I am a born again Solar Power Freak #1

I seem to be becoming a solar power freak. This is weird. This is very weird. This is downright alarming.

Here's the thing: many decades ago, in my long lost youth, when dinosaurs ruled the earth and people actually listened to disco (No. Really. They did), I paid a lot of attention to solar power. This was the 1970s and we were just getting our first taste of energy famine. OPEC had just screwed the tap down tight and it seemed pretty clear that it was a sign of things to come. (And it was.)

So I spent some time casting about for alternatives. What, I wondered, could take the place of oil. One of the things I looked at was solar power.

There are several ways of extracting electricity for sunlight. You can, for instance, focus the sun's rays on a boiler. Water turns to steam and turns a turbine. In the 1970s, I could even see such a system in operation. I was living in New Mexico in those days (as I am now) and Sandia Federal Labs had an enormous solar power program underway.

It was quite amazing, really. On some land south of the city, the scientists had constructed an enormous field of mirrors which focused the sun's light on a tower in their midst. You could see it from almost any place in town. And when it was in operation…Lord! The tower glowed like steel in a blast furnace.

As I say, impressive. The problem? It actually produced very little energy. Not really. Oh, it could turn water to steam and turn a turbine and all that, but it also consumed power, usually in passive ways. My father was working at Sandia at the time, and he put it simply and distressingly. "As near as I can tell," he told me, "it can produce almost enough energy to keep its own mirrors clean."

That was the kicker, you see. You don't just stick a mirror or lens out in a field and hope for the best. It gets dusty, particularly in a desert, and you have to polish it. Or it degrades in the environment. Ordinary mirrors lose their reflectiveness after a while, which is why antique mirrors often seem so dim and brown. So, you need to develop entirely new kinds of mirrors, things what will stay bright even after decades in the open. And, at the time, there were no such mirrors out there, or at least none that could be produced cheaply enough to make solar competitive with oil or coal.

*

Okay, that seemed to pretty well take solar boilers out of the game…at least in most parts of the world. So, I turned to photovoltaics…that is, solar cells, materials that turn sunlight directly into energy. It's what people usually think when they say "solar power."

Solar cells are quick and convenient. You could use them pretty much anywhere. You can plaster your roof with 'em.

So, why not go with them?

Because…in the 1970s, they cost a lot, and they weren't too efficient, and they tended to degrade (like mirrors) over time. I remember looking at the numbers. In those days, solar cells were proven money losers. They consumed more energy to produce and maintain than they could possibly generate.

And that, as far as I was concerned, put paid to that.

I decided (around about 1980), that solar simply wasn't in the cards. What we needed to do, I thought, was focus on developing some other means of power production…Fusion, in particular. And, until we got that problem licked, we'd need to rely on a combination of oil, coal, and gas.

Which was about where my thinking stopped.


*


Okay, now fast-forward about thirty years. Give or take a little.

I began, dimly, in my limited way, to notice some things.

Like, for instance: the cost of solar cells has dropped like a gawdamn rock. I meant it has freaking plummeted. New manufacturing technologies, plus the advantages of sheer scale as more and more companies have come into the solar cell business, has brought them way, way down in price. (As I write this in early 2014, I can get enough solar panels to almost power my whole house for under $2K, depending on the supplier.)

And they've gotten more efficient. New solar cells are getting damn competitive with oil, gas, and coal in terms of generating energy…and they're getting better every day.

But the real news isn't in the cells themselves. It is in lots of other stuff. Like that batteries are getting better now. And a lot of our electronics don't consume that much energy any more. Your cell phone does things that would put a mainframe computer of the year 1980 to shame…but consumes so little power that it can be charged in under hour from any outlet.

And then there's weight. Things don't weigh what they used to. Which means it doesn't require as much energy to move them.

Case in point: in New Mexico there's a company named Titan Areospace. It makes drone aircraft. Not the kind that blow up people. Rather, the kind that drift up to high altitudes and hang out there for, say, five years or so.

And guess what? They're solar powered.

Titan just got bought by Google which is interested in the aircraft as alternatives to satellites for the delivery of wireless Internet (take that, Comcast! And Verizon!)

But Titan's drones would be impossible were it not for a host of new materials, new batteries, and new everything else. They are so bloody light, and so energy efficient, that they can cruise the skies, and do it all without a drop of jet fuel.


*

It was ironic, really. For years I'd been waiting for a technological revolution in energy production…fusion, thorium fission, space-based power satellites…and all the while the revolution was coming from quite a different quarter, from materials science.

But, better late than never. I now more or less admit that "renewables" in general and solar in particular are going to be a major part of our energy future. I still think we ought to keep up work on things like fusion and space-based power and all that other stuff. I also still think that solar power advocates need to face up to just how hard it is going to be to build a solar powered economy. And I suspect that, yes, there will always be a need for big generators somewhere in the system, if only to provide for backup or to power industry.

But clearly, the sun is going to be a very big part of our energy future.

Now, that said…I also think that solar is going to be a disruptive technology. Maybe even as disruptive as computers were before them. Maybe more.

Which is to say that there will be people who fight it, and progress in general, tooth and nail.

But that's for next time…

I am not sufficiently arrogant to be happy

I was feeling a little depressed last night. All right, a lot depressed. And, of course, me being me, I then became depressed about the fact that I was depressed. A really ripping chap of stout build and firm mind would (you see) be able to overcome it. I should, by sheer force of will, make myself chipper regardless of my circumstances. By God, it's the American way.

Then…I got to thinking about it. What exactly is my situation at the moment? Well, my mother died a month ago after two long years in a succession of nursing facilities and hospitals. My father grows ever more frail. My wife is putting up with me (no easy task). My kid is in the middle of finals. My career continues its unconventional trajectory (i.e., upward, but by way of a swamp). And the world as a whole resolutely refuses to rotate in the direction I would prefer.

So…

Given all that, what right do I have to be a cheery little ray of gawdamn sunshine?


*

Actually, just as I finished typing that, I realized there is something serious in it. We are taught from the cradle that the optimum condition of life is to be happy, to be cheerful and bright. It is good for us, and pleasant for others.

Yet, everyone around me is not in a good place at the moment. My father is grieving, though (the boy from a former generation) he refuses to admit it, or speak of it. Martha, too, is dealing with her feelings, and with mine. And, besides, she wrestles with some of her own demons (she adjusts, not always easily, to being retired). My son is well, but he hurries to complete all his work for the semester, and it is a lot of work.

And I…well, I have all my own problems.

If I were to deny all that, to be chippy in spite of it, then I would be denying their pain, as well as my own. I would have to somehow not feel the sadness, concern, and sympathy which is normal and humane to feel in such conditions. I would have to be in other words, a sociopath.

There is something frightening in that thought. It suggests, you see, that to be Polyanna one must be not quite human.

And, maybe, rather terrible.

I err, I am ashamed

I had a curious experience. And a shaming one.

I run multiple blogs and sites for both my own purposes and my company's…i.e., Belfort and Bastion.

One of these blogs is based on Tumblr. That company allows you to "reblog" material you find on other Tumblr-based blogs. You just hit a button and, voila! it's on your own site.

I had come across a posting on a stranger's blog that happened to include the photo of a young woman—actually a girl, pre-teen or early teens. I was interested in the article not the photo, but when I reblogged one I reblogged both.

I also made some comments critiquing the article.

What I didn't know was that the photo had not been used with the permission of the young woman. Worse, a quick read of my one line comment could be interpreted as a criticism of the woman herself. And, even more of a problem, the young woman in question frequently Tumblr and came across my re-blogged entry.

She was, not unnaturally, offended and sent me a note to that effect.

I was aghast. I apologized, took down the photo, and un-reblogged the article as quickly as I could.

I hope the young woman forgives me. But the experience has taught me something. Or, rather, reminded me of it. To wit: no motion is free of unintended consequences. And some of those consequences may include the injury of the innocent.

It is not possible, surely, to foresee every such eventuality. But (and here is the lesson for the day), you may at least reduce their possibility by always keeping in mind that there is a world out there…beyond the keyboard, beyond the screen, beyond one's own little existence, outside of one's own skin…

And it is your duty, as a human being, to make that effort at empathy. Not just on the web, but everywhere.

For the alternative is to be cruel. First by accident, as I was. Then, all too easily, by design.

