The Armijo hacienda began as one of the first homes in Albuquerque, but was long ago resurrected as the popular Old Town restaurant, ” La Placita. ”
Haciendas were self contained economically, spiritually, emotionally.
Several generations of family lived, worked, sustained themselves in these compounds where they farmed, herded livestock, made clothes and tools, used medicinal plants, entertained themselves at night on back patios under the stars. There were haciendas within yelling distance all the way from Mexico City to Santa Fe, nestled in the Bosque cottonwoods by the Rio Grande. Skirmishes with Indians and bandits were always part of their landscape.
In the 1700’s, this would have been a hard but peaceful life, far from the treachery of Europe and Old Politics, the power of the Catholic Church, the restless marching of armies across continents,flags of discovery and conquest planted on beaches around our planet.
Having lunch in a La Placita dining room, open ears can almost hear the animated dinner conversations of these early settlers.
Their conversation would not be much more different than ours today with family, friends, community, politics, religion, and gossip the main concerns.
The difference, between then and now, is that then, families lived, ate,worked, and talked together.
Inside the downtown Marble Street Brewery, adults pursue spirits, music, networking, barbecue ribs, chips and salsa, self promotion, smoozing, passionate political arguments, soothing ruffled feathers, looking for sex, patching up business deals.
Outside the brewery, kids, watched by their Mom’s, build castles with lego’s on the sidewalk.
When little, we played baseball at dusk in the street,rode simple bicycles down to the local five and ten, dug tunnels in arroyos. In evening baseball we could barely see the white tennis ball coming at us as we stood in the batter’s box. Home plate was a street manhole and first, second and third bases were chalked in at the curbs. We were still playing when the night streetlights came on.
Adults were nowhere to be seen, leaving us to our own devices, waiting for us to grow up and get out on our own.
This evening reminds me of the 1950’s.
These kid’s skyscrapers are already teetering from the weight of the next block.
Their screams, as their skyscraper falls and blocks spread over the sidewalk like a witch doctor’s bones, are happy.
Happy screams are the best ones to hear.
In 1965, this gym was state of the art for our time in high school.
It had locker rooms for boys and girls, a weight room,offices for the coaches and staff. It had polished hardwood floors on the basketball court that gleamed and rows of wood bleachers that could be rolled out and back in depending on event requirements. In the gymnasium, band geeks performed concerts,the school had Homecoming, Pep assemblies,and yearly Prom. In P.E.,we guys rope climbed from the gym floor to the ceiling, touched an I beam and came down as fast as we could while our classmates watched and nervously waited their turn to climb up like Jack going up a beanstalk.
Money has been appropriated this 2018 to build a new state of the art sports complex for Manzano High School. The new facility is almost complete and all that is left to do is demolish this old – functional gym, scoop its pieces up with a big machine to be hauled away by another big machine.
In a world on the move, chasing its tail, collateral damage is just part of the new game.
Newer,Bigger Better keeps our country’s economy percolating.
Looking back is just for fools.
Brick and mortar are way too old school for our progressive modern lifestyles.
An Eagles hit in the early 70’s was titled ” Take it Easy. ”
“Standing on a Corner in Winslow, Arizona” was a lyric that became a real park at the Corner of Kinsley and East 2nd Street in the real town of Winslow.
Winslow isn’t big, just a small town on old Route 66 that is a place to gas up and walk the dog. It only takes ten minutes to pull off I- 40 and find the ” Easy ” corner. This ” place of interest ” has a bench, a few statues, a plaque to memorialize it, and, this early morning, a radiance, the calendar flipped back decades.
This morning, a street crew cleans up, using weed blowers to scoot leaves and papers onto a tarp that will be tossed into the back of a flatbed. They wear lime colored vests and hardhats and give me a quick nod as they go about their business. There are restaurants and curio shops nearby that sell Route 66 memorabilia but ” Closed” signs are up in most of the windows.
Standing on the corner, I watch a You Tube video of ” Taking it Easy. ”
The song and message still sound good.
It sounds like it should be our new National Anthem.
Route 66 is the most famous United States highway that joined others to became the U.S. Interstate Highway system that linked our 50 states, made remote places accessible, let restless spirits roam to where they belonged, spawned a history of music, posters, legends and stories.
From November 26, 1926 until June 26, 1985 the 2,448 miles of highway joined Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico,Arizona and California. It started in Chicago and ended in Los Angeles and brought millions of people to the Pacific Ocean, the end of the line for souls tired of the Depression, the Crash of Wall Street, the Dust Bowl, World War One, World War 2., conformity and financial ruin. California sparkled in their eyes like the gold in its rivers and mountains.
