Boston (2)

One last thing before I return to Albuquerque. I was never really a Bostonian. Nor even a New Englander. You need to grow up there for that. It helps, too, if your parents and perhaps their parents grew up there, as well.

Yet, I'm married to a native New Englander. My son spent his childhood there. I, myself, lived in the area twenty years there.

And, well, I'm proud of the town…my other, adopted home. I'm proud of the way it handled the crisis. I am proud of the way it aided the injured, grieved for the dead, endured the lockdown, co-operated with authorities, celebrated the capture of the bombers, and did it all without too much bloodlust.

There was something noble in all of that.  I'm not sure that, had I been there, I would have managed it quite so well.

So, bravo (and brava) to Beantown. You're a better place than I am a person.

Boston (1)

Taking a moment away from my story of the city, my new/old home of Albuquerque.

As I write this, the final act of a recent tragedy out in Boston has played itself. The two men…boys, really…who seem to have been responsible for the brutal, bloody, stupid acts at the Boston Marathon have been identified. One is now dead after a dramatic firefight with police. The other has been captured.

Fortunately for me, everyone I know back East is safe. No one I knew was at the race. No one I knew was caught up in the exchange of gunfire that killed the first terrorist. Though, it was a near thing. My son knew the cousin of one of the policemen who was badly wounded. And, my son's girlfriend lives just eight blocks from where the two men lived. A man I publish, one of the writers for the Belfort and Bastion, has an apartment not far from the police command post set up after the incident.  Meanwhile, some very close family friends, a couple with two young children (we've known the mother since she was a toddler), were awakened in the night by the sound of firearms and sirens.

Still, there is something horrible and enlightening about all of this. At least there is for me. Even given my distance from the actual events.

To wit, I'm struck by how much life rather resembles an old fashioned cinema, the type I used to visit as a boy, in those long lost days before Surround Sound, CGI, and megaplexes.

You would go into the theater, your popcorn in one hand, your cola in the other, and you would seat yourself somewhere near the front. The screen would glow silver and white (yes, I recall the days before color was ubiquitous). You would hear in the background the comforting rumble of the projector. You would lose yourself in the adventures of the lights and shadows on the wall before you—comedy, adventure, Three Stooges, James Bond, Disney, cartoons and cartoonish humans. The plot would contain no real surprises. The characters would be true to their stereotypes.

And, for most of us, most of the time, that's what life is like. It goes on its predictable way. Sometimes bad. Sometimes good. But largely uneventful.

But then…

Sometimes, when I was a boy, and you went to the cinema expecting to see Clint Eastwood claim his Few Dollars More, or Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux confront the Morlocks in their fury, there would be an interruption. A flash! The film would break. You would see the scene shatter before you, be replaced by light and fire and white emptiness.

The Projectionist, asleep on duty, or indifferent, or gone for a cigarette out front, would do nothing. And you (a child) would be forced to go forth. Crippled by your shyness, you would have to explain to the authorities that somehow the Hollywood epic in its wonderful blandness was gone.

Well, it's like that. We live our stories. We assume they are important. We assume they are reality, or at least all the reality that matters.

And then we reminded.

By the light. And the fire. By the emptiness.

There is something beyond the screen.

And it may not love us.

To all my friends in Boston, and all Bostonians

My thoughts are with you in this dreadful moment.

Things Which Have Not Changed (1)

Crime.

When I first told people I was moving back to Albuquerque, some of the friends I still had in the city warned me. “It’s not like when we were kids here,” they told me. “Violent crime is way out of control. It’s like that TV show, Breaking Bad, but real life.”

I'm not sure about that. Of course, it might be true that there's more crime here now than then. The city is certainly larger than it was, which means there are more people, which means in turn that (if only because of simple math) there will also be more criminals. And, too, there is a very real drug problem here—some very major drug cartels, very dangerous organizations, exist right across the border in Mexico. Plus, there are gangs here, and ethnic conflicts.

Still, the perception of crime is a personal and a very relative thing. In my own case, and from my own perspective, the city seems pretty much unchanged when it comes to threat level. If anything, I feel safer here now then I did before.

