On Sundays, during warmer months in Albuquerque, an old train barn opens its huge metal doors to the public. Vendors set up inside to sell their produce, art, clothes, soaps and lotions, health food, get signatures for green projects and alternative lifestyles, listen to music and enjoy the scene.
This Sunday, we come down to hear Chadd’s saxophone quartet – Sax Therapy.
It is quaint inside the train barn, good to see an old dilapidated unused piece of functional architecture used for better than a roosting place for pigeons.
Running across, and embedded in the concrete floor of this large open area, are rails that used to bring trains inside to be repaired, outfitted, cleaned, and re-conditioned. Now, the only Albuquerque train is Amtrak that has ticket sales in what remains of the original Alvarado Hotel. The real Alvarado Harvey House was demolished in the 60’s to make room for buildings that never followed, part of the 1960’s short sighted urban renewal dreams of government elected officials.
Seated at the south end of the train barn, Ruby and I watch dancers twirl to forties style big band music. A college singer croons Rosemary Clooney. Following them is Sax Therapy featuring two alto saxes, one tenor sax and one baritone sax. They do a Monk tune, a twenties style ragtime classic, and a Texas blues wail to start, then move to a show tune and Be-Bop.
Chadd negotiates his bari with ease, his eyebrows going up when he moves into the upper register and eyes looking to the ground when he goes real real low.
I’m not sure but think I hear a train whistle moving towards us in straight four four time.
When you get four saxes playing together you can almost feel your teeth vibrating on the crescendos.
Between Roswell and Mountainair, in New Mexico, there is enough open space to house millions of people, plus livestock.
Land stretches from the road as far as you can see. Whether the planet is running out of space or just resources needed to support seven billion people is a topic for early morning radio talk shows.
The horizon is distant and telephone poles and barbed wire fences, ancient technology, crowd this rural highway along with an occasional grouping of cattle, old crumbling farmhouses, windmills with blades missing like a kid’s front tooth.
We wave at the few drivers that pass us going towards Roswell.. A road marker advertises Gran Quivera National Monument and Richard takes an exit to get us a look at the historical site.
People lived here long before Pilgrims, long before Columbus. When the Conquistadors came, in the fifteen hundreds, to search for gold, to claim land for their King, to convert Indians to Catholicism, there was conflict. In 1680, a Pueblo Revolt sent the new invaders packing until they returned with even more deadly force.
What is left of this Pueblo are the walls of an old Spanish church, without its roof, and numerous fallen rock walls of homes on the hillsides around the church.
It would have been strange for the Indians to learn a new religion, kneel at a cross, drink wine, eat wafers. Their Gods were of nature and their vision of creation and man’s place in it was different than those of their conquerors.
Stacking rocks and building walls in an open paradise would have been intolerable.
New Mexico is about open space.
You can’t live here without realizing land survives.
Conquerors are, in good time, conquered.
Saturday night football has pulled into the station.
Leaves are turning, temps dip into the forties at night, football practice consumes players, and especially coaches.
This Saturdays game matches the Arizona Western Matadors and the New Mexico Military Institute Broncos. Richard’s son, Drew, coaches offense for the Broncos and Richard supports his sons. I rode shotgun down and watch this evening’s game from the bleachers as a visiting nationally ranked team in their division meets Drew’s team, close and personal.
Football is one of America’s popular spectator sports.
All the details are here: bright lights, a grass field with two goalposts and freshly marked yard lines, grandstands, a bright scoreboard, friends and family following action, teams moving onto and off the field of dreams, halftime activities, sounds of hard contact, the execution and non execution of carefully designed plays practiced all week on this same field by the home team.
Football is a team sport with individual stars. It is a combination of planning and chance. The best team doesn’t always win.
These two teams are evenly matched with only a few key plays making the difference. There is an opening game run by the Matadors that puts the Broncos behind early. At the end of the first half the Broncos leave the field with the ball on the Matadors seven yard line.
When the game is over the Broncos lose with the final score 28 to 26. After the game we go down on the field. Cadets, released to return to their barracks, cross the field around us.
Drew’s next week will be a study of this game and a preparation for the next. There will be high fives for some players and thumbs down for others.
For spectators, a football game is over when it is over. For coaches, the games play like film loops in their brain all season, and, sometimes, many seasons.