Roads have notoriety in human history. The Romans built roads to link their empire. Jesus rode a donkey on a dirt road into Jerusalem. The Oregon Trail opened the West to city slickers looking for a better life.
If Route 66 kept going, across the Pacific to the Orient, I would put my bicycle on it and pedal all the way till everyone I met spoke a different language.
Roads that take me to new places are hard to say no too.
In 2018, it still costs to park, but inflation has kicked up the price.
In older times, Albuquerque Old Town visitors would pull their 55 Chevy’s into parking spots under towering cottonwoods, next to adobe walls built in the early nineteen hundreds. They would not lock their car doors and drop quarters into the slots of this triangular collection box to keep legal and be within walking distance of the Main Square.
Sometimes, there was an old man sitting in the shade reading a newspaper, collecting quarters from the parking box and secreting them into a sock in his right suit coat pocket. There was a half empty flask, bearing his initials, in his left suit pocket.
There were few patrons then that didn’t pay. In the fifties, people had money in their pockets and a conscience.
I miss seeing the old man reading his newspaper, tapping his feet to Mexican music on his little GE radio, waving at families coming to Old Town on a Sunday afternoon for a stroll down memory lane.
For city folks, parking has always been a big deal.
We don’t take our cars to heaven, but, if we did, this old man will be waiting to collect our quarters in the big parking lot just out front of the Pearly Gates.
Paying parking for eternity sobers up even the worst drunk.
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.
Bennett’s Amusements moves in the day before an event, fences off their area at the Festival, back up huge equipment trucks, rides, and promotions. Agile carnies pick up wrenches and assemble a superstructure of steel connected by hundreds of feet of electric cables to a main generator run by diesel gas. Plain ole country dirt turns into an amusement venue.
In this circus there aren’t any animals or strongmen, no bearded ladies or human freaks. These are all protected species now, and midway visitors in 2017 are mostly interested in rides created by country bumpkins with time on their hands and a love for machinery.
Bennett’s, a small time outfit, moves across country, handling amusements in fields, shopping center parking lots and county fairgrounds.The king of the circus, Ringling Brothers, shut down last year and all that is left of the industry is ma and pa operations like this one.
Kids, these days, don’t run away to join the circus. Many just want to sing rap, get interviewed on television, and drive a nice muscle car..
I don’t know what is coming to replace Bennett amusements but it is not likely going to be something I like.
What people do to amuse themselves tells you who they are.
Doctor Who has the most unique phone booth in the Universe. but on our way back to Creede, Colorado, Richard’s idea is to stop and pay respects to one of the last pay phones in America.
On site, Richard and I both pick up the phone and listen to the dial tone to confirm the antiquated technology is working, and take our obligatory pictures. I wish Columbus had had a camera to document his first landing and native Indians had been able to shoot videos of foreigners sticking a strange flag in their hallowed ground. Seeing a You tube video of the universe created, in real time, would also be inspirational.
Dr. Who would know if there are payphones or push mowers on Mars.
He would know if there was a Denny’s hidden in the rings of Saturn.
He would know what the Gates of Heaven are made of.
I can’t call Dr. Who though because this last of its kind pay phone doesn’t take credit cards, phone cards don’t let us call outside Earth’s atmosphere, I don’t have a truckload of quarters, and the Operator is on break.
Watching a piece of human history disappear has sadness wrapped inside its wrapper.
Back in the day, we didn’t use our phones much.
We had mostly the same complaints as we do today. We just shouldered them better.
This exterior wall is hung with mining mementos.
There are picks, shovels,axes, some wrapped with gauze, injured from too much use. There are scythes, traps for animals, lanterns, hammers, levels and long thick nails used to secure railroad ties upon which cars carried ore away from deep mines.
In the eighteen hundreds, young tough men prowled these streets.
Daily, they went underground into tunnels secured by hand cut timbers, never certain they would come out alive. They ate bad food on metal plates that doubled as gold mining pans in the river that tumbles through town and into the valley below.
In the winter, snow was up to their waists and bitter cold seeped through cracks in log houses that had been stuffed with newspapers and torn shirts to keep Old Man Winter from sneaking in.
Iron stoves, vented through the roof, got so hot they looked like meteors.
The sign on the wall says ” No Sniveling. ‘
If something can be done, do it.
If you can’t do it, find someone who can.
The pioneer spirit, in America, in 2019, is fighting for it’s life.
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