Of course, that is partly due to a lot of unique factors. I don’t normally go into those places where I’m likely to get mugged. And I am no longer a young man, and young men are surprisingly often the targets of violence, at least when the perpetrators are other young men.

Plus I am no longer in the local school system, which, in the 1960s and 1970s was not a happy place to be. Not if you were, shall we say, a member of a target population.

*

Yet, I'm interested in how often I hear from the residents that the City is worse than it was. I hear it from my friends here, both new and old, and from long term residents. You hear about the new and more violent gangs that are on the streets. They say we now have branch offices of the Cripes and the Bloods. And the Cartels really are here. Plus, of course, we have our local groups, local warlords, and everyone cites Breaking Bad.

But, the thing is, if you look at the actual crime statistics, you find rather a different story. At least as I interpret the numbers (and I’m using here the city’s own reports from cabq.gov/onlinesvcs/crimestats/), it looks to me as though the over-all rate of crime has actually gone down. Not way down. It's still all too possible to get mugged or hurt here. And we’re still far ahead (alas) of the rest of the nation…particularly in personal assault cases…but, things do seem to be moving in the right direction (i.e., downwards) even if the velocity could be better.

How then to account for the perception that Things Are Getting Worse? Why are so many people, particularly people I knew as a boy, telling me to watch my step?

I suspect the answer has to do more with the human soul than with the city's numbers. There is in us, I think, a hard-wired need to see the past as more fortunate than the present. I think we are designed, neurologically, to do so. I think nostalgia is a need as intense as hunger and desire, and arises from the same dark, damp, inexplicable recesses of the brain and the spine.

*

Why? Why would we have such a need? What would be its "evolutionary value?"

I suspect that it helps our daily lives. The past, made rosy, prepares us for the future. We strip away the realities of our genuine story…the pains, the embarrassments, the humiliations, the moment we realized our parents were human, the moment we realized that we ourselves were so very, very flawed…and what we have left is a fortress. The Past is then our refuge. Our goal.

Yes, we say, our present is less than lovely…but the past! Ah, the Past! The Past was perfect. It was where our parents loved us, our friends were genuine friends, our teachers offered us genuine wisdom, our wants were few and easily satisfied, and the future was ours to possess.

If none of these is now true, well, we have the memory that they once were. We can retreat into remembrance. Or, if we have energy, then we can set out to rebuild that vanished Eden. We can tell ourselves that we are not undertaking so daunting a task as the creation of something new. We are simply regaining what had been lost.

How easy it will be. Or so we tell ourselves.

And underestimating the length and difficulty of the job is a fundamental prerequisite to our beginning it.

*

So on some level it is healthy and good that my friends warn me of the degraded state of the world. Whether the world is degraded or not is irrelevant. It means that they are in touch with an ancient part of us that stands, amazed and frightened, at the gates of paradise. Stands, and plans, and strives for a way back in.

Which, alas, confronts me with an unsettling question. To wit, why do I not share their feelings? Why have I no touch of the shared and common Eden?



*


I suspect there are many reasons. For one, I was among that group of young people who, in the late 60s and early 70s, were so supremely focused on the future (moon shots and space travel, sci-fi and Star Trek, the fascinations of we pre-nerds at the dawning of the information age) that we never had much time to consider the Present, much less the Past.

And, too, I must confess to having a somewhat melancholic disposition. Some unfortunate aspect of my genetics makes me tend to remember only the less happy aspects of my history, the times when I've failed others or myself. (Alas, there is no shortage of those.)

But, most of all, I think, I suffer from excessive rationality. It is a kind of mental disorder, and one compounded by a regrettable knowledge of history, and particularly of its less attractive aspects.

*

As I say, these characteristics are not good. They are flaws in my makeup, not advantages.

But, one plays the hand one is dealt. I will work with not against my disability. If I cannot love the Past…or, at least, not my own Past in this city… I shall focus instead on the Present.

In other words, I shall pretend that Now is Memory. That the current is nostalgia.

Is it a perfect strategy? No. But, it is the one I shall employ. And, besides, there is a certain resonance about it. After all, I am told that this is the day of Breaking Bad.

