Movie night is a Friday night extravaganza.
Charlie and Sharon host and we often watch what Hollywood has cooked up to modify our behavior, influence our thinking, stir up emotions, entertain, or put us to sleep.
This evening we watch Spenser Tracy in ” Bad Day at Black Rock, ” an early movie about injustice, race relations, and government cover up.
It is an eerie feeling watching movies where everyone in it, and everyone who made it, are now ghosts.
Seeing things that happened, but are no longer here, is almost the same for me as reading Scotttreks moments that are behind me in time’s tunnels.
Is a remembered and re-remembered moment better than the real thing?
Do postcards accurately report what I have seen or done, or just reflect how I want to remember it?
Strawberry Shortcake, as I remember it, or like to remember it, was spectacular and movie night is always worth doing.
The things of man start with an idea.
Either you are hungry, uncomfortable, scared, envious, or in love. Sometimes you are just bored and want to change because you can.
Chip and Lori want to live simple and live free as far from civilization as they can get.
” It’s an experiment, ” Chip says, and, thankfully, his wife is going along with it. Moving in a different direction than your spouse is like trying to row a boat with oars going in opposite directions.
Sitting around a campfire at night, under more stars than we can see, their new experiment oddly feels like home, even if the wind whips up and the cold sneaks in under my bedroll and makes me wake up in the middle of the night.
Our roots are where we sink them..
Nowhere is a place too.
Nowhere is often a remote, uninteresting, nondescript place, a place having no prospect of progress or success, obscure, miles from anything or anyone.
Nowhere is often a place no one else wants to be, a place that offers no comfort, no wealth, no value.
Nowhere, however, can also be a place to gain privacy, a place to begin new, a place to build what you now see that you didn’t see before.
Pioneers struck out to find value in the nowhere reaches of the old west. Astronauts went into the nowhere of space looking for new worlds. Explorers in the sixteenth century ventured into nowhere to find profit.
Chip, wife Lori, son Bowen, and Scott are striking out today for our Nowhere, Arizona.
There won’t be a town here, but, by the time we are done, this trip, there will be the start of a storage shed for Chip and Lori’s stuff. Their homestead is still further down time’s road.
When you come to Nowhere, you don’t want to come with Nothing and you want to leave Something behind.
This is how it must have felt to the pioneers on wagon trains headed west after the American Civil War, a shared tragedy, like slavery, that some Americans still haven’t worked their way through.
The odd thing about nowhere is that someone was often there before you arrived.
Henry David Thoreau got tired of his rat race in the 1800’s and retreated to Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts to live a simpler life.
As a transcendentalist, he believed getting close to nature would get him closer to truth, wisdom, God, and peace. He built himself a little cabin on Walden pond, took daily walks, observed nature, documented his thoughts and daily chores in a book he called ” Walden, or Life in the Woods. ”
My road trip mission is to help Chip and Lori get a start on their simpler life in the middle of Nowhere, in Arizona, not far from Saint John.
With 80% of Americans living in cities these days, the things you can’t do, in a free country, are astounding.
The 20% of Americans who live outside city limits are an independent breed.These folks move to a different drummer, value individual liberty, work, helping your neighbors, keeping government at bay, They used to be everywhere, be your neighbors, go to your church, run for office. Now, they are scurrying out of the city as quick as they can get their backpacks together.
When all Hell breaks loose, do you really want to live in a city, anywhere?
Henry David Thoreau’s book is still resonating, a hundred and fifty years later.
I’ve heard, though, that even Henry would sneak back to town to have dinner with sympathetic readers and talk shop with Ralph Waldo Emerson over a glass of wine and a big piece of the widow Smith’s award winning Angel Food cake.
Sometimes you just don’t know what you are missing till you try something else.
Pat has been persistently trying to move Scott to a DSLR for several years. ” I Phone cameras are good for what they are, ” he has always maintained, ” but cell phones make telephone calls and get you on the net. If you want good pictures you got to get better equipment. ”
My DSLR stuff has been collecting dust, but, on this trip, Scott has taken his Nikon DSLR out of its case and taken a few photos.
The entire process is like discovering that you can eat soup with a fork, if you like, but it is easier and less messy to use a spoon.
So, here are a few photos taken with the Nikon.
I like them and hope Pat likes them too.
Next trip, there will be substantially more of them.
However, I’m not ready to toss out my fork.
This rock, more than a stone but not a boulder, in Embudo Canyon in the Albuquerque foothills, has been moved onto the trail, by something other than wind, water or wishes.
It appears to have been lifted from a nearby mound of dirt. Where the rock used to be, on the mound, is a small hole that matches it’s size perfectly.