That is not a consummation greatly to be wished.

I censor myself...

There are drawbacks in being a public diarist. There is much which I could record in a notebook …material that is sensitive, embarrassing, crude, personal …which I cannot place here.

Which is unfortunate. It removes much of the power of a real diary. The role of a personal, handwritten journal (the kind that used to come with a lock on the cover) is often to be a kind of silent therapist. You place within it the darkest parts of your life. Your hatreds, fears, lusts…the name of the man you secretly wish to destroy (though you know he doesn't deserve it), the acts so foul that you cannot possibly admit you want to perform them. And it is safe to say these things in a journal. Safer even than it would be to speak them on the couch of the psychiatrist or in the church confessional. Because no one will ever know what you've written…save you, and God (assuming there is one).

And besides, some day, when the journal is full, you may toss it into the shredder. Or just pitch it into the trash. (Come, admit, no one will ever read the thing.) And then, those thoughts and sins are consigned forever to oblivion.

How different here in public. Here there is no oblivion. No genuine confession. No absolution. Here, sins would be forever enshrined. Perversions (of the body or the soul) would become your defining characteristic. People would remember you not for your attempts at the good but your admissions of the evil…evils which, truth be told, are present in us all. You would be different, and therefore damned, only because you were so gauche as to say that you had them.

So I restrain myself. I conceal. I censor. And that is for my benefit. But also for yours. You do not want to know.

Yet, I know, too, that mine is not really a popular opinion. As usual, I am the one who is out of step. I am the oddity, the crank, and the eccentric. I cruise the web and walk the aisles of my local bookstore, and I find there are many, many diarists and autobiographers for whom the barrier does not exist. They abandon the implicit privacy of the memoirist as easily as the progressive cartoonist breaks "the fourth wall," i.e., as though it were an act of daring.

And perhaps it is. Daring, I mean.

Yet, I wonder, at what point does confession become exhibitionism? Where does the diarist leave off, and where begins the dirty, sick old man in the proverbial raincoat, pants below his knees, for whom a sad fulfillment comes only in a flash, the pathetic shock, and the waving of his limp little willy at a cold and indifferent world?

The Rhythm Of Melancholy

I have begun to realize there is a kind of generational rhythm to melancholy. It has a predictable pattern.

To explain: a close friend of mine, a man almost exactly my own age, just lost his father…this after his mother passed on only a short time ago. As you know, my mother too recently passed away. In fact, virtually everyone I know who is also of my generation is in a similar situation. We all of us watch as our parents age, become frail, die…

Which is why I suspect that every generation has a certain cadence to its emotional life. We share with the majority of our peers common stages of our lives. We know together the extreme emotions of childhood, the extraordinary unease of adolescence, the confusion of the twenties, the triumphs and defeats that come after that.

When you are my age, and I'm 57, you share with your peers that moment in your life when you suddenly realize that they…your parents …won't be there forever. Or, are not there now.

And, no matter how good or bad your relationship was with them (and in my case it was very good), there is something unimaginably disturbing in that.  For you know that what seemed a fixed point in the universe, its pivot, does not exist any longer. It is wholly gone, forever.

You realize that now you have no choice but to attempt to be a pivot yourself.

Though, in some ways, that is the more dreadful, for you know that…in time…your children will discover in their turn just how unsteady a center you really are.

Easter 2014

To my friends who are Christians, happy Easter. ("He is risen.")

To my friends who are not, may you have a lovely time on this early Spring afternoon, when …at least here in New Mexico…the sun is out and the winds are not chill and everywhere there are the signs of new beginnings.

*

Interesting that both the Western and the Orthodox Easters fall on the same day this year. That doesn't happen often. We, you see, (i.e., the West) use the Gregorian calendar. They (the East) use the Julian.  There have been some rather serious quarrels about that.

Amazing thing, human nature. That we find even in the days of the week a reason to get into a good scrap.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A remarkable man...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/books/gabriel-garcia-marquez-literary-pioneer-dies-at-87.html?_r=0

A bit of minor whining

Tired. A wee bit depressed, as I often become when I've finished some major project.

And I have completed one, by the way. A project. Although it isn't quite complete. I was working on the layout of a very demanding book. It has taken me two days to get it (I think) more or less in shape. I sent it to the author this p.m. for a final check.

Two things worry me: first that he won't like it and I'll have to make major revisions. Second, the printer. (Yes, for the first time, I am moving into hardcopy. More later.) I fear that when I send the files off to the printer I'll discover I've done something horribly wrong and need do it all over again.

Let's hope I'm wrong, shall we?

Fashion

I was bored and found myself cruising Tumblr.com blogs. These are interesting in that allow you "reblog" material from other people's Tumblr sites. It makes for an unusual form of social network in that like-minded blogs tend to link to one another. Fans of, say, photos of World War II fighter aircraft post each other's images. With a few clicks you are enmeshed in an entire community.

On this particularly day I somehow drifted into a linked collections of blogs dealing with high-fashion photography. People were scanning or downloading photos from Vogue, Elle, W Magazine, Town and Country, etc., and loading them to their sites for various reasons.

It had been years since I'd actually looked at a women's fashion magazine and I did so now mostly out of a professional curiosity. I am, after all, a former magazine writer and an aspiring publisher.

But, as I looked at the photos, I realized I was becoming more and more uncomfortable. They seemed odd somehow. At first I thought it was just because the women were so very thin. They had that concentration camp look that nutritionists and feminists so often decry.

Then I thought it was just because they were, well, creepy. The modern fashion model is not made up to conform to any traditional conception of beauty (and certainly not a heterosexual man's). Their skins were deathly pale, cosmetic bruises could be seen under eyes on cheeks, expressions were stern to the point of murderous, and there was way too much leather and lace.

Next, I thought that what bothered me was the age (or the seeming age) of the people involved. There were two sorts of model on display: thin, boyish women made to look very young, and girls…girls between the ages of 11 and 14. Both groups wore the same very suggestive outfits, clothing which concerned almost nothing (even though there was very little to conceal). Both were posed in positions that I can only call erotic, as though they were inviting the viewer to join them in bed, or as if they had recently shared one another's beds and we were there as an audience, peeping through keyholes, spying through windows.

It felt, well, perverted. I felt that I was supposed to be seeing children…highly sexualized children…girls, or even boys in drag, offered up for my voyeuristic pleasure, and suggesting that I cultivate a certain pedophilia.

This I found revolting and it was with a real feeling of illness that I left off browsing for the day.


*

The following morning, I took the dog for a walk. As we strolled through the sunlight of a New Mexican morning, I considered again my reaction to those photos. For a time, I believed I finally understood why they'd made me feel quite the way they did. I thought I was reacting as a father, someone who has a child (even if my son is now grown), and who was distressed to have these images floating about, possibly influencing the real behavior of real children. (Pre-teen girls do read this kind of magazine.) And, worse, possibly influencing the behavior of adults in their relations with children.

But just as we came around the corner down by the school, I realized that there was still more…something else was troubling me.

I recalled one picture in particular. It showed a girl of maybe ten. She was heavily made-up. She stood in some urban location and gazed at the viewer with an odd expression that seemed to combine disinterest and erotic availability. Though she was a child, she held a cigarette in one hand.

I later discovered that this picture was in fact "inspired" by much more famous images by much more famed photographers. There is, indeed, it seems a whole genre of them: the child presented as an adult, performing acts which are hazardous at best, and which are therefore somehow infinitely more alarming when they are done by someone so very young. So very vulnerable.

And it struck me. There is something here that is genuinely unhealthy. Something indicative of a sickness at the very heart of our culture.

But that sickness isn't in the threat it represents to children…or, rather, not just in that threat.

It is in what these photos say about our adults.


*

Consider, who is that child with the cigarette supposed to be? Who does she genuinely portray?

Well, there is a theory we humans prefer photos of things that resemble us. Confronted by a collection of strangers' images and asked to pick the most attractive, we select the men and women who most look like us…either our exterior self or our internal reality.

If so, then the images in the fashion magazines are in fact those of the adults who read, write, and publish those journals—our fashionistas, our Devils In Prada, our setters of style and makers of trends. It these people whose souls and whose inner-most selves are presented on the shiny pages.