Drew is disappointed with the outcome, but pleased with his players.
One can see joy when Bedouin travelers top a mountain of sand and wind their way down to an oasis with date trees, water, and a flat place to set up tents, unroll hand woven rugs, and build small fires in the enormous desert night.
This courtyard is the same, a quiet place to retreat from hot summers, a place where summer winds are deflected by brick walls and critters can’t get inside to eat the roses.
The courtyard has been a work in progress and it changes, like those deserts where yesterday’s path is covered up by last night’s windstorm.
This courtyard has a fountain, flowers, yard decorations, lounge chairs, a Texas state flag, and privacy. It is reminiscent of Cartegena or Cuenca where, behind great wooden doors reinforced with iron bars, there are luxurious compounds where children ride bikes, women hang up clothes on the line, and old men smoke cigars in mid afternoon under the porch when it is too hot to be watching girls in neighborhood cafes.
When I visit Alan’s place, we sit on the front porch and listen to the fountain and recall when we used to visit here during vacation summers and drive a beat up jeep on rutted dirt roads across cattle pasture to fish in stocked cattle tanks. We would try to hit cow patties in the road and laugh as we hit them.
Our grandparent’s farm, a mile due east, has been neglected and was recently buried into the prairie by a bulldozer.
Uninhabited, for years, mice took over the living quarters and it was decided by the new owner that the old homestead couldn’t be rehabbed and wasn’t worth saving.
Alan likes Texas so much he made it his own oasis.
Peace and quiet are to be sought and fought for.
There used to be a small stream here that meandered down the hill and went over the edge of the canyon and fell into a deep dark hole below us.
The land’s owner built himself an observation platform, erected a light pole, and built a water wheel that generated electricity to power the light. The chances were good that no one would be out at night and walk over the cliff and fall into the chasm, but it was a place he could bring guests and have a beer as they watched the water wheel turn, throw rocks into the dark and listen to them splash at the bottom on hot summer nights.
There is no water coming down the hill now so the water wheel is stopped, its blades providing climbing opportunities for vines and weeds. Insect webs reach across the gap between blades and the generator is rusting. The water wheel was built with welded iron arms, bolted wood planks, and pieces cut from old tractor tires. The hub of the wheel is a rim off a car.
On a ranch, people get used to making stuff. It keeps them interested and uses junk that accumulates.
This wheel is a John Currie creation. He and Uncle Hugh always tinkered with junk piled in the corner of a barn or discarded in a pasture filled with weeds, dead brush, and cow chips.
Water wheels are old technology.
They will be resurrected at the next big reset in human history.
Drive In movies, in the fifties, were a popular family outing and also a place where teens, borrowing the family car, could get away and explore birds and bees in the back seat of station wagons.
The latest Hollywood movies were projected onto huge screens and patrons watched from their cars with sound provided by little speakers that hung on a partially rolled down car window. If you got hungry you walked down gravel, between cars, and bought Cokes and popcorn at a cinder block concession stand that had restrooms, tables to sit and eat, promos that told about coming attractions.
At night it was cool and pleasant and if you didn’t like the movie you could watch shooting stars or look for aliens on their way to Washington D.C.. The movie screen was enormous and much better than the little black and white television in your living room.
The 60th anniversary of the Sandell has arrived and the featured movie this Saturday, August 29th, is ” Love Me Tender ” with Elvis.
Deep in Jesus country, Elvis still gets air time. He is remembered as a rock and roll legend, a womanizer, a great entertainer who died middle aged and alone with a drug problem. He sang great gospel, served in the military as a regular enlisted man, and never lost his Southern roots.
Finding an operating drive in movie these days,that still shows movies, is almost as impossible as finding a roll of Kodak film, or a camera that even uses film. Technology is zipping past us more quickly than we can process its need or ethics. Humans being ruled by artificial intelligence is no longer the crazy science fiction we used to think it was. Drones are almost to our front doors delivering packages.
Clarendon is a small Texas town where my father, and his sisters, were raised and went to school. They used to ride a horse to class during the Great Depression.
When Elvis burst on the scene he must have looked, to them, like a madman.
He was a harbinger of things to come.
Not far from Clarendon, Texas is the homestead and ranch headquarters of Charles Goodnight, a pioneer Texas rancher.
