Popsicle’s have been with us as long as I have been on this planet.
Back when my shoes were size five, we neighborhood kids would hear music marching down our street and see a big white ice cream truck with black speakers mounted on its roof. It was playing happy music on a dreadfully hot summer afternoon.
The truck stopped in front of our house as we stood out front with coins in our little fingers. It wasn’t a glamorous job for the drivers, but, then, people worked to pay their bills.
Grown men with two day beards were paid one to two bucks an hour to drive the truck and sell us treats. They smoked Marlboros or Lucky Strikes and had anchors tattooed on their right forearms. They took our money with a smile and always gave us back the correct change. A radio hanging from the truck’s rear view mirror played Patsy Cline or Hank Williams.Some of the men had fought on the battlefields in Europe and the Pacific.Others were just drifters.
The Popsicle’s were all flavors. You could get cherry, lime, orange, banana, pineapple, and half a dozen more tastes..The ice cream in the freezers was vanilla, chocolate, chocolate chip plus lime or orange sherbet for those who didn’t like ice cream. There were also ice cream concoctions covered with chocolate that were popular – Eskimo Pies, Dilly Bars, Ice Cream Sandwiches.
When you finished your Popsicle you were left with a stick and a joke.
” What is the most musical part of a turkey? (The Drumsticks)
” What did the horse say to the angry cow? (What’s your beef?)
” What is the mouse’s least favorite weather? ( When it rains cats and dogs)
” What do you call a girl in the middle of a tennis court? ( Annette)
Popsicle’s are still sticking around though I never see the trucks in neighborhoods anymore.
What is touching is the generation of kids that bought them from a white truck in front of their home during summer vacation now have gray hair, walk with a cane, or need oxygen to keep them going.
The popsicle jokes are still funny to me even if my gray hair isn’t.
The fourth of July is the official birthday of the United States.
The American fight for Independence was hatched in Boston pubs and undertaken by a cadre of locals. Over taxed and under represented was the big beef and secretive plotting led to a Declaration of Independence from merry old England who was licking wounds from European wars and needed raw materials and taxes from America to pay for debts incurred.
There was fighting, men died, a Constitution was written, leaders got elected.
These days the metaphor for America is an aging Uncle Sam who sports a long white beard, wears clothes made out of a flag , has a top hat of red, white, and blue, a firm grip on your American credit card, and a hand in the affairs of other countries all over the world.
This is an older group present tonight, a group with a collective history.
This wild bunch has seen the Civil Rights movement, Kennedy assassination, Moon Walk, World War 2, Vietnam, Watts, Desert Storm, 2008 Financial Collapse, Government Shutdowns, the fall of Russia, Castro, Cell phones , Computers, Multiple Recessions, Gay Marriage, Food Stamps, Medicaid, TARP, TSA , Sex changes, Drones, Watergate, LSD, Disneyland.
Birthdays are good, once a year. They give a chance to pause, look back, look ahead.
What America says it is, and what it is, is a growing enigma.
It makes moments of peace, like this, more poignant.
The Owl Cafe was born in San Antonio, New Mexico, one of many New Mexican towns you zip past on the freeway, not even dots on the state road map.
The original cafe doesn’t have an owl on its roof and is a fifties style bar and grill with ancient cheap wood paneling, a bar of soap in the urinals, fly catchers dangling from roof overhangs. The original Owl Cafe peddles green chili cheeseburgers and cold beer and does so well that it’s owners built a new Owl Cafe in Albuquerque, New Mexico’s biggest city.
The Owl Cafe in Albuquerque has a menu with all the favorites; burgers, hot dogs, enchiladas, chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and gravy, shakes and soft drinks, cherry pie. There is no attempt at sprouts, kale, broccoli, vegan or low fat fare. Occasionally the restaurant parking lot is full of 1950’s car shows and neon lights on the owl come on in early summer evenings when softball games start at Los Altos Park across the street.
Presiding over the Cafe, on the roof, is an Owl that you can see from blocks away as well as from I-40 that takes people across country heading east or west.
Owls have a reputation for being wise. It seems, though, that they should be well down on the bird IQ list. When you stay up all night and live off small rodents you are not radiating intelligence.
This guy never sleeps and when ambulances blast past on the Interstate, his eyes simply blink.
If he were truly wise, he would never be surprised, and, never blink.
On top of Sandia Peak is a rock house built in the 1930’s by the Civilian Conservation Corp. Coming out of a government prolonged Depression, the CCC was created to provide relief to unemployed men by the U.S. Congress and F.D.R.