These are powerful, powerful people. They are among the mightiest of our civilization has to offer. What they decree to be fashionable will determine the purchasing of millions, and the labor of millions more.

And who are these people? What do we see when we turn to their images in the glossy magazines?

Answer: a person who has all the superficial characteristics of extreme youth…but whose reality is vastly different.

That reality is exhaustion. It is corruption. It is the Bordello Madam somehow concealed within the body of an ingénue as she smokes her cigarette and contemplates heroin chic.

In other words, there is much in this child-hag to remind one of the corpse. Cunningly embalmed. The very picture of peaches and cream.

Even as the decay sets in.

A curse?

Seriously, I sometimes worry about that. I mean, curses. I am a rationalist, I do not believe in magic, etc.

Yet, some, primitive part of my brain does believe. Like the cowardly lion, it chants I do believe in spooks. I do. I do…

And that part of brain fears that someone or something has, at some time, cursed me. I was guilty of some unknown trespass. I offended someone. Perhaps it was when I was child…and a distasteful child I must have been. Always knowing the answer. Always putting up my hand with a comment in class. Always the Little Professor. (I deserve a curse, if that's the case.)

As I say, it is only that little piece in my head that believes any such thing. Normally, I ignore its shrill little voice.

But…

Well, let us hope that either it (that part of me) is entirely wrong, or that, somehow, by the intervention of some angel or kindly crone, the curse evaporates like winter's chill on a spring day.

Or a moment of night terror in the dark. Burned away by the rising sun.

A book...

Another worry. I have recently contracted to publish the book of a rather important individual, a man famous in his particular niche of the world. It should sell well.

But it hasn't. It's sold a couple of copies. Not more.

It is incredible. It is impossible. It is unthinkable. Yet it is true.

It may yet sell. Maybe it just needs time to get started. Let us hope so. But, if it doesn't, how do I explain the failure of the book? How do I explain it to my self, and to the man who wrote it?

How, indeed, do I explain it to the world? For it would suggest that I carry a remarkable curse. I am magically capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory regardless of the circumstances.

I trust that circumstance and sales will prove me wrong. And make it unnecessary to explain to the world.

Or anyone.

I forgot something

Realized I left out the most important part of my father's logic in my recent posting about his concerns for his children and grandchildren. That was the one on April 07, 2014.

I have rewritten to include the following:

Ah, but there is more. There were a great many Baby Boomers (that's why we were called the "boom"), but we tended to have relatively small families. Our children and grandchildren, in turn, had smaller families still—often one child or none. This means that a large and aging population has to be supported by a smaller and (in fact) dwindling one.

Alas, we are not finished yet. That smaller population of young people is in the midst of a vast social-economic-industrial transformation. For the first time ever, white-collar jobs are being automated. Machines are taking the place of "brain workers." Quite simply, as a nation we are not going to have many of the well-paying professional jobs that once guaranteed the existence of the Middle Class.

Question on the previous post

The question: is this modesty? Or breathtaking hubris?

On Being A Diarist

Still attempting to be diarist in my blog, which is to say that I am attempting to be as honest as possible. I am attempting to write only what is true.

This is not wise. This is not easy.

For one thing, you cannot record the whole truth. Much of what is true is not interesting. Worse, some of what is true cannot be shared without endangering yourself or others. If I were to faithfully report certain of my darker secrets, I would lose most of my friends and gain many enemies. Truth may be beauty and beauty truth, but not all of it is equally appealing.

Also, there is a practical issue. To anoint one's self a diarist is to abandon all hope of ever being published. The diary has no commercial appeal. It is too personal and my life too mundane. You, the reader, have no need of me. Your own journal (if you keep one), your own memories (if you do not) are every bit as thrilling. Probably more so.

So, why do I do it? Answer: because I can only hope that my writings, while not dramatic, still provide some value. They are the musings of an early twenty-first Everyman. They reflect our common mindset, the concerns of the age.

Thus, the paradox: I elect to write the most personal of all genres in hopes that it is the least unique. The least individual. That it states instead the mentalité of the mass.

Of us all.

Read this article by Sarah Kendzior. It explains a lot...

Surviving the post-employment economy 

I need a Jeeves...

I started Belfort and Bastion as a publishing company. But, come, let us confess. I am the last person on earth who should have begun a business. I have none of the characteristics required. I am not detail oriented, have few people skills, possess no games theory expertise, show little capacity for forethought or strategic thinking, and demonstrate almost no understanding of what customers actually want.

In fact, I became an "entrepreneur" only because I had no choice in the matter. I was unemployed, nearly a 1000 miles from any of the publications or schools which might have hired me, couldn't make a living as a freelance writer, and so…well B&B was born.

Sad, really. My talents are being unexploited. What I should have been, of course, was a creature rather like something out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel—an amiable idiot with a trust fund and a helpful Jeeves to get me out of the various pickles into which I blunder on a predictable (if maddening) basis.

Alas, things that might have been. Saddest words and all that rot.

another glitch

Once more I may be in tax trouble. The IRS has not yet said that it has processed our return, nor sent us the refund that our accountant said we would be getting. Don't know what that means. Hopefully nothing.

But, there is another issue. I am not quite sure what I am legally. I formed the company as an LLC because I was told it was safer. Then someone else (someone who was supposed to know such things) advised me to file as if I were a single proprietor. But now I'm not sure whether I've done the right thing. When I was filling out forms for Amazon.com, I came to suspect that I may have been required to file as company rather than as a person.

Let's cross our fingers that I get it all worked out.

Bluntly, I'm not the best the person in the world to have started a business. But for more on that, see the next entry.

My father is no longer optimistic...

Had a long conversation with my father the other day. At 85, he remains one of the most intelligent men I know, and the only one whose predictions about the future are consistently on the money. This is unfortunate because he is (for the first time since I've known him) no longer optimistic about the short-term future of the nation.

In particular, it concerns him that the Baby Boom generation (i.e., mine) is now cranking slowly into old age. As a result of the financial crisis of a few years back, very few of them have anything like the savings required to provide for them, or to pay for their medical care.

This means, he says, that society is effectively passing the bill for that care to the younger generation. Now, in prosperous times, that would not matter. If we knew something like the wealth of the 1960s or 1950s, then young people could afford to pay the tab without suffering themselves.

The problem is that we are not prosperous. We are in a Depression, even if we call it a Recession. Further, after decades of offshoring, downsizing, and "right-sizing" that Recession is simply not going to go away in a hurry.

Ah, but there is more. There were a great many Baby Boomers (that's why we were called the "boom"), but we tended to have relatively small families. Our children and grandchildren, in turn, had smaller families still—often one child or none. This means that a large and aging population has to be supported by a smaller and (in fact) dwindling one.

Alas, we are not finished yet. That smaller population of young people is in the midst of a vast social-economic-industrial transformation. For the first time ever, white-collar jobs are being automated. Machines are taking the place of "brain workers." Quite simply, as a nation we are not going to have many of the well-paying professional jobs that once guaranteed the existence of the Middle Class.

Then, finally, there are our wealthy. If the last few years have proved anything, it is that our economic leadership is incapable of seeing beyond its own bank accounts. Our wealthy will do anything to save themselves a few pence, even if that means the total impoverishment of the rest of the nation. (Yes, I know what Libertarians will say in response to that. But it is true all the same. Greed is not always good. Free markets do not inevitably lead to prosperity. Someday, travel through New England or visit Detroit and look at the abandoned mills, the shuttered buildings, and the shattered lives…the fruit of Neo-Liberal economies.)

All of this together makes my father …unhappy. He worries about the world his son and grandson will inhabit.

Which troubles me no end. I am used to being a bit despairing myself. But not him.

When a man of his vast spirit is daunted, I am afraid.

conclusion?

Later. I am, in theory, square with the insurance company. I say "in theory" because you can never tell. Some error might yet creep into the equation.

Rather a metaphor for life, don't you think?

Still on hold...

Still on hold with the insurance company. Actually, on hold again. I waited for 45 minutes the first time. Spoke to a representative who said she'd take care of the billing and address problem but had to switch me to someone else to restore my coverage. I have now waited another 45 minutes for the second representative.

Will I go mad or merely have a conniption fit? Stay tuned and find out.

taxes and now health insurance (oh, God)

One problem arises. Another eases, if it does not vanish.

