Cherub’s are winged angelic beings who attend to God. In traditional Christian angelology they are angels of the second highest order of the nine fold celestial hierarchy.
It is difficult to know which task is the most difficult for this cherub – holding up the world is critical, but being God’s golf tee is also important.
The world, in God’s club house, is his best golf ball. It spins through the heavens like a well struck putt, following a perfect arc all the way into the cup.
When God makes a fifty foot downhill, severe break to the left putt for an eagle, the heavens all rejoice and cherubs are the first to clap their wings.
God never makes bogeys and the cherubs attending him don’t need to tell Him how great he is, or suggest a seven iron when he chooses an 8.
This collection of objects on my living room wall keeps me humble, reminds me,when I look deeper,that there are forces holding up our planet that I should know better.
It makes me feel better knowing that world’s creator plays the game of golf.
Golf, often called the sport of kings, has a much higher ranked fan than me.
There is controversy whether this is a lighthouse and whether Columbus’s bones are really inside the not so small ornate iron box in the center of this ornate display.
Columbus found the Dominican Republic on the first of his four voyages to the New World. Interestingly enough, he never set foot on America’s soil but set up his family comfortably in Santo Domingo to give them a good life and claim to lands he discovered for the King of Spain.
He was a visionary, as well as a businessman, and having audience with Kings and Queens is no easy task because, being important people, their time is worth more than ours. Mounting an expedition that was going to the ends of the world was a dangerous enterprise.
The big things I learn today are that, when walking, things you see are much further to get to than they look. Whenever you get lost, call a taxi and pay a few bucks to get where you want to go so you don’t spend your entire trip walking in circles.
It seems odd to celebrate a man who discovered America,but didn’t, and odd I’m standing here taking a photo of what we are told is the explorer’s mortal remains?
He and his beloved Santa Maria , right now, are most likely somewhere north, northeast of Mars navigating under celestial lights on dark dark seas with only a compass, telescope and good instincts to guide him and his crew..
He, I’m sure, is doing in the next world what he did in this one.
His bones might be here, but he doesn’t need them for his new discoveries.
In the lobby of the Albuquerque County Line Barbecue, there is a special love machine for testing your love potential.
This ” Love Machine ” costs a quarter for its diagnosis, and, for your quarter, you can see how you measure up on the love chart by putting your hand firmly around a special handle, squeezing firmly, and waiting for your diagnosis to shoot off like firecrackers, Roman candles, or duds.
We humans like to measure. We hook up our cars to diagnostic apparatus, we use dip sticks to check oil and transmission fluids, we use IQ tests to measure intellectual ability, we use polls to decide who to elect to be our next President.
Whether this ‘Love” test is really accurate, scientific, or needed, is something academics can argue over beers around the barby at University picnics.
For those, in love, they don’t really need a machine to tell them how they feel.
A better sign of whether you are in love, or not, is to look at your credit card statement.
Be Happy – Stay Happy.
Under the ” Home of the Big Rib ” rib, as you walk towards one of several back dining rooms at the County Line Barbecue, is a lucky chair.
We all have our favorite chairs. Yours might be an old recliner that you found on the sidewalk with a ‘ Take Me ” sign pinned to it like a donkey’s tail. It might be an ancient folding chair you drag out of your garage and open up on your front porch like folks did in the old days. Your favorite chair might have a hard back, torn cushions, scratched legs where your dog or cat wanted to get your attention.
My favorite “LUCKY’ chair, this evening, is made from horseshoes. I sit down in it to improve my luck as I listen to the ” Radiators ” slip into a blues tune in the bar, filled tonight with patrons getting tipsy.
Some artisan has collected these worn horseshoes and has welded them into a quirky,quite comfortable chair, and, as I sit and tap my right toe to the music, I feel my luck coming back in spades.
Barbecue, horseshoes, cattle, branding irons and the Old West go hand in hand and those old time cowboys sure didn’t live on just jerky, pitching horseshoes and playing poker. They knew a few things about the value of luck when they crossed hostile Indian country.
If sitting in a chair made from horseshoes can bring me observable positive consequences, you can be damn sure I’ll be back here soon for another therapy session.
Superstitions, I have heard from the superstitious, are not always false.
Albuquerque has just introduced E-Scooters to the Downtown Civic Plaza, Nob Hill, Old Town, and, eventually, other well frequented locations in the city. These scooters are lined up across from the Albuquerque Museum of Art, chatting up a storm and telling scooter jokes.
Two ladies, I talk too, say the scooters are fun to ride but you need an App on your phone to use them. There are about 750 of them, to start, and a private company, Zagster, has exclusive rights to promote in our city.
The scooters are available from seven in the morning till seven in the evening, have tracking devices installed, go 15 miles per hour, and cost the operator a $1.00 plus fifteen cents a minute to rent. The rationale is to address climate change, provide other modes of transport the younger generation will like, encourage people to get out, eliminate traffic in high traffic areas. and make money.
One of the big concerns of the Albuquerque Police Department is people driving these scooters while intoxicated, something that has already happened.
One of my issues is grasping how large American bodies are going to balance on these small running boards while going fifteen miles per hour with just hand brakes?
If the city was serious about climate change they would just make us walk in a transportation free zone.
Riding at your own risk, these days, has to be in all of our plans of the day.