During a short decade, over 300,000 young men got a place to stay, food to eat, and a small salary for working on public projects. They upgraded services in rural areas, built and upgraded National Parks, helped build Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge, gained dignity in hard times. This program was one of the more popular out of Roosevelt’s New Deal but it was shut down, unfunded, when World War 2 provided more grim employment possibilities.
The rock house, which would make Fred and Wilma Flintstone a nice vacation home, is perched on the edge of Sandia cliff with a million dollar view of Albuquerque. To the west is the Rio Grande river. To the north is the Sandia Indian Casino and golf course. In the middle of town is an eight story bank building at San Mateo and Central, the original Albuquerque skyscraper. To the south is Sandia Labs that engineers weapons and conducts weapons research, and Kirtland Air Force Base, storage home for nukes.
This afternoon there are scattered hikers and curious on the promontory. The rock house is a mile and a half hike from the visitor center and tram and there are small pockets of snow left in shaded areas by fallen logs or clusters of granite boulders.
Unemployment is still with us, a stubborn reality.
Finding men and women to join the CCC would be difficult these days.
Picking up your check at the mailbox is much easier than stacking stones.
The Albuquerque Museum is in Albuquerque’s Old Town.
Old Town is not far from the Rio Grande river and train tracks that spurred growth in western communities in the nineteen hundreds. Old Town is a part of Albuquerque that is older than the city itself, originally a stopping point for Spanish explorers looking for their ” seven cities of gold. ”
Founded in the 1700’s and named after a Duke in Spain, Albuquerque is still a footnote to big brother Santa Fe that came of age in the 1500’s. We have a mix of Indians, Spanish, Europeans. We have cowboys, farmers, mad scientists. We are a melange of old, new, secular and spiritual, all explained by the state nickname ” Land of Enchantment. ”
The Museum is free today and filled with school kids. One room we enjoy features New Mexico artists. Another features the historical development of the ” Duke” city. Another is closed for construction with a sign apologizing for the inconvenience.
Neal and Joan, visiting from Colorado on their way to watch their daughter Calley graduate from college in Flagstaff, Arizona, make this time special.
One black and white framed photograph on an exhibit wall is of a solitary man wearing a hat and standing in the middle of an empty mesa by a sign saying” Nob Hill.”
Nob Hill was then the edge of town, fit only for jackrabbits, coyotes, rattlesnakes and buzzards. Now, it is trendy. There are shops and restaurants and the area is a playground for University of New Mexico students with live music, brew pubs, used book stores and boutiques.
New Mexico has turquoise and silver jewelry, beautiful hand thrown pots, the Kiva, cliff dwellings, the atomic bomb, Indian rugs, roadrunners, top secret research facilities, military bases and Indian reservations. We have Carlsbad Caverns, White Sands, Los Alamos National Labs, Chaco Canyon, and the Catwalk.
New Mexico holds to its past firmly as we barrel into the future.
It is like holding a horse blanket as you ride a rocket into space.
The General Store and Cafe is not really a General Store.
You can’t buy barbed wire, bullets, hard candies scooped from an oak barrel. There aren’t bags of flour to load into wagons, fishing hooks or Doctor Edward’s best elixer to cure aches and pains in all places.
The Hillsboro General Store and Cafe has food and gifts and memorabilia. There are ancient fans dropping from high ceilings, glass bottles and posters, an old manual cash register that still works, a funky front door that opens with a little latch bandaged up with white tape like a patient in an emergency ward.
This morning town residents and visitors sip coffee, chat, tell stories, use free wi-fi.
Breakfast is good and there is something comfortable about a place where everything is older than you are. This is a community but John tells me it is nothing like the old days when people watched out for each other, kids raised hell within limits, and a favor was always repaid. When John’s wife, Susan, wants to call her kids she still has to drive out of town on a hilltop by the Hillsboro graveyard to get cell service.
The General Store and Cafe, in operation since 1879, will go on longer it seems, until no one wants to open up and light the stove.
With over a hundred years of life here, you can feel ghosts.
If this place makes it another hundred it will most likely look just like it does now.
The sun fights hard to get through single pane windows that haven’t been washed on the outside since the last rain.
Hillsboro is a hard scrawny town on the way from Truth or Consequences, where I used to live, to Silver City, New Mexico..
In the old days Hillsboro was a gold and silver mining collage of wood shacks, shovels, dynamite, barbed wire but today it has lost its luster.
When its precious metals played out, there were copper mines left, but they were shut down too and moved overseas when costs and government regulations became too onerous.
Hillsboro used to have apple orchards and a popular annual Apple Festival that peddled apples, arts and crafts, food and live music but that disappeared after management stole money and absconded to Europe.
At one time, main street here had a biker bar that drew Harley Davidson enthusiasts from Albuquerque and Las Cruces but that attraction closed when the bar’s owner sold the liquor license for a ton of money.
A recent couple, trying to bring magic back to the town, have opened a winery on Main Street, the highway you take to Silver City, but this morning they are packing their belongings and have driven a For Sale sign in the front yard.
Today, becoming gold prospectors,my friend John and I use gold detectors instead of picks.
Working our way up hillsides, we wave our battery powered wands over rocky soil. We have tried the detectors around the house with loose change to practice before getting serious. We haven’t found gold yet but we have found barbed wire, nails, bottle caps, and rusty beer cans.
Tomorrow will be yet another gold hunting day. Expectations will be lower, but hope refuses to die.
Those yesteryear miners were tough S.O.B.’s and more stubborn than their donkey’s.
For every gold nugget, there is a trail of blood, sweat, and tears,
For every dream, there is heartache.
This 800 square foot frame stucco two bedroom one bath single car garage house has been in the family since the fifties.
It has been a residence for dozens of renters, some good, some bad. Through time, much property maintenance was done that is now being re-done. It rents for seven hundred and fifty a month today when one hundred and twenty five used to give a renter the front door key.
This time the place is for sale to a good owner, someone who has time and money to grow a garden in the back yard, put in rocks and desert landscaping, add another room and a bath. The neighborhood, by San Mateo and Kathryn, is acceptable though you see transients pushing grocery carts down San Mateo towards Wal Mart. The War Zone is a few miles to the east but homes in this Parkland Hills neighborhood still show signs of committed ownership with new windows, landscaping, solar panels.
It brings back ghosts to work here.
I see my dad fixing a front screen door and brothers raking leaves and mowing the front yard when it had grass, decades ago.
Two big Chinese elms occupy the front yard and birds leave presents on my car each day I park here.
I miss my Dad sorely, but this house won’t be mourned when a new owner moves in.
A Sold sign will bring me closure.
In Canyon, Texas there is a relic from the fifties that overlooks the freeway that plows through town.
This giant statue of a cowboy is known as “Big Tex”. He has been here as long as townspeople can remember and civic leaders have started a fundraising effort to save him from the dust bin.
The story goes that he used to be associated with a western clothes store that has since been torn down. The owner let Big Tex stay on the property because it would have cost too much to remove him.
Big Tex used to have all his fingers and real levi’s specially made for his twenty foot legs. He used to have a shiny hat and you could see a twinkle in his eyes. Tethered down with pipe, like a Gulliver, the elements and time have taken their toll and he needs a new wardrobe and a new lease on life.
The most recent notch on his gun came when Sports Illustrated dropped by for a visit and had one of their models pose with him for their famous “Swimsuit Issue”. What sports and swimsuits have in common is selling magazines and generating interest. Lots of Texans like their sports and lots of Texans like their swimsuit models. Put them together and you have a rising revenue line.
I think I see one of his fingers move when I am taking his photo, but, on a second glance, decide it is just my imagination.
Life, often, gets a whole lot bigger than imagination.
Before you reach Amarillo, following I-40, you look to the right and see a series of Cadillac’s stuck in Texas dirt in the middle of an unplowed field.
In the old days the Cadillac’s used to be natural, like they came from the factory. They had huge fins, power windows, custom paint jobs, real rubber tires, chrome that would make any car buff salivate. You looked out in the field and the vehicles looked like they had come back down to Earth, like errant arrows, and buried themselves into the soil as far as their momentum would carry them.
On most days you see tourist cars clustered by a little turnstile and see tourists themselves following a wide path out to the cars where they pose for pictures, touch the cars to see how they feel, kick where real tires used to be. The Cadillac’s have been covered with so much graffiti that they are now hardly recognizable.
At the entrance to this entertainment is a little sign that informs you that ” This is not a National Park, Pick up your own Trash.”
This diversion is a brainstorm of an eccentric Texas oil man, Stanley Marsh. There have been not so nice rumors about his sex habits but he was a patron of the arts and how often does anyone create a Texas Landmark that has ended up in coffee table books all over the U.S.? It is unknown exactly what snapped in this man’s mind when he was having barbecue ribs on his back porch shooting Lone Star beer cans with a 45 pistol, but now we have a lasting spectacle that wasn’t here before his epiphany.
Men do all kinds of crazy things and, for the most part, they don’t need a reason. In Texas, the Lone Star State, you are still free to speak your piece and act out your fantasy’s.
If everyone buried a Cadillac halfway into their backyards, we wouldn’t be standing here taking pictures, shaking our heads, getting mud on our shoes.
It’s people who do things no one else would, that we remember the most.
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