The new problem. Blue Cross Blue Shield has just canceled my coverage. Apparently when I changed addresses, the change didn't get made with them. Now they (I think) have dis-enrolled me for non-payment of my bills.

As I write this, I am on hold trying to get through to them. They are saying I can expect a 45 minute wait.

Dear God. I hope I can take care of this quickly and easily.

The problem that is a little less pressing is my taxes. I finally heard from my accountant this morning. Apparently the error was theirs. They failed to tick the box on the return which said I was full-time resident of New Mexico.

The good news is that they should be able to correct the situation by simply refilling.

We'll see.

Meanwhile, cross your fingers for me on the insurance.

I am read by robots

Made an unnerving discovery today.

You remember I said that no one may be reading my blog? Well, I went back to the blog's dashboard and checked to see if it had any "comments." That is, I looked to see if anyone who had read the page had left remarks.

I was startled to find that there were far more comments than I'd thought. Several of my entries appeared to have been quite popular. It was amazing and I was delighted.

But, then I went and looked at the comments themselves. Some were real. I mean, some had been clearly left by real people who had really read the pieces and had some remark to make.

However, the vast majority were no such things. They were left by marketing software designed to search the web for any blog, post a canned comment to one or more of the entries ("Great Blog!") and then conclude with a link to some commercial site. ("Oh, and visit my webpage, 'IncreaseTheSizeOfYourPenis.blognot.XXX).

Thus I find that I may be read, but mostly by spambots.

Ah well. Maybe it is fitting. We see reports of how more and more news and non-fiction is being written by robots.

Maybe it is only fair that the audience, too, should be synthetic.

A letter from Hobbes

My small concern with the New Mexico Department of Revenue worries me for no good reason. I am simply a person who, well, worries.

But the other issue is that this comes on the heels of the death of my mother. Among the many things that astonished me was the vast number of forms that had to be filled out afterwards…and the amount of misinformation that comes from seemingly knowledgeable sources. We were told, for instance, that we had to phone the happy folks at Social Security to tell them my mother had passed and to find out where we should mail a copy of her death certificate.

Forty-five minutes waiting on hold later, I learned that there is no such requirement so long as the funeral home staff has notified the agency by electronic means. Which they had done. Which meant I had wasted my 45 minutes.

So it is that the letter from the tax people looms particularly large for me. It is a symbol for the System…

Not exactly Hobbes' Leviathan, but dreadfully near, and rumbling on…all seeing yet not seeing…

Perceiving everyone. Believing all to be in error or in sin. Crushing the unrighteous beneath its armored treads.

When, in fact, it alone is unrelieved in its ignorance.

Minor things...death and taxes

Small things have troubled me for the past few days. I've got tax troubles. The state of New Mexico is refusing to process my return. On what grounds I cannot understand. As near as I can make out from the (somewhat ominous) letter they've sent me, I think they think I am no longer a resident of the state.

But why? My correct address is on the return.

I fear it may be because I use a New England-based accountant and they assume that if he is in New Hampshire, I must be too.

Ironic. One of New Mexicans' fondest complaints is that ignorant Easterners don't realize that we are part of the United States of America.

Now we have the reverse. I am here. But the New Mexican government declines to believe it is so.

I have sent a copy of the letter to my accountant. I will let you know what we learn in due time.

Letters to the Wind

I consider beginning Xcargo the Blog again. I am not quite sure why. It has very little readership…nothing like the following Explosive-Cargo the ezine had…and I wonder sometimes if the whole blog scene isn't on the way out. There was a time when it was the means of self-publishing. But, now, so much of the web has been co-oped by the Great and the Powerful, and smaller voices (like mine) tend to be drowned out.

Yet I begin again. Partly that's simply because I (for once) have the time to do so. The past two years have been busy to say the least. The move here, the days watching my mother in various stages of unconsciousness, dealing with my father's smaller but real health problems, trying to start "the business," these and other things have consumed most of my waking hours.

Now I have a little space to breathe and to write.

But also I begin Xcargo because I wonder if it isn't what I'm made to do. If it isn't what my talent is…assuming I have any talents at all. I wonder if I am the sort of writer known as a "diarist."

Perhaps this is what I am meant to write. Perhaps I am destined to pen these small things, these moments in my life, half remembered, uncertainly told, offered up to a reader who may not exist. Who may never exist.

Well, there are worse callings. There is even something romantic in it. Like the poet who wrote letters to his vanished beloved and cast them to the winds.

To be received… by whom? By no one. By the world. Either one. It makes no difference.

Quick notice

To all my FB friends, B&B contributors, Xcargo readers, etc. Thanks so much for your support these last few weeks.

My mother passed away peacefully this morning at about 6 a.m. local time.

It is hard, of course, but we console ourselves in knowing that she had a long, full life that included some remarkable adventures. She grew up in the Depression-era south, married my father and came to New Mexico, got her Ph.D. in middle age, traveled the world, and, as a hobby, repaired homes and office buildings with my father as part of their real estate business.

Rather amazing woman. I am proud to be her son.

To the doctors we go (hi ho, hi ho)

We woke this morning with all the aches you expect post-car crash. Martha was actually in serious pain and when I suggested that she make an appointment to see her doctor, she did not object.

I then drove over to check on my Dad. He, too, hurt badly. I asked him if he would let me take him to the Doctor and to my amazement he actually agreed. (He must be really uncomfortable.) A short time later I had the two of them at Urgent Care. Much prodding and poking followed and finally they reappeared with the news that nothing was broken (cheer) but that Martha had bruised ribs and a sprained foot while my father had strained and bruised muscles in his chest (not so cheer).

I then took Dad to the Home where he could visit Mom while Martha and I went to make arrangements to have the car towed from a temporary lot to the place where it will be repaired (we hope).

After that, I took Martha back to the apartment where she has been sleeping most of the day. Around three, I picked up Dad and took him home. I suspect he will sleep rather well too.

As for me, I'm the least damaged of the three of us. I was farthest from the impact. I do have a bit of pain in the left arm, but I trust that will past soon enough.

Have you noticed? Life is just too damn complicated.

My day so far

The important thing first: we are all fine. A little bruised and battered, and we've all got muscle aches, but we're fine. And given what could have happened, that's significant.

Okay, now, before I get to what happened today, I have to give you some background. You know my mother was in a nursing home after she had her stroke. Well, we just finished moving her to another …and much better … facility after the administration of the first one announced that it did not want my father and mother being seen in the front end of the building (where there is a retirement community) because they might "disturb" the residents. I'm still thinking of suing them.

But, anyway, we got my mom moved to this other facility and things seemed to be working out fine. Then, my father needed to go to South Padre Island, TX, where he has some property that needed to be looked after. So, he and I head off and do several days of work but then he catches a vicious cold that soon turns into pneumonia. I end up taking him to the only clinic in the area and waiting for what felt like days and finally we got enough antibiotics to stagger a moose.

He feels better. We fly home. (This time, heaven be praised, he even lets me push him around the airport in a wheel chair so we don't miss any connections.)

But, then he gets worse again. He gets so bad, in fact, that I'm thinking of taking him to the hospital. But, after still more antibiotics, and enough codeine cough syrup to not only stagger the aforesaid moose but put him into a coma, my dad gets better. (Whew.)

But, about this time my mom takes a turn for the worse. She goes back into hospice care (still at the same facility, just a different program). Everyone is very concerned.

About the same time, my Dad says that he thinks maybe it is time for him to give up driving. Again, heaven be praised. We were spared having "the" talk with him. (Whew #2)

So, I'm driving him to and from the facility. He goes in every morning about 8:30 and stays until around 2:00 pm (that 1400 hours for those outside the US of A). He sits with my mom all that period, talking to her, holding her hand, and so on.

And she begins to rally. She's opened her eyes again and is eating well. (That's Whew #3).

Okay, now, today, Martha and I drive over to pick him up again about 1:45. We have plans to grab lunch with him and then do some shopping. We've just bought a house and he enjoys helping us find things to go in it.

Everyone is happy…

We leave the facility. Martha is driving and we are in her car. We come to stoplight. The light turns green. Martha moves into the intersection and…

Crunch.

A woman who tells later that she was "looking at the scenery" and didn't notice the red light, or the other traffic stopped at it, whizzes through the intersection and impacts us HARD broadsides.

Long story short: EMTs, fire truck, ambulance, police, etc., etc. and, of course, etc.

You see the irony. My father had given up driving to avoid accidents. Then we get creamed by a fully functioning adult who is just barely in middle age.

Amazingly, we are all in good shape. I was terrified …if the impact had been 12 inches a little further on, Martha could have been very seriously hurt. And my 85-year-old father is pretty frail. He was having a hard time breathing after the impact.

But, somehow, everyone came out okay. Dad's all right, Martha's fine, and I'm only a little more warped than usual.  (Whew #4, and last for the evening.)

That's my day so far.

As I say, I could complain, but since we're all walking and talking, I guess I won't. We could have been far less fortunate.

Still, if I don't complain, I may grumble a little. Under my breath.

Just pretend you don't hear me.

It begins...sorta

Well, maybe I'll back to blogging again. And, sigh, maybe I won't.

It has been an insane period in my life. Over the last few months we have had to move my mother from one facility to another, my father and I traveled to South Padre Island to check on his duplex there, he caught a serious cold which turned into pneumonia, then we came back here...

Oh, the good news, we bought a house. Closed on it yesterday.

Like I say, I will try to relate all my adventures. Sometime. Soon.

cheers
mjt

Haven't posted in forever

Like it says, I haven't posted in ages.

Lots of stories...

I will try to tell them over the next few weeks.

Weather

Things which have changed (2)

The Weather.

I had not originally planned to post the following entry this week. But, then, there were the tornados in the middle west…

One would think that the weather is, in its variable way, a constant.

And Albuquerque's weather is really rather nice. It is far warmer here than it is in the East—though, keep in mind, it is not tropical. The number of Easterners and Europeans who come here expecting it to be a kind of States-side Sahara—only to end freezing their tails off—is remarkably large. You see, the city is in a desert, but it is high desert…a mountain desert. It is dry, but it can get very, very cold. If you come here in winter, don't come in Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts.

Still, winter here is better than in Boston if only because there is so very little snow. Most of the time, if simply doesn't appear, or it does, then it comes as dusting and is gone by mid-morning.

Hard on children, of course, and I can remember spending many a depressing morning trudging off to school when everyone in every neighboring state had the day off because of some happy blizzard or another. But, for me, after thirty years on post at Ice Station Zebra (a.k.a., the Northeast), it is quite welcome.

If I never see another snow shovel again, I'll be perfectly happy.


*

Actually, Albuquerque gets even less snow that surrounding areas in the state. The mountains on the eastside, and the volcanoes on the west, act like walls against the weather. Storm clouds tend to lose their punch on the way over them.

Locals call Albuquerque "the snow hole," because it will be dry when everywhere else in the state is under three feet of drift. Just this winter, for instance, the highway that leads east of the city was blocked by a massive storm. The police set up roadblocks and kept cars and trucks from going any further.

But, here, on this side of the Sandias, it was warm and sunny. We were walking about in shirtsleeves, or, at most, with a sweater.

Unfortunately, this can lead to problems. People believe the evidence of their eyes, not official reports. And so, every once in a while you hear tales of someone or many someones who come the road block and simply don't believe that things could possibly be so bad on the other side of the mountains. They will assume the authorities are being overcautious. They will proclaim to that those who listen to such warnings are cowards.

And so they've figure a way around the block. Maybe they'll even go back into the city, up the River on route 25, and then attempt the "unimproved" road that leads from the tiny village of Placitas through the National Forest and finally back down to the Valley.

And sometimes, they are not heard from again.


*

But I was saying the weather has changed In spite of what I've already written, I think it has. In small ways, yes, but changed.

Things seem minutely drier. The sage and the brush is ever slightly more brown…becomes brown sooner in the year, stays so into the spring. The "fire danger" level in the National Forests and campgrounds is now always "high," where thirty yers ago you might occasionally see a "moderate" or even a "low." Weather seems ever slightly more extreme.

I can only assume that I'm seeing the effects of global warming. And, by the way, I don't think anyone can pretend any longer that it isn't happening. The data are just too overwhelming.

Oh, perhaps, it isn't entirely 100% proven that climate change is the result of human activity—that I'll grant you. But to say that it is not underway is be an idiot or a liar. And, alas, we have so many both sorts among us, as well as various combinations of the two.

The latter point, the presence of fools and frauds, is the one I want to make. There is, you see, a danger here. To deny the obvious, to refuse to see it, to not prepare for what may be coming, is to court disaster.


*

I don't know what will genuinely happen. Prophecy is beyond me. And I don't think that climate science is now sufficiently advanced to offer any real predictions on climate change. The world may grow hotter, as the anti-CO2 crowd never tires of telling us. Or it may be grow colder. I've heard it suggested that, by releasing tons of super-chill water into the oceans, the melting of the ice caps might actually return us to a new period of world glaciations.

But change of some sort is coming. That is the one thing that history teaches about climate—the one thing of which we may be ABSOLUTELY certain—is that climate is variable. It changes.

And when it changes, it inevitably means that someone is adversely affected. It means that crops do not grow in places where they grew before. It means that rain does not fall where it was once plentiful. It means that some people in some place become hungry and desperate. It means those desperate hordes must go elsewhere to survive…regardless of the cost to themselves.

Don't believe it? Look at East Africa, which has known drought and famine for decades now.

Look at Somalia and Ethiopia, whose leaders saw the handwriting on the wall…knew what was happening as early as the 1970s…yet did nothing to prepare.

Consider the consequences.


*

I'll end with a personal experience. Or rather, one of my wife's.

I had warned her that during Spring, New Mexico is windy place. Fifty-six years ago, when my father interviewed at Sandia Labs, they told him, "In Spring, most of our scenery is mobile."

It was a joke but it was true. Wind and sand and dust are norm here in the space between winter's cold and summer's heat. If you wear contacts, you learn to also wear sunglasses even at dusk. If you have allergies, you resign yourself to sneezing.

But this year…my first Spring back…

We had gone out for lunch. We were at a little Italian restaurant on the North side of town. It was nothing special, but nice enough. And the place had huge glass windows that looked out into the street and the mountains.

Our meals had just come when I heard someone say, Look.

I turned. Martha turned. The window glass was shaking now. There was the sound of a million grains of hard sand striking the metal skins of the cars in the parking lot. Where before it had been bright and sunny, now the sky was brown with dirt, and boiling…

We watched. Everyone in the restaurant watched, speechless. Outside, the suddenly, inexplicable wind raged…

Later, Martha said to me, in a voice a little tinged with fear, "You didn't me it would be like that."

How could I tell her that no? No, I didn't. Hadn't.

Because I did not know.

And that my fear was every bit as real as hers.

Mother's Day 2013

I went across the street to see her. That is, to the Home. She was there in her chair. Her head was down. Her eyes were open. Staring. What was she thinking?

Does she think?

*

My father was there. He is always there. Always present for her. Never losing hope.

I spoke to her. She did not answer. I kissed her head. For a moment she raised her face. Her arm stirred. Her hand took mine. She held it. I could feel her fingers open and close.

Did she know what she was doing? Was there intent? Or was it only the spasm of muscle and nerve?

*


I sat on the bed. She raised her eyes to mine. What did she see? What did she perceive? How did she interpret her vision?

I visit her once a day. Usually for an hour. Sometimes, particularly on special occasions (as today) I am there a little longer.

She has good days. She has bad. On the good days, she speaks. She smiles. She will laugh. She seems to have no doubt who I am.

This is not one of the good days.

*

Today, I sat beside her. I stroked her arm. I spoke to her. She did not reply. But her gaze did not leave mine.

I have asked this before. I will ask it again. How much of her remains? How much is in there, behind those sad and beautiful eyes?

My father, in his infinite faith and immeasurable patience, assumes that all of her is there …somewhere… and that if we work hard enough and wait long enough, she will stir, awaken…speak and be as she was before.

Is this the case?

I do not know.

*

I have not my father's power. I do not have his steel and wisdom. But I will do my best to emulate him.

I will believe (I will force myself to believe) that she endures. I will believe that she is somewhere. That she exists. Maybe not in the form that sits in the chair. But someplace.

And that someday…somehow…


*

I will thus elect my reality. I will choose among the many options. I will select one rather than the others. I will operate on faith. Not facts.

I will believe.

I will believe that, eventually, she will return. Or, failing that… that her voyage and ours will once more…intersect.

*

I will believe that even in the worst possible case…

That, in some distant time, on that great bridge…that arch of white stone that spans the infinite distance…that she will hear…

That she will hear the footsteps behind her…the sound of running…the sound of those who hasten to join her.

She will hear. She will pause. She will turn.

She will greet us.

And smile.

Things which have not changed (1) -- continued

Crime (again)

An aside: if crime, per se, feels to me to be about the same (or even a little reduced), then the awareness of crime is heightened. People just seem to think about it more.

Why? I'm not certain. The media may report about it more aggressively now. Maybe that has something to do with it. And the 'Net means everyone knows everything the instant it happens. And, finally, there's Breaking Bad, the hit TV program set in this City, and which has to do with a chemistry teacher who becomes a methamphetamine dealer. (It's also going off the air shortly. Wonder how that will effect things.)

But one of the responses of the new awareness is that there are now gated communities here, which didn't exist when I lived in the city the first time. Now, you will find them all over Albuquerque, and particularly in the two eastern quadrants of the city.

One of them is directly across the street from my apartment. It is rather impressive, actually, a little reminiscent of a walled city, something out of the Middle Ages. A tall white brick wall circles it—over six feet tall in some places—and there are gates and guard posts at each entry way. Over the tops of the wall, or through the iron bars of the gates, you may glimpse the tall roofs of rather luxurious suburban homes.

So safe. So strong. So secure.

Yet…

*

The other day, I was out jogging. I saw ahead of me two teenage boys. Good kids. Just a couple of lads walking home from school or maybe the big Church just down the way. They were tall. I suspected they played basketball. But their sport of choice at that particular moment involved a small, hard rubber ball that they bounced between themselves as they walked.

The inevitable happened, of course. One of the boys threw the ball a little harder than he should have. It arced up into the sky and then over the white wall into the Gated Community.

Neither boy hesitated a moment. They simply hopped over the wall…as easily as if it were a curb…retrieved their toy, and hopped back over again. They headed on their way up the street, nodding shyly at me when I passed them and smiled.

Admittedly, they were athletic boys. Long legged boys. But, the point is the same. If they could get over the wall (and this was one of the places where it is at its tallest), then so could someone else.



*

But, the really interesting part of my story comes later.

Background: not long ago, the city had a bit of a scandal. A high-flying local real estate developer, Douglas F. Vaughan, was running a very lucrative business. He offered his family and friends, and wealthy customers, the opportunity to invest in his operations. And, at first, everyone seemed to profit. He was a magician, people said, at real estate.

Of course, it was a Ponzi scheme. People lost millions before it was all done and said. Vaughan went to jail and was duly dubbed Albuquerque's very own "Mini-Madoff."

The connection to my story? Well, before his fall, Vaughan built himself a palatial estate…a huge house, with bedroom upon bedroom, bath upon bath, garage after garage…all furnished, of course, in the best of taste.

And where was this estate? This house from which a genuine criminal mastermind directed the systematic looting of bank accounts across the city?

Where else? The very gated community that is across from me. It nestles in among the other homes of other (though more honest) affluent men and women.

And there, of course, is the irony. The good people of the Gated Community built their little city and gave it walls to seal away the contagions of the age.
Only, all along, a thief greater and more voracious then any they could have imagined…was right there among them.

Like the viper at the breast. The disease in the blood. The cancer in the cell.

Such is the illusion of safety. The true efficacy of walls.

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.

The Sea

Another image from the apartment.

We have my father over for dinner now and then. He comes and sits in the front room. Oreo, our dog, makes an enormous fuss over him, leaping into his lap and licking his face. He laughs and seems pleased.

Then we eat. My father likes Martha's cooking, though he finds it a little mild. This is a man, recall, for whom spices are a food group, and no plate is complete without cayenne pepper. But he enjoys the food, enjoys us, enjoys his time here…

Afterwards, we talk for a while. He talks to us, particularly to Martha, about politics or the sale of our house back in Winchester, or about my mother and his hopes for her recovery. He grows animated. Then he tires. I take him home. I leave him in the driveway of his house and drive away, not wanting to seem to hover, not wanting him to see me lingering to make certain he gets inside without problems.

And I go home to Martha. We sit and read or cruise the Web, or watch a sitcom on my laptop.

It gives me a curious feeling. You see, I never had my parents over to my apartment when I lived here. Later, when we were in Massachusetts, they would come to visit, of course, but there was never that moment that most of us have in extreme youth when we invite (for the first time) our parents to "our" place, and we show it off proudly. We say, in effect, look, see? I have the made the transition to adulthood. Or, at least, am making it. Will complete it. Soon. I promise.

Now, thirty years on, when I am already middle aged, and married, and have a grown son, I find myself experiencing that late moment of adolescence…that earliest hint of maturity…

That dawn which for me, alas, came so long delayed…when my sun is already at zenith…

And theirs so close…so dreadfully close… to the sea.

Time, Space...disco

More on the apartment…

After we got the boxes more or less sorted out, we found that it was really quite comfortable. It is large enough for our needs, yet not so big as to be a burden, and I must confess I greatly enjoyed not shoveling snow in the winter…it doesn't fall here often, or at least it isn't deep, and even should it happen the apartment complex staff handles everything nicely.

Yet, it has summoned up some curious ghosts for me.

For example, as I write this our stereo plays. We have it tuned to a local oldies station. For whatever reason the station plays a lot of music from the late 1970s—James Taylor, Moody Blues, Helen Reddy, Foreigner, Queen, Olivia Newton-John, KC and the Sunshine Band, Neil Diamond, the Bee Gees, and so on. There's even a little of the less offensive Disco on display, a genre which has aged much better than I thought it would.

In other words, I'm listening to music now that was popular just about the time I was finishing up my undergraduate degree and getting ready to move to Massachusetts.

And thus the ghosts. I sit in an apartment that isn't greatly different from the one I had then, more than thirty years ago. I listen to music that was popular when I was in my twenties. I find myself now, as then, confronting fundamental changes in my life…even in my identity. Then, I considered the prospect of a new state, a new environment, the beginnings of a career. Now, once more, I contemplate having a different existence, one in which I am the caretaker of my parents' property, or, even, the caretaker of my parents themselves.

So, I find myself returned to the uncertainties of youth. And that is both good and bad. When you are very young, life is like a grand hotel, one with a seemingly infinite number of hallways stretching off in all directions, all lined with doors, each more inviting than the last.

Now, for me, the hotel, the hallways, they still exist. But the doors? Many of them are closed forever. Barred and shut.

Ah, but there's the rub. Behind some unlocked doors are monsters. I have found a few of them. 

So, if there something sad in the loss of promise, so too is there something comforting in the knowledge that I may not need encounter them again.

Or, rather, there may yet be Minotaurs in my personal maze. But, at least…at least…this time they shall not take me unaware.

Stuff...too much stuff...

But from food to place.

We arrived in late afternoon. A short time later we parked in the lot of our new apartment building.

As I think I've said somewhere else, the place is really quite nice, and very, very handy. We're directly across the street from the Home. To visit her, I need only cross the road. And my father is not far away. I can walk to his house, if need be.

And our own particular apartment is charming as well. There are two bedrooms—we use one as our shared office—a kitchen, a dining area, a living room, and two baths. It's comfortable, and cozy, and we are happy here.

Except…

There is this little issue of *stuff.*

All our stuff arrived a few days after we did. It came in five U-haul containers and was duly delivered out front in the parking lot. Tables, chairs, a sofa, a recliner, a dining room set, lamps, paintings, art works, two TV sets (neither of which we use), and boxes, and boxes, AND boxes….of books.

Oy.

It was then, really, that we realized …however dimly…that we had moved from a two-story house to a two bedroom apartment. And we just didn't have room … for… all… that… stuff.

The irony is that we'd thought we weeded out and downsized. We donated, we sold, we threw away…we got rid of more than half of possessions, at least, before we moved.

But, once we were here, we discovered the reality. That all our weeding and tossing was insufficient. We found ourselves in our apartment, which formerly seemed so copious, with boxes and cartons piled floor to ceiling.

After two month, we have more or less managed to get the mess under control. My father, who I think saw what was coming, volunteered to let us store stuff at his house. And now, his guest room is stacked floor to ceiling.

I realized that he was amused by us, and our situation. In his wisdom and his age, he knew what we had not yet discovered.

To wit: possessions are like beliefs. Even when proven baseless and false, you cannot get rid of them so easily. They flourish, they reproduce, they remain…

And what took thirty years to acquire may take thirty more to lose.

Foods we cannot get

Foods we cannot get...


If there are new foods to discover here, there are some we have left behind. Though, I'm surprised by how little we miss the cuisines of Boston. We were neither of us big fans of the things that are, perhaps, most characteristic of the foods of eastern Mass. Clam chowder, clam rolls, fried clams, steamed clams…lobsters and fried fish…jonnycake, funnel cake, popovers…these and others we do not miss, particularly.



There are some things we mind not being able to buy. Coffee-flavored ice cream is rare here, though you can find it if you look. Good bagels are similarly scarce…though, again, if you look you may discover them.



What has been a loss, though, is hot dog buns. In most of America, and certainly in New Mexico, a hot dog is oblong and round across the middle. It looks like a small loaf of soft bread. In New England, hot dog buns have flat sides and open from the top. This means that you may grill them, in butter, in the same pan that you cook the dogs themselves.



It is…oh God!...close to heaven to eat a hot dog with that kind of bun, toasted and warm, and with relish and brown mustard. Such a feast is best consumed in the company of a friend and a "frappe"—a milk shake—on a Saturday afternoon that knows no other obligations.



And, alas, such buns are not to be found here. No bakery provides them. No store for ex-pat New Englanders stocks them on its shelves. We are reduced to relying on the kindness of friends who mail them as presents on birthdays.



Such are the small tragedies of life. Or, maybe…it is calling. I am summoned by fate. I should enter the bread-baking business. Offer New England buns to southwesterners. I shall wear a paper chef's hat and an apron…call myself "Mr. Buns,"…promote my business by cruising the town in a converted Wienermobile.



There are less dignified fates. Consider the banker, the lawyer, the marketing expert, the social media consultant, the Wall Street insider…the men and women in tight suits with padded shoulders, optimizing shareholder value and agreeing that a rising tide lifts all yachts.



At least I would know I was ridiculous.



There is a certain blessing in that.

Piñon

There is no end of other foods that are unique or at least characteristic New Mexico. I won't go into most of them.



Although I should mention to the Piñon. This is a sort of pine…smallish, not exactly a shrub but no towering monarch of the forest either. You find it in forests and groves, particularly in the hillier areas, all over New Mexico…and, indeed, throughout the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. What makes the piñon part of an entry about food is that it produces a nut, sort of oblong and white. You can eat it and people have done so for thousands of years.



Here, people have piñon nut, roasted and sometimes salted, as a snack. That's common throughout the Southwest. But New Mexicans will also take piñon nuts and grind them with dark roasted coffee beans, rather the way that folk from New Orleans will mix their coffee with chicory. Coffee brewed from the mix can be best described as very, very rich, a little heavy (almost as though it already contained cream), and nutty.



Piñon coffee may be unique to the state. I'm not really sure. I've seen it in other parts of the southwest, but whenever I have… in Texas, Arizona, California…it has always come from here. Usually in the little yellow bags that are the trademark packaging of the New Mexico Pinon Coffee Company, a local institution and something of a genuine landmark. (You can see them at their website if you like. It's nmpinoncoffee.com/.)



Honestly, I'm not a regular drinker of piñon coffee. It's a little oily for my taste—though there are people who will touch nothing else. But there is one aspect of the piñon that I'm completely sold on—its wood. Burn it and you have an amazing smell… something like sandalwood, something like rosemary, but not really exactly like either.



I will leave you with an image: a night, not too cold, but chilly, and you are out of doors. There is a piñon wood fire. It flickers. It pops. Its strange, lovely scent is everywhere. You are with someone dear. There is a bottle of wine…



But, wait. There is no need of me here. You have an imagination. You have the capacity for romance. You may handle this.



Indeed, I charge you to do so. Envision it now. Construct it as your night. Your fire. Your lover…whoever that may be. Your wine.



Your sense of wonder.



Your stars, unimaginably bright, under a sky of ebon black.

Sopaipillas

More on food…



New Mexican cuisine is actually distinct from those of other regions, so much so that it actually rates a separate entry on Wikipedia. (It's on the web. It must be true…he said with a smile.)



Anyway, New Mexican cuisine is related to but distinct from the those of Northern Mexico, as well as "Mex-Tex" from the east and Arizonian and Californian stytles further west. Thus, New Mexican dishes are sometimes unique to the area (as, for example, in its use of the Green Chile in preference to all other chiles) or they prepare dishes in unique ways.



One food that New Mexico does share with much of the American Southwest, as well as parts of Latin America, is the sopaipilla. This is a kind of bread or pastry made from wheat flower. They are made by rolling out dough into a kind of triangle, folding it over, and then deep frying it.



When it is fried, it puffs up. It is warm and toast, and empty, a kind of brown, tender bubble of bread. You take it, still warm, and bite off one of the ends. Then you pour honey into the hot interior, and eat it…



Again, to die for.



Sopaipillas are sometimes served as desserts, but where and when I grew up, you ate them with the meal. Hot, fresh, brown, glowing…like a kind of edible luminaria.



My most intense memories of sopaipillas come from my childhood. When I was very young, my parents would take me to a restaurant down in old town. It was quiet and dim and huge…and very, very old…in an adobe building that dated back to earliest days of the city.



In the back wall of the restaurant there was a glassed-in booth. Inside the booth, a chef and a huge pot of oil. You could watch while he made the sopaipillas in a batches of dozen at a time. My father would pick me up and let me watch. The man behind the glass would smile.



It is one of my favorite memories. It dates from that moment in my youth…that moment I all our youths…when the world seems full of safety and promise, and sweet honey, and those around you are protective or at least indulgent…and miracles and wonders come fresh and hot.



And full of honey…





*



One other memory of sopaipillas. American cuisine is, today, much more diverse than it once was. At one time, and in some places, meat, potatoes, and white bread was as exotic as it got. (When I was a boy, I knew people who had never eaten in a Chinese restaurant.)



That day is (I hope) happily past. You probably had Green Chiles and sopaipillas for supper last night, and my long description of them is both unnecessary and boring.



But, not that long ago, 'twas another story entirely. A few decades past, in a certain Northern state, and I was a undergrad in search of a university, I was traveling and hungry and I went to a restaurant that advertised itself as "eclectic." It was expensive, and rather chic, and I really couldn't afford it. But, there were burritos on the menu and I was lonely, alone, and rather homesick. So, I counted up my pennies and figured What-The-Heck?



I went in and found that the burrito came with mixed vegetables. From a can. And the beef was ground chuck.



But the real jewel of the evening, the cherry on the top, was the sopaipillas. It was a cold night, wet, and I'd been dreaming of those sopaipillas…warm, and golden brown, and sweet with honey.



They didn't come with the meal but I knew they'd be dessert so I waited patiently. Finally, the waitress came by and said, "Are you familiar with sopaipillas?" Her tone indicated that of course I wasn't. That I was a rube and hick and kid and would never have tried something so exotic.



I assured her I was…my eagerness all too evident…and said that she should bring them on. I was ready.



"Here you are," she said, and produced a tin box, maybe twelve inches on a side, and decorated with New England motifs.



"What?"



"Your sopaipillas," she assured me.



I opened the box cautiously, as though it might contain live cobras.



Inside were little white things…biscuits, vaguely triangular, hard, cold as a stone.



"Sopaipillas," she said again, as I stared at them in horror and pain. Then, she hurried away to take something boiled and gray to the table across the room.



After a moment of grief, I nibbled at one. It was …bland. I later wondered if it had come from a factory, baked like a cookie, or whether they'd bought preprocessed dough …like the kind of that comes in tubes from Poppin' Fresh ("home cooked rolls"), rolled them out in triangles, and baked them up a few nights before. No longer hot, of course, and stiff as a board, but, Heck! No sense in wasting 'em.



I sighed. I shed a single tear. I paid my bill and exited into the stormy night.



There are some situations, as in Vietnam, when all you can do is get on the helicopter and leave…

And more Green Chiles

But I've lost track of the issue of Green Chile.


I suppose you've noticed that I was a little disappointed in the two Chile Fiestas I attended. They seemed small, somehow. And the one in Albuquerque was particularly so. There was a notable lack of food in the shadow of the balloon museum. I expected places where we could have bought a meal rather than just samples of hot sauce. But, perhaps I'm being unfair. Both are relatively new events. Perhaps they will grow with time.


Besides, I was afraid that Martha would be disappointed. I wanted to provide her with a genuine spectacle, something to both introduce her to the New Mexican culture and also entertain her. But, again, I think I'm overreacting. In spite of my concerns, she seemed to enjoy herself quite a lot—particularly the Los Lunas one, where she watched children play, shopped for jewelry, sampled the food.


But this, of course, is the nature of marriage. That we struggle and stumble, desperate to please, certainly that we have not done, only to discover that in the midst of all our terrors…


Someone wonderful loves us.


In spite of it all.

Balloons...Balloonists...Me

On the other hand…

I'd met them, actually. I mean the Abruzzos. You'll recall I said the museum's name is officially the Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum. The Anderson in question was Maxie Anderson, a local businessman and balloonist who was one of the pilots of the Double Eagle II.  The Abruzzo was Benjamin L. Abruzzo, another Albuquerque businessman and an aviator. He was on both the Double Eagle 2 and 5, as well as scores of other remarkable flights.

I did not know him. But I did see him now and then. My parents were skiers and Abruzzo was also part of the combine behind the Albuquerque Tramway, a rather remarkable cable car that runs from the city to the Sandia Ski Area (again, more of which later). And, now and then, Mr. Abruzzo would address the ski club of which my parents were members. I remember him as a personable chap in a business suit who spoke well and easily.

I also knew…well, that's too strong word… I knew of his sons. There were three, I think. The eldest was in the same Junior High School I was. I remember him as being pleasant enough—much bigger than I was, an athlete where I was anything but, and a bit of a favorite of the ladies, the teachers, and the coaches. But he wasn't a bully, which set him apart in my book. He could have easily taken advantage of his position.

I understand he grew up to be, like his father, a businessman and an aviator. But it was the youngest of the sons who ended up following most closely the father's fate. This man became a competitive balloonist and was well-known in the field.

I never met this man. But, I remember envying the elder Abruzzo and his sons. They seemed to live the life of daring and adventure which, for whatever reason I was temperamentally ill-equipped. Where they went out into the world and challenged, I stayed in my room and read science fiction.

I suppose I still feel a little like that. I ask myself if I had the chance, and I could have exchange fates…would I?

I wouldn't. But there would be a real temptation.

Which is odd…for the father died in a plane crash in 1985, and the younger son did the same in a balloon accident in 2010.

So, no.

And yet. And yet…

I hear that hateful little voice whispering. Forever whispering.

Better to have lived a day in passion than a thousand years asleep.

Green Chiles (again)

The other Chile fest we attended, the one in the City, was in a big field next to the Albuquerque Balloon Museum, or, more precisely the Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum. More on that later. For now, suffice to say that New Mexicans are also in love with balloons.

Anyway, once more we parked and paid a fee (bit more stiff this time, but it included entrance to the museum). Once more we entered and threaded our way through tables and tents.

It was pleasant enough, but there were fewer vendors of food…something of a problem since we'd thought we would have lunch there. Still, there was much to be seen. Again, there were vendors of sauce and toppings, whole roasted Chiles, jewelry…and (one major difference from the Las Lunas gathering) beer. Several local microbrewers were on hand to offer their wares.

I am not quite sure it was good idea (all those people and all that beer), but it did cool the tongue after one too many visits to the hot sauce samples.


*

We exited through the Museum. As I say, New Mexicans are crazy about balloons. In the Museum itself you may see all manor of historical balloons, or, at least, their gondolas, suspended from the ceilings on long cables…as though they still dangled from their gas bags.  And so, here you may see the Double Eagle II, the balloon which first crossed the Atlantic, and the Double Eagle V, which managed similar flight across the Pacific.

Impressive, really. The gondolas are relatively tiny. One wonders what it was like to be confined in them for day upon day, drifting with winds which you my exploit but cannot control, hoping that you will not tumble into ruin and death and white capped waves at any moment.

I suppose it requires that one be a sort of hero to manage that. You must be brave, verging on the fearless, and daring! You must be willing to risk it all on a single toss, telling yourself it will be seven and not snake eyes.

I could never be that sort of individual.

But, then, I suppose I don't want to be. If I must be heroic, and I don't suppose I ever will, then I would prefer it to be in some sort of service…doing something…for someone. For many someones.

Perhaps that means I am a lesser man.

So be it.

Oh, my God, I'm famous...sort of.

Well, it seems I've been quoted.

Way back in 1994, I wrote the following line in my ezine, explosive-cargo:

"If the Anti-Abortion Movement took a tenth of the energy they put into noisy theatrics and devoted it to improving the lives of children who have been into lives of poverty, violence, and neglect, they could make the world a'shine."

(I've also seen it reproduced on the web as "...make the world shine.")

But, anyway, someone just pointed out to me that it's been included in William Martin's recent book of liberal quotes, Quotes from the Underground: Radical Wisdom in Small Doses.

In a word, wow. Far freaking out.

Thanks Dr. Martin.

Green Chiles (3)

The Green Chile is so central to New Mexican cuisine that it is celebrated. We've been to two "Green Chile Festivals" since we got to town. One was in Las Lunas, which is a community some miles south of the city. The other was here in Albuquerque, but I will get to that second in another Xcargo.

The Los Lunas one was first. We had seen posters of it somewhere, and Martha said, "Why not?" So, one Saturday, we got into my little truck and headed down I-25…past the airport, past Isleta Pueblo (Indian land. Which means it has its own casino, now. Like every reservation in the state), and finally to Los Lunas.

We took a designated exit and followed signs. We came finally to Wagner's Farmland, which is both a working farm and a sort of local attraction. People bring their children. There's a petting zoo. A maze in a cornfield. Hayrides. And so on.

One huge field had been turned into a parking lot. Teenagers with little red flags guided us into through muddy roads—one of which we actually got stuck in. The tires were rolling merrily and going nowhere. I took it as a metaphor for my life. But, then, by dint of pulling, pushing, and some swearing, we got traction.

From there we followed the crowds to a fenced-in area. We paid a small fee, were given green paper bracelets to wear, and then entered. Around us were tents and tables, vendors and providers of free information about this or that service. There was live music from a stage.

We wandered. It was smaller than I thought it would be. But, Martha clearly loved it. Her camera was busy.

We ate enchiladas with, of course, Green Chile.  Then we toured the tents. Jewelry and jars of Chile sauce, handmade clothes and carved wood statues, brochures from this or that organization…

Oh, and then we got a free plastic cup from the New Mexico Chile Association. It sits now on the table beside me. I use it for water.

Then…

It was done. We went into Los Lunas, found a Starbucks, and with iced decaf Americanos, went our way again.

I wondered vaguely where the day had gone.

More on Green Chilies…(or chiles)

Before you can eat them, they must be roasted. You can do this at home in your oven, but it is a lot of effort and instead most people buy them from some store or enterprise that has a commercial roaster. This is a device that looks sort of like a large, perforated drum into which the chiles are placed. Then the drum rotates slowly over an open flame—in the old days, charcoal or wood, today usually propane.

In recent years, this has become something of a growth industry. At harvest time, in October, many of the local grocery stores will install a roaster right outside their doors, on the walk or even in the parking lot. Thus you cannot go in or out, even on so minor a mission as to pick up that carton of milk or loaf of bread, without being tempted.

What does it smell like? Hard to say, exactly. Pleasant, and decidedly organic, but not familiar. I suppose you could say it has some resemblance to the scent of grilling vegetables, but not a whole lot.

I will say this. It is a strong scent. It carries far. You can't miss it. And I've heard stories (maybe apocryphal, but still amusing) of overeager authorities sniffing what they thought was the bust of all busts, bursting into a backyard or a tailgate party, and finding…startled suburbanites, standing around a roaster, wondering what all the fuss and bother is about.