We have come now to a place, in America, where adults dress and do what kid’s do,
These two questionable birds remind me of cartoon characters us kids watched on black and white television in the 1950’s, most often perched on a tree limb talking about crazy humans. They were, as they appear here, angular, opinionated, and had New York voices that were like a piece of coarse sandpaper rubbed over my cheek, and not gently.
Perched on a tiny end table in front of the Madrid, New Mexico Mine Shaft Museum, they, for the moment, aren’t gossiping loud enough that I can hear who they are roasting.
The Madrid mining museum is full of old rusted mining implements piled into one large open room, under a tin roof. Through an open doorway, I see the old rust colored machines that kept town and mines operating in the 1800’s when lots of young men and painted women came out west to make their fortunes.
The docent of the museum this morning, a gray haired volunteer woman standing by a manual cash register, talks in a mellifluous voice and explains, to an equally old couple, listening attentively, how the town prospered in its heyday.
I can hear Heckle and Jeckle cackling outside over a really nasty human joke.
For some unfathomable reason, I want to buy them and the fountain and set them all on a little table on my back porch in Albuquerque.
These two could really tell me, every day, funny, but true, stories about mining in Madrid, Mew Mexico, before and after the hippies came.
Watching humans all day is as funny as it gets.
This morning, the Fountain goes off at nine sharp, the same time as all the local businesses open. Ducks cruise past it like little feathered boats as a steady geyser of water is propelled several hundred feet into the air.
I film the eruption from several directions and barely get it all into my camera viewfinder.
I’m not sure I would come to Fountain Hills just to see this fountain, but, being here, it is icing on the Fountain Hills cake.
In the desert, you see lots of things that don’t seem to fit.
Why, in the middle of a desert that sees less than ten inches of rain a year, would there be a lake? Who, in their right mind, would build a fountain that shoots up several hundred feet in the air?
Regardless of the fountain’s history, I’m duly impressed with the ability of the human race to come up with engineering marvels that still can’t out do what Mother Nature routinely does, even without putting her make-up on.
Smoking has taken a beating in the United States.
Most smoking in America has been banned from public buildings. All tobacco packaging has to contain scientific warnings that tobacco products are not good for your health. Tobacco is taxed at an exorbitant rate. Television advertising of tobacco products has been curtailed drastically. Multi-million dollar lawsuits have awarded money to smoking victims in large class action health related lawsuits. Doctors advise all their clients to quit. Smoking in movies and on television by actors and actresses has trickled to a few puffs each season.
Camel cigarettes are one of the last surviving brands from the 1950’s.
As kids, we thought it funny to see the Camels on cigarette packs and wondered who would smoke them instead of Philip Morris, Lucky Strikes or Marlboro’s. The fifties were a smoking heyday with millions of vets acquiring the habit in the war and continuing when they got home. Our Dad smoked but quit by eating tons of lifesavers he kept high up on a closet shelf where we kids couldn’t reach them. The Camels always made us think of the French Foreign Legion, men wearing funny hats fighting other men wearing funny hats.
In this Santo Domingo airport, on my way home, I meet a plastic Camel lounging in a smoking room. It is cool and quiet here and there are only a few people in the lounge this morning, a cleaning woman and one smoking man puffing intently on his Camel cigarette.
Camels might truly be cool, but I hear, from people who have lived with them, that they are nasty, have body order, and spit at people they don’t like.
Advertising always gets us to ignore product negatives and buy what they want to make us think makes us more important and sophisticated.
I’m in this smoking room, hanging with a camel, and I don’t even smoke.
I’m walking, minding my own business, not a cloud in the sky.
Water pours down like someone is pouring a bucket of water on me.
In the Zona Colonia, water used to mop, or spilled when watering plants, leaves the upstairs balcony through a piece of PVC pipe and falls to the street below.
If I had a plug and a ladder, I’d climb up and fix my problem and give these careless people a well deserved back up of their plumbing.
All they have to do is look down and make sure no one is below before they empty their buckets.
That’s common courtesy, but you don’t have to have courtesy when you live on the top floor.
When you live upstairs, it gets easy to forget those below you.
Next time, I’m bringing an umbrella.
You can never count on people to do the right thing.
The front and back metal gates to the massive Cathedral, in the center of the Zona Colonia, are not four hundred years old. They look that old, however, and the faces sculpted unto them look eternal and primordial.
There are the faces of Luke, Mark, Matthew and John from the Bible. There are faces that show basic human emotions that continue, regardless of time and place. There are insignia of the Spanish Crown, familial and political dynasties. The weathered corroded faces remind me of Gothic figures peering down from old churches in Europe telling us we are not perfect and will be rewarded for our sins in terrible ways I cannot imagine, even in my most harrowing of dreams.
Each art form tries to convey human emotions with its own materials and methods.
Music uses sound to suggest romantic interludes, fierce battles, fear invoking scenes. Art uses color and line to show the three dimensional world on two dimensional surfaces. Sculpture, as done by old masters, uses clay, bronze, marble or stone to show us who we are and who we should be. These weathered faces on the gates convey anger, remorse, pain, love, tenderness, regret, hope, betrayal.
These faces draw me closer instead of pushing me away.
I would like them much better if one of these guys was laughing.
Even back then, people working on this Cathedral liked a good joke, even if it’s telling sometimes got them locked up in the dungeon for a few nights with a hundred lashes and not even a pot to pee in.
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