This sweet roll is pure Texas.
Tired of omelets, biscuits and gravy, toast, waffles, steaks with eggs over easy, diners can always opt for a non-politically correct sweet roll breakfast that Lyle Lovett would feature in his kind of songs.
This roll fills a plate instead of a saucer. It would go well on Caesar’s table at a fine Roman buffet where elites dine with the Emperor served by slaves and entertained by musicians and dancing girls.
This morning Dave and the Russian Vera join forces, one with a fork and the other a knife. The roll is carefully, surgically divided into smaller bites and by the end of breakfast they have finished half and put the other half in a takeout box.
I look for togas here but people in Pier 19 are wearing windbreakers and baseball caps and look middle class. We sometimes think we have a Caesar in the White House,but, so far, American Caesar’s don’t have a professional food taster, don’t get killed too often, and are kicked out of office after eight years if they can fool the voters two elections in a row.
Vera will have to walk miles to recover from this decadence.
Dave never gains weight but he will need a smoke before breakfast is done.
E-Harmony, from what I have learned about it, is doing as much for foreign relations as all our American Ambassadors put together.
The sky is burning and, if it wasn’t, there would be no reason to snap this photo.
Joan, Neal’s wife, and the rest of us, all stare as we all walk towards the Shrimp Haus, a South Padre Island restaurant that features shrimp, shrimp, and more shrimp – boiled, breaded, fried, cooked or uncooked with salad bar and side orders of fries, potato salad or cole slaw.
The sky’s colors look like Matzatlan sunsets, sunrise in Ambergris Caye, the sun sinking in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas.
For a moment it seems the clouds are waves and the entire world has turned upside down with the top becoming the bottom and the bottom becoming the top. Palm trees, that the wind shakes, are cheerleader’s pom poms at this heavenly football game..
Mother Nature waves her flag and is impossible to ignore, diminish, or trump.
Tomorrow morning, we will be presented a different light show.
Sunrise and sunset are bookmarks in nature’s novel.
Being together is a good thing.
Prospecting is in your blood, or it isn’t.
On a weekday, at the beach, Neal prospects, Joan knits, Scott pulls his hat down and lays back against a dune and watches kite surfers move across the water. The wind is blowing, but it is better here than in a frigid north where a cold front moves down and throws a wet blanket over the Northeast, Midwest, and South.
At the tip of Texas, almost as far south as Florida, we are not immune from restless weather. Palm trees rustle, clouds hang like a boxer’s black eye, fog lounges on street corners like a thug.
Prospecting takes patience.
It isn’t long till our prospector comes back with his find.
He pulls out scrap, beer cans, foil, pop tops and wire. Then, out of his front shirt pocket, he brings the coup de gras – a corroded copper penny.
You know there are gold doubloons and pieces of eight not far from where this penny was found. Newspaper reports of gold doubloons found by farmers from Ohio walking on the beach surface every so many years.
Hope supported by facts is more than enough reason to prospect here.
It is Weston’s idea to go see the dunes.
Passing through Midland on my way to the beach at Padre Island,Texas, I pay a visit to a nephew living in what some call ” the armpit ” of Texas.
Saturday we drive to the sand hills, take off our shoes and climb dunes. Sunday will be devoted to watching the Denver Bronco’s try to reach another Super Bowl. Weston is from Colorado and I wouldn’t expect him to support anyone but John Elway’s team.
Midland is a big small town in the middle of the oil patch. Around, and in, it’s city limits, are drilling rigs, unused casing, semis for delivering pipe and oil machinery, thousands of mud splattered pickup trucks, and metal buildings filled with oil related businesses
Women are, I am told, scarce here.
Finding a man that has a paycheck is a woman’s prerequisite for a long term relationship, so, with the downturn in commodity prices, many of the fair sex have moved to better hunting grounds.
Trekking up and down these baby dunes makes me believe it must be humbling to have to cross the Sahara Desert with a caravan of camels and only the stars to guide you.
This is a hard land to live in.
To survive here, women have to be tougher than the men who love them.
Going out without an umbrella is taking a risk in San Pedro Town.
Rain is forecast and today doesn’t disappoint. A woman, passing in a golf cart, waves back at me while I video this drenching.
The storm is over in fifteen minutes. It gets hot and humid as water begins to evaporate, flows into low spots, and soaks into sandy soil.
Residents love rain and talk ruefully about dry season.
” In summer, ” they remind me, ” you would sell your own mother for a rain like this. ”
My mother would be the first to tell me to enjoy this moment today.
When the rain is done, I head back to my lodgings, walking down a dirt path that looks like an aerial view of Minnesota’s 11,884 lakes.
Not even a mother knows where her kid’s will end up and what they will or won’t accomplish.
Life, as a puddle swallows my right tennis shoe and rain water soaks my tennis socks, is mostly a blessing, as long as we feel it that way.
It isn’t here yet but Halloween is galloping down the road and the headless horseman will soon be here.
New Mexico and Mexico have much in common this time of year as our town celebrates both Halloween and Dia De Los Muertos or ” Day of the Dead. ”
There is no border between the countries of Mexico and the United States and buses run regular from Juarez to Albuquerque. Everyone here knows border talk is just talk and the cultures of North, South and Central America are merging like shoppers at a great flea market.
Brother Mark, visiting for a few days from Denver, wants a photo in front of the Breaking Bad Bus that takes visitors on a tour of Albuquerque locations featured on the popular TV series of the same name.
Shopping, we find pinon incense for his wife Leigh in one of the shops off the main plaza. There are also flashy ceramic tiles, polished rocks, pinon coffee, chili socks, wooden Indians, serapes, Day of the Dead skulls and statues, turquoise jewelry. One shop has Breaking Bad posters on the wall, and, in another, Sheldon looks at the world with his Big Bang Theory.
When you say the words Halloween and Albuquerque, over and over again, you start to lose your mind.
On the way out of Old Town, I scratch my head to make sure it is still up there, and, thankfully,it is.
I’m on my way soon for Belize and Ecuador.
I don’t, like this headless horseman, want to go anywhere without having something between my two ears.
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In the saxophone family you have a number of siblings.
The shortest boys, who sing the highest, are the C Melody and Soprano saxes. Then you move to Alto and Tenor Saxes who are the most common kids on jazz bandstands. At the back of the parade you have Baritone Sax. The lowest voiced saxophone, and biggest of all – the Contra-bass saxophone- seldom gets out of its case because it is an elephant at the tea party.
This afternoon Sax Therapy performs in Old Town during the annual Albuquerque balloon festival.
Dressed for this performance in suits, the quys move through their songbook with style.
A few listeners take photos, engage the musicians in conversation, and dance, especially when the ensemble launches into a spirited version of ” When the Saints Come Marching in. ”
The guys play like a family, and, on this song, a happy family.
Everyone knows their part and they play well together.
Sax Therapy is therapy everyone can use.
Once the sun drops below the Albuquerque city limits, street lights switch on, programmed by computers.
The man made lights aren’t strong enough to make everything visible so, at night, you move from one pocket of light to another and guess what is down that alley, or behind that fence, or on that roof.
Tonight, brother Neal and I run into downtown’s neon’s, flashing signs, street lights cycling from green to yellow to red to green. Car headlights appear like gigantic bug eyes as gawker’s cruise. Earlier, street food vendors were parked in the middle of closed fourth and sixth streets selling their specialties but most of them have since closed up and driven home.
At Sadie’s, Neal and I have our right hands stamped with a black owl that lets us re-enter the bar if we decide to leave and want to return. My jazz teacher, Chadd, plays with a Latin band playing tonight and we came down to hear him play.. The opening act Cuban band is just setting up on stage and we realize quickly we will have a wait before Chadd’s group finally gets on stage.
Compensating, we take our black owls outside to fly old Route 66, admire the beautiful renovated Kimo Theater and grab a burger at Lindy’s, a downtown eatery dating back to the 1940’s. This Downtown area has been trying to rehabilitate itself in the last decade and has made some progress though families and sane people don’t often come down here after dark.
When Chadd’s band, Barrutanga, finally marches on stage in a crazy Latin band homage to New Orleans, it is after eleven.
Neal tells his wife, later, that it was an experience.
Experience, I have been told, is what happens when you make the same mistake twice.
The only mistake we made was arriving at nine instead of eleven.
If it crawls, slides, slips, flips,slithers, climbs, it is not safe.
At “99”, in Albuquerque, there are selections to fit Chinese tastes.
Today, Ruby has a taste for seafood, and, lifting up a black cloth, she goes after blue and white colored crabs that try to escape the small plastic tub that holds them for display. The crabs that run from her the fastest are the ones she grabs in her prongs and puts, with help, into her open plastic bag.
For meat and poultry she likes Sprouts. The meats at “99”, she says in basic English, are old and not good.
I don’t care for tree fungus, but find noodles tolerable. Worms are offensive. The most difficult skill is to eat soup with chopsticks.
Americans eat meat, potatoes, bread, hamburgers, french fries, sugar, salt. Chinese eat seafood, vegetables, fruits, nuts and rice.
The crabs try to hurt us with their scissor hands but they are no match for Ruby’s prongs.
New Mexico was once at the bottom of a great sea.
Over millions of years, carbon creatures died and drifted to the bottom of that sea and became preserved in silt. Layer upon layer of silt turned to stone and the fragile bodies of once living creatures became captured and preserved. My Geologist brother Neal likes nothing better than hiking mountains, looking for geological treasure chests and opening them to find fossil pieces of eight.
This morning we return to a quarry he was introduced to in junior high school.
A teacher brought he and a friend here to scrape away layers of shale and discover ferns, brachiapods, and other marine life. These days a teacher wouldn’t risk the field trip but that trip set two kids into lifelong careers.
As I look up at the quarry walls this morning i can easily see geological epochs as they were deposited in layers. Even a foot thick layer took thousands of years to form..
Neal knows the layers we are looking for on this dig and finds us a promising hunting spot in the side of a crumbling bank in mountains that used to be under water.
Hawks fly over us on a clear cool fall morning and we have brought our small cardboard boxes for specimens, rock hammers, scrapers, newspapers for wrapping what we find, bottles of water, a few apples and sunflower seeds, and lots of hope.
Any day you can poke into pre- history and find something only you are seeing for the first time in 250 million years, it is a good day.
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