” Let’s move it back, ” Alex laughs.
If we move the rock back will some cosmic order be disturbed? Has moving rocks become against the law in an open space monitored by cameras and posted signs? Maybe the rock likes it here closer to the trail and doesn’t want to go back to where it was?
We keep walking quickly through this crime scene.
This situation has man’s dirty fingerprints all over it and I’m not putting things right.
Not wanting to get involved is a perfectly normal thing to do these days.
The LaFonda Hotel has been a fixture in Santa Fe going back decades.
The current hotel was built in 1922 on a downtown site where the first Santa Fe hotel was built in 1607 when Spaniards came to town. It is on the register of the Historic Hotels of America, was once owned by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad, and from 1926 to 1968 was one of the famous Harvey Houses that took care of train passengers riding from back East all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
In the 1900’s this was the favored haunt of trappers, soldiers,gold seekers, gamblers and politicians. The hotel, in the 1920’s, was designed by Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter and John Gaw Meem and is still a favored watering hole for New Mexico state legislators and government officials who populate Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, affectionately called ” The City Different” by those of us who live in our state.
Santa Fe itself has long been a refuge for writers, artists, movie stars, and the local newspaper, ” The Santa Fe New Mexican ” is the oldest continuously operating newspaper in America. The world famous Santa Fe Opera is close by as well as Canyon Road with a gallery every other mailbox.
Up to Santa Fe for the day, Joan suggests I visit Boston. I’m thinking the Boston Tea Party Ship and Museum would be my cat’s meow.
While the LaFonda Hotel is super comfy, charming,historical, quaint, revolutions always ring my bells.
Joan misses some ambiance, on the phone, fixing who is watching her kids , and when, with an unaccommodating ex in Boston.
Fortunately for me, I haven’t fought in these kind of revolutions, and divorce and wedding bells, remind me of cannonballs whizzing by my ears.
Stan has had back yard chickens for a few years.
They weren’t something he wanted as a childhood dream, but his adopted kids wanted chickens so he built them a first rate coop, feeds them, keeps their cage clean, and can’t kill them because his daughter would cry.
” Do they lay eggs in the winter, ” I ask?
” They slow down, ” Stan says, ” they lay eggs four or five years. ”
” Then what? ”
Stan takes a moment and judiciously answers, ” Leave the coop and the gate to the back yard open and hope they take a trip and forget how to get home. ”
Chickens are eaten all over the world, but looking at them makes me uneasy.
Why do I want to eat an animal that lives in a cage and pecks in the dirt for its food?
What does Stan do with the cage when his kids grow up and leave home?
The coop is too small for Mother-In-Law quarters and it doesn’t come with a big screen TV.
The Amarillo College Museum has several floors and this Friday, after Thanksgiving, Alan, Cousin Jim and Scott ,visit both floors.
On the second floor, one of the museum’s permanent exhibits features sculptures carved from sandstone dating from the 1st century in Thailand, Cambodia, and India.The sculptures have been donated to the college by local Dr. William T. Price and his wife, Jimmie Dell Price. The exhibit seems an anomaly in Texas cow country with windmills, barbed wire fences and branding irons crossed over gateways the usual West Texas artistic themes.
When these sculptures were begun, the craftsman/artist started with a simple block of sandstone and then carved away sand till they reached what was in their mind’s eye. There is no going back with this art, no pasting sand back. If you make an error the entire sculpture is ruined and months and months of work are annihilated.
These sculptor’s, like brain surgeon Dr. Price, work slowly and meticulously with sharp instruments, good eyes, and patience.
These artifacts are safe here from the bumpy unknowable future.
The past is like a fine piece of china riding in the back seat of a car, with bad shocks, going down an unpaved mountain road.
This museum is that same car, safely parked in its garage, and the fine china purring in the back seat like a contented cat.
Pots and pans are on the stove, the table has been set for three, a Butterball Turkey browns in the oven. It took four hours for this bird to cook and slicing it up on the kitchen counter means dinner is close.
Alan, Sherrie, and I have Thanksgiving this year at Alan’s.
At the White House, a Trump turkey is pardoned but White House chefs are in their sparkling kitchens preparing a big feast of beef, ham, salmon fit for a King and Queen. Dignitaries visit America’s White House throughout the year, and, while discussing policy, like to wine and dine as befits their diplomatic positions.
On a turkey’s calendar, November 22 is marked with a huge X and circled for emphasis.
On Thanksgiving, they load their families into their SUV’s, tuck in their feathers, and go to the beach, out of harm’s way.
Next year I’m planning on being there with them.
Seeing turkeys, in bikini’s, is something I just don’t want to miss.
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