In the mid to late 1800’s, he controlled a ranch of over a million acres, had 180 cowboys on his payroll, and was an industry by himself. He was a tough man who lived to be 93, fought Indians and had Indians as long time friends. He experimented with crossbreeding buffalo and Texas longhorns and was responsible, with help from his wife Molly, for saving the short hair buffalo from extinction. He entertained Presidents and panhandlers alike in his dining room and, as a cowboy employee once said , ” when he told you to do something he expected it to be done. ”
His house is on the National Register of Historic Places and was restored with private funds, grants, and donations.
On a small horned couch in the upstairs master bedroom is an open Bible with a pair of reading glasses holding his place in Psalms.
There are temptations and lines to be drawn in accumulating a million acres of land and running men and cattle.
Mr. Goodnight was reputed to be a gruff, stern, no nonsense kind of man. Yet, he was also reputed to be kind and generous with his time, his money and attention to those who wanted to work hard and learn. If he liked you he would do most anything to help you rise on your merits.
My brother Alan tells a story of our Aunt Roberta, my father’s sister, who lived in Clarendon where an old Mr. Goodnight had his city house and spent the last few years of his life. She and a girlfriend used to play jacks on the sidewalk in front of his home and she remembered a nurse coming out with a plate of cookies and telling them they could come anytime to play.
Stern and gruff as he is in his photos and paintings, the man that sent out cookies to two little girls had a heart of gold.
This mule deer beelines to Alan’s back yard to have dessert.
There are sunflowers off Alan’s back porch and when this deer snaps one off the stem he looks like a little kid eating a piece of brightly colored candy. When I move towards a large living room window to get a better look at him, he moves away to a safe distance.
On the edge of the canyon is a new house that has compromised my brother’s view.
People here like deer but hate wild hogs. Deer get into your garden and eat your flowers but they are gentle, peaceful creatures. Hogs tear up everything.
The neighbor’s house on the edge of the canyon is large, expensive. It has a big roof, a double car garage, two porches, several stories.
Why does it take so much too keep us people happy and so little to keep a deer happy?
It would take some ranch dressing, salt and pepper, to make me even try these sunflowers.
This remodel on Shirley, for Alan, is a long, twisted, dirty novel that is taking some work to get read.
There are convoluted chapters, hairpin curves, a cast of characters that belong in a Louisiana swamp.
This job is not one you want to bring a friend to, but a friend is the only one who will show up day after day and help you put a nice shade of ruby lipstick on an old tired pig. As little money as possible has been spent on this house over the decades and the guiding principle has always been too use a band aid when a tourniquet was needed.
This project is almost done. You keep showing up day after day until there is, finally, a quitting point.
For me, this might be my last rehab. Stan, one of my best friends, says he has ” another nineteen years, two hundred and five days, three hours and two seconds to go till he retires. ”
With this property turned princess finished, dressed for the King’s ball, I am going gator hunting in the bayou and eat fried fish in a tin shack restaurant with sawdust floors and a cooler full of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer by the old fashioned manual cash register.
Next week, Stan, Stan’s brother Sid , Floyd and I are playing golf.
Golf beats working no matter how we score.
ABQ Marketplace on Louisiana has eclipsed Winrock Center, the original Albuquerque Mall.
While Winrock is now huge piles of dirt, exposed steel, jack hammered asphalt, chain link fences and construction signs, ABQ Marketplace is stocked with big name stores, food and restaurants, and stylish clothes that are already moving out of style. This evening shoppers jockey for parking spots and neon lights compete for human attention.
I sit outside the Apple Store and wait for Ruby to finish browsing Bebe’s. Watching her decide between dresses is a lot like watching paint dry and it goes easier if I sit out front and surf the net to see what Russia, China and the United States are up too in their latest wrestling match.
The Apple Logo is prominently mounted, above the Apple store’s front doors, highlighted by a spotlight. In diminishing light, clouds look as if they are plotting rain.
As powerful a mind as Steve Jobs had, he has moved on and other’s have picked up reins of his wagon and are driving it hellbent down winding mountain roads as outlaws try to steal his intellectual property.
Taking a bite out of an Apple has historic repercussions.
We still pay for Adam and Eve’s first unauthorized bite.
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