to catch. And promises to keep. And deeds to do. And where the freaking farpdooldes is that idiot?

Finally, the driver gets off the van and heads into the hotel. A moment later he reappears. He is mumbling to himself. As near as I can tell, he is making a complex philosophical observation about the need to decapitate assholes. Which is an interesting paradox in that I’m not sure holes have heads.

Be that as it may, the JPITA guy shows up a few minutes later looking peeved. We look at him in the dark. He makes nasty comments to himself about idiots who don’t understand he was going to be back in just a few minutes. Right after he checked his email, had breakfast, got coffee to go, and had a shoeshine. Because, really, those are important. And why we’d think we’re so special?

And all the people in the van consider slaughtering him. But, in the end, we’re all too sleepy. More lynch mobs than you think get stopped just that way. Snoring is the sound of civil peace.

*

Anyway, we make it to the airport. I’ll spare you all the stuff that follows after that—the lines that stretch from here to infinity, the airport security guys (and gals) doing full body cavity searches on 80-year-old grandmothers, the crowding, the rush, the panic…these are a few of my favorite things.

Suffice to say that we finally got on the plane and, just as dawn was breaking over the horizon, we lifted off into the friendly skies.

“Well, we made it,” Martha says, happily.

“Uh-huh,” I answer, wittily.

“Now,” she says, while smiling, “we can sit back and relax.”

“Right,” I say, grinning like an idiot.

“Thank goodness,” she concludes, and then she leans her head back and goes straight-away to sleep.

I’m left sitting in the chair next to her.

I look down at my gut.

It seems to be moving. All by itself.

And as for the burrito…

You know the scene in Aliens?

*

Next week, the Celebutantes of Santa Fe.

Until then,

Onward and upward.








Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker