Flamingos are often seen in front yards as plastic yard ornaments, and double as stir sticks in fancy lounge drinks.
This evening, the Albuquerque zoo is hosting a music concert. Surrounding the stage, families and friends have spread umbrellas, blankets, folding chairs and wait for Ryan McGarvey, a local boy made good, to sing and play his electric guitar. Newspaper stories say Ryan has performed with the British rock and blues legend Eric Clapton.
Flamingos at the zoo, this evening, can’t be charged with not sticking their necks out.
Tonight’s concert will sound, to them, like the bellowing of hippos and their tall graceful necks will move to the music like a conductor’s baton.
Julie and Nathan, California Chris’s sister and her boyfriend, like the concert, and especially love the rain and stormy skies.
Spectators huddle under umbrellas, blankets,plastic tarps, and the music, all by itself, out- dramas the weather.
Seeing flamingos in New Mexico is as surprising as it would be seeing roadrunners in Florida.
Hanging out with those of your own kind seems to be rooted in nature.
We humans are always trying to outdo nature’s design.
Pets, in America, have become more than pets.
At the Marble Brewery, the limits to their importance are clearly stated on step risers leading to the second floor.
It is only a matter of time before this road house rule against pets going upstairs is summarily challenged in court, ruled on by learned men and women wearing robes, with a jury chosen by prosecutors and defense attorneys that has no thinking animals to make decisions complicated.
If a dog’s master breaks house rules and takes his pet upstairs, can the dog be held responsible for what his master does?
I’d like to be sitting on that jury.
Seeing a dog barking in its own defense would be worth hearing.
Golf is not a dangerous sport except to your ego.
It is not leaping out of an airplane with a small chute to land you safely. It is not driving a race car around curves over two hundred miles an hour. It is not getting tackled by a three hundred and fifty pound lineman who isn’t thinking of tucking you into bed.
This sign is posted at the Santa Ana Golf Course in Bernalillo, New Mexico.
We are in snake country in New Mexico even though New Mexico is one of our fifty U.S. states with Congressional Senators and Representatives and Spanish, as well as English, our official state languages. Despite our 107 year statehood,we have more in common with Mexico than the colonial red brick homes of Virginia, coon-skin hats and flintlock rifles.
Despite this snake warning, we golfers sometimes search for our bad shots in snake country. Our group of eight to twelve ” old men ” manage to play once a week, stocking up on ” birdie juice” to celebrate our one under par successes in a best ball team format.
If we had all paid attention to warnings in life, we wouldn’t be where we are today, riding around in golf carts while the rest of the world works.
Crazy glued to the dashboard, these critters listen to talk radio.
They are also familiar with Top Fifty tunes, political lies, opinions, advertisements, trivia, propaganda, ” Fake News” and World News. Some of these critters seem like animals we should have as friends, others look like aliens come to take over Earth and send us to salt mines worse than the ones we are already working.
Hollywood cranks out critters each year, as fast as screenwriters and makeup crews can design them. Our television and movie oeuvre is full of ” out of this world ” characters invading Earth, demons terrorizing children from dark places, galactic battles, romantic meetings between vampires and humans.
These guys and gals seem approachable. They have little tails, pointed ears ,protruding snouts, cute penetrating eyes. They have red and white stripes and dots, camouflage that is useless in our drab urban world.
Glued in place, they have their best conversations when their driver has locked his car and and gone to pick up a pack of cigarettes , a six pack of beer, and lucky condoms.
They have a point of view that heats up as the temperature inside the car reaches 120 degrees F.
The thing interesting me the most is the mental stability of the human who glued them to his dash.
If sticking plastic critters on your dash was a sane idea you would see it more often.
Snakes don’t have fingers, toes, arms, or legs. They are coldblooded and need sun to get stirring. Cultures throughout human history have worshiped them, reviled them, and eaten them.
For photography and curiosity reasons, Joan, visiting from Boston, has pinpointed snakes as things to see and do in Albuquerque.
The Albuquerque Rattlesnake Museum is reviewed on Trip Adviser, open for those tired of New Mexican chili, curios, Navajo pottery, white church spires looking down on a park gazebo,adobe architecture, private residences with signs warning “Trespassers Beware.”
These snakes are behind glass. They represent more than one species and are hidden before our eyes in their captivity, the same colors as the leaves, rocks, sand that surround them. They are not loquacious creatures and use simple rattles to warn us away.
Snakes don’t win popularity contests, but, this morning, they are strangely beautiful, quiet, pensive in their captivity.
Snakes don’t hold a candle to human scheming but, this morning, they are exceptionally photogenic.
In the 1950’s, Patsy Cline was the premier country western singer.
Her lyrics mirrored those of today; broken relationships, falling in and out of love, working for a living, heartaches and headaches. She was talked up in the tabloids, wore clothes as far removed from the range as a cowgirl could get, sang classic songs that still pop like champagne bubbles.
” Smokey “, Alan’s cookie jar horse, passes his time on the range listening to Patsy on headphones in Texas.
When cowboys get hungry in the bunkhouse they separate Smokey’s head from his neck, reach for a peanut butter cookie,then carefully re-attach the head and neck in one sure handed gun slinging motion.
Patsy’s best song is ” Crazy.”
” Crazy ” brings back memories of me and the construction guys sitting in an east side Albuquerque Waffle House, feeding quarters into a juke box, playing Elvis Presley and Rolling Stones hits while waitresses crooned out waffle and scrambled egg orders in raspy voices.
” Crazy” should be our new National Anthem.
We don’t have trouble being crazy and Patsy sounds more prescient every time I listen to her.
At seven in the morning, South Fork, Colorado is Closed.
The Rainbow Grocery, down from the Rainbow Motel, opens at seven this morning. The Rainbow gas station, next to the Rainbow Grocery, is open but their coffee is not good enough to make me want to pour a cup this early in the morning.
Across the highway, as fifth wheels and pickup trucks pound past, I spot the new Gallery Coffee Shop with lights on and movement inside.
Waiting till a seven thirty open, in front of the coffee shop’s locked front door, with last night’s raindrops still beaded on outside tables and chairs, I keep my dry spot on a bench and watch a delicate hummingbird cutting through the air like a seasoned helicopter pilot.
He sticks his proboscis into one of the plastic flowers of the hummingbird feeder just above my head and loads up with sugar.
When I raise my phone to capture his image, he darts away.
When the shop’s proprietor sees me, he unlocks his shop early and I step inside,order myself a hot coffee and pecan fried pie made by the Amish in nearby Monte Vista. We talk some about his ” artist ” life.
The western art displayed on the big open dining area walls took Frank thirty years to get to the point he can finish a small canvas in weeks instead of months. He tells me about his ” process of art ” as well as coming to South Fork from Texas in the summer months to paint and help his wife run their small business because his wife especially likes it here and there are tax advantages.
It takes skill and patience to make all these little lines in a cowboy’s face, make a horse’s mane look real on a flat surface. Frank says he has been drawing since he was ten years old and his wife right now is at a business breakfast in Monte Vista but will cheerfully take the reins of the shop in a few hours so he can go finish a new watercolor in his studio.
Hummingbirds, I Google, are cold blooded and, at night, perch on a tree branch, let their body temperature sink to conserve energy, and sometimes go into a torpor if it is really really cold.
In their state of torpor, the hummingbirds can dangle from a branch by one foot and appear dead.
We humans also know about torpor, but we don’t dangle from branches.
These mounted animals look down at me like judges ready for my sentencing.
Hung over the aisles of rods and reels, shotguns and rifles, fishing tackle, ammunition, these guys are frozen in their final moment of life.
Hunters have always stayed close to their prey.
In New Guinea, deep in jungles, hunters wear shrunken heads of enemies around their waist. Plains Indians danced under the moon at night wearing buffalo robes with horns hooking the air. Ancient Incas wore feathered head dresses. Seafaring whaling men carved walrus tusks with designs of ships and harpoons. Oceanic islanders wear shark teeth around their wrists.. Texans put cow horns on car bumpers. Sportsmen hang calendars in their garages that feature big game animals and buxom women. Presidents pose with one foot on the body of a downed lion.
Nature’s variety is on display here and, fortunately,for these trophies, our eating habits have changed. Most of us urban folk don’t dine on deer, raccoon, llamas, opossums,alligators, snakes or geese.
Human consumption of alcohol, ironically, saves more of these fine animals than the Sierra Club can dream about saving.
Even in death,these animals seem too regal to be stuffed and hung on a grocery store wall.
If this was ” Twilight Zone, ” I’d be hanging up there on the wall and an elk would be buying his hunting license and talking about two legged trophy humans who are easier to shoot than ducks on a pond.
Back in yesteryear, a school assignment, in English, was to compare and contrast apples and oranges.
The assignment was dropped on us to develop critical thinking, stimulate observation, and bring order to our primitive minds. The assignment proved that apples are not oranges and oranges are not apples but they do have things in common, and liking to eat either is not a bad thing.
This snail and tortoise have things in common.
Both, on this day, are sticking heads out, coming out of their shells, testing waters, seeing if the coast is clear, checking weather, on the prowl for morsels.
The snail is on Alex’s front porch and moves slimy, leaving residue on the tile as he moves. He peers over the edge of the porch,seemingly oblivious as I bend down to take his photo.
The tortoise is on the backyard path I follow to feed Charlie and Sharon’s adopted deer, who come to their back yard in the Albuquerque foothills for snacks, water, and rest .Their tortoise sticks his head out for a moment, but he pulls it quickly into his shell as I step over him on my way to fill the deer’s tub with cracked corn and chicken scratch.
Sticking one’s head out is dangerous.
When you are comfortable and safe in your shell, why would any living being ever want to stick their head out?
In the 1950’s, the world was in a Cold War.
Yet, there was hot atomic testing with Pacific atolls being blown into non-existence and school children crawling under their desks at a school bell. Russia and the United States were headbutting and angry rhetoric took the place of missiles. Scientists, and what they were working on, became a preoccupation for the public.
In the 1950’s, there was also a flurry of B movies about giant insects, crabs and birds turned into threats by nuclear radiation and/or chemical injections in secret government research stations, taking revenge on humans that created them, casting fear into hearts at local theaters and spawning fantastic comic books.
One such movie production was a 1955 epic, titled ” Tarantula . ”
The plot stars a giant angry spider escaping from an isolated desert laboratory and threatening the fictional town of Desert Rock, its hard luck population, the U.S., and, by extrapolation, the world.
This real tarantula, outside my guest house in Haiti, is not to be feared.
After discussion with the kids who watch the tarantula with me, he is allowed to live, to move back into the brush. His bite would hurt but his venom wouldn’t be fatal to any watching him this morning while tree trimmers work, stirring up undergrowth.
We have more to fear from the things this big boy eats.
Scarier than tarantula’s is what science is doing, outside our purview, while promising everything is just fine.
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