But to break bad…to shatter evil…does not that also mean that one creates good?

Things which have changed (1)

Size.



I should mention some of the ways in which the city, Albuquerque, has changed in the time since I've been gone…that is, the last 30 years or so.



The first and probably the most obvious is sheer size. I've not done serious research, but I did check the web, and according to Wikipedia the current population is 552,804 (or, at least, that's what it was in 2011).  If you include the surrounding areas, what specialists call "the Metropolitan Statistical Area" (MSA), then things get even more interesting. The total population then is in excess of 887,000 souls.



Now, when I left here, in 1979, the population of the whole area…not just Albuquerque but the MSA, which is to say almost the whole center of the state…was just about 480,600 (at least according to the web sites I've checked). In other words, the size of the city and its environs has not quite doubled since I was an undergraduate in my twenties.



And the increase becomes even more dramatic when you go further back. When I was thirteen in 1970, the population of the MSA was somewhere between 350,000 and 370,000 people, depending (I gather) on who you count and how you count them. (I'm using censusscope.org as my source, and it gives a number of about 373,000. However, The Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University provides the smaller number.)



In 1960, when I was all of three years old, the city's population was 315,485 (again, according to censussope). Thus, just in my lifetime, Albuquerque has gone from being a pretty small town, really, to a reasonably serious player among America's middle ranked cities.



This is not necessarily a good thing. There have always been serious traffic problems here—everyone has a car, public transportation exists but it is under-funded, streets are broad and straight, and speed limits are high and often not particularly well-observed.. (There's one avenue not far from where I sit now which has a limit of 55 miles an hour. This is not a highway, understand. It is a city street. It cuts between residential areas and is lined on either side by shopping malls. Thus pedestrians, if there are any, must play a kind of tag or leapfrog with thundering cars and SUVs, all moving at speeds that would be considered intimidating on some Eastern freeways).



Now, though, those problems are increased by an order of magnitude. Traffic can be simply overwhelming. At rush hour (and it seems that, in these days of 24/7 work weeks, every hour is rush hour), you will find yourself at some stoplight on an average city road that has up to eight lanes, not counting the two additional left turn lanes, and a right turn lane as well. Yet, in spite of that vast capacity, you will be trapped, stopped, stuck in motionless traffic, with too many cars (each containing too few people), waiting long hours for something, anything, to move.



I remember when we first started visiting here, my wife and I. My father told Martha, "This town is getting just too big. The traffic is terrible."



Martha, city-girl from the densely populated east, laughed when she told me this. Albuquerque? Wonderful little Albuquerque? Albuquerque the anti-Boston? Albuquerque with too much traffic? How was that possible?



Then, she started driving here on a regular basis.



A few years, even before we moved, she told me, "You know what? Your father was too right."



And at that moment, in her face, I saw the sadness that comes with the death of a hopeful illusion—that is, the idea that somewhere, somehow, there is a kind of Shangri-La, a Mayberry, a Rivendale, where the good things of cities are not balanced by the bad.



I recognized the look quite easily. It's been on my face often enough. In Boston, New York, New Orleans, Las Angeles, Montreal, London, Paris…others.



Think of it as the curse of the small town boy. The boy who goes in search of something, some excitement, some escape…but who discovers the reality that place is largely irrelevant. If the heart is itself not at peace, then there is no safe harbor. Serenity does not come from position.



So he returns to the community that sent him forth. Only, alas, he discovers too the sad wisdom of Mr. Wolfe.



He will have no welcome.

Taking a break, and Something For Everything

I'm taking a break today. I should be posting something about New Mexico and our lives there. But, well, I'm tired. I've had a long, long day. Sometime, when I'm feeling particularly chipper, I'll share the gristly details. Or maybe I won't. We all of us have enough petty annoyances in our life. You don't need to hear mine.

Instead I'll simply post a link to the Belfort and Bastion editorial blog. There's an essay there you might enjoy. It is about a new author of ours, and his book, which is sort of a teenage Faust projected into our grim, postindustrial little age.

You can see it here.

And, in the meanwhile, I'm off to seek solace in a long jog and a short beer.

Until next time…

Onward and upward.