Thanksgiving dinner falls into my lap.
In the middle of a Walkaholics ramble, our group is invited by the owner of the Sandbar to a free annual Thanksgiving dinner at her bar and grill. It is something she likes cooking for and an appreciation to loyal customers.
This is a full blown extravaganza with turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, dressing, salad. bread and desserts. The company is cordial and the mood is celebratory.
Last year my Thanksgiving was celebrated in Uruguay with a slice of pizza and a beer. It is hard at this moment to know where Thanksgiving will find me next year.
This week turkey’s have been in hiding.
Surviving dinner when you are the main course is a gift from God.
Alcoholics can’t walk by a bar without going in. Ministers can’t hear church bells without reaching for their Sermon. Firemen change clothes at the smell of smoke. Construction workers can’t avoid a construction zone.
This has been a year of house rehabilitation so it was impossible for me not to grab a paint brush and lend a hand.
The Legends Bar and Grill renovation, on the north side, is in progress. Opening day is December 1, 2015. Painting is the same down here as up north. You keep your eye on the edge, cut a straight line, don’t let paint drip, keep the brush moving, clean up if you make a mess.
The big push today is to prime wood trim upstairs in the bar, install galvanized metal sheets on the kitchen ceiling, and move a huge defunct cooler out of the kitchen, through two doorways, and onto the front porch where it will be picked up later and used in some way by the group of seven men who move it out.
When the group of men arrive there is much measuring, grunting, re- positioning, and evaluating. A few times the task looks impossible but if someone got it into the bar it can be taken out.
Jack’s sign is posted in the kitchen, beside a good cooler, and reminds him on a hot day, with both fans blowing and orders buzzing around his head like angry mosquitoes, that a craftsman is never far from his philosophy.
The grills are fired up and chickens are the topic of conversation.
A local Hispanic church is doing a fundraiser selling food, used clothes and donated items outside their little church in San Pedro town.
” Jesus es la Repuestra ” the marquee says and they are doing brisk business this Sunday at lunchtime.
I have barbecued chicken and rice with slaw, sit on a bench as a cluster of volunteers praise Christ, pack orders to go, and celebrate.
A boombox, on the wall next to me, plays Cuban salsa.
It feels like home to be hearing Spanish and even though New Mexico just got snow, which I know because I checked with the weather lady on the internet, I’m not ready to run back home just yet.
There are rubber bands tied to my ankles that want to snap me back to the Land of Enchantment when I have pulled them to their maximum stretch. The rubber bands are extended, right now, almost to their maximum length.
Jesus motions for us to follow, but some insist on putting toes in the water before their feet go in.
Humming ” Amazing Grace “, sitting on a rock wall, the water is already up to my knees.
There are at least two hundred invited guests but anyone can join this wedding..
Wayos is a popular beach bar in San Pedro Town and Wayo, pronounced Y -oh, is a popular owner.
When the groom arrives in a black golf cart limo, there is applause and cheers. As always, his bar is open and weather is uncooperative. It rains in spurts and people crowd under tents, roof overhangs, and in the bar to escape another torrential downpour.
The wedding ceremony is short and the couple recites handwritten vows under a big tent overlooking the Caribbean Sea.. They promise to honor and cherish and encourage and support each other, and, in front of important people in their life, draw a big heart in the sand with their names inside it.
Before, during, and after the ceremony, people re-connect. It is a close knit group on this Isla Bonita and meeting people is not difficult here. When people come here they cast time and routine out of the boat and lifting anchors that hold them elsewhere.
It is a good wedding and a happy time.
Nature isn’t co-operating but another lady well wisher, standing next to me, tells me it is good luck to be married on a rainy day.
If that is so, this couple will have enough luck to take care of all of us.
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.
.
In the distance, ATV’s and pickup trucks wait for this year’s contest to begin, looking themselves like small tin cans hung on a fence post for target practice. They scurry around after each shot, mark where pumpkins come back to Earth and send back GPS co-ordinates that help calculate the distance of each shot.
On the firing line there is activity as half a dozen cannons are lined up and crews are checking mechanisms, counting pumpkins, and figuring how to beat competitors. The King and Queen of the Punkin’ Chunkin’ Festival has been crowned. Winners of raffles have been announced. Lunch is winding down and stragglers hurry to grandstands from full parking lots.
There are a few issues, but, by one in the afternoon, pumpkins are being launched, one after another. There is a siren to warn us of a firing, then, a few seconds later, an explosion.
Pumpkins shoot out of the barrels hot. If you are sitting just right, you can track the pumpkin as it leaves the barrel, follow it in its arc till it plummets into the field and splatters into harmless slices of pumpkin pie. No one gets injured, maimed or killed in this war. It is country fun for country folks.
The distances are announced over a simple public address system and the crowd cheers for a good shot.
The winning shot, this year, travels 3185 feet. Competition is fierce and people enjoy the annual event.
Trying to do it better is what keeps this country alive, even if it is chunkin’ punkin’s, spitting sunflower seeds, or tossing cow chips.
Moriarty is a small town thirty minutes east of Albuquerque on Route 66.
Annually, the city hosts a Pinto Bean Festival to honor the lowly pinto bean and those rural folk that live in this area in manufactured homes on subdivided one acre plots that get more sparse the farther you move from I-40.
Pinto beans get their name from their mottled brown and beige color, like a pinto horse. Take pinto beans, a flour tortilla, some green chili and a little meat, if you have it, and you have a burrito that has been New Mexico survival food since settlers moved here hundreds of years ago.
This Festival is a collection of booths.
In one are two women gunslingers wearing revolvers and shooting up business for a local indoor shooting range. There is a group who want to restore an old Whiting Brothers gas station sign as a relic of the loved Route 66 that held states and communities along its route together like crazy glue. There are games where you toss a bag into a box, spin a wheel for free food at a local Denny’s, try to toss a ring around a soft drink can for a free drink. There is a station to get blood pressure checked and another to meet Jesus. Roberto sells hats made from palm fronds from Ecuador and kids play on swings with recycled automobile tires providing a soft landing for their falls.
One of the more moving installations is at the entrance to the Fair where two men are taking donations to support the Moving Wall coming to Moriarty. The Moving Wall is a scaled down version of the Vietnam Wall in Washington. It has the names of all the men and women who died in that hapless conflict in a far away place.
Vietnam casualties reached small towns across America and on the walls of VFW’s in hundreds of communities are pictures and names and military rank and rate of young people who lost their lives in foreign jungles.
Pinto beans help you survive when chips fall on the table and society begins to crack like a dropped ice cube.
I pick up two bags on my way out of town.
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 N.A.U. auditorium is filled with parents, friends, graduates, speakers, security, and interested observers.
The event is graduation for the 2015 class of NAU Lumberjacks who have spent their last several years sharpening axes, learning to identify trees, and borrowing money to pay for the experience of reading, writing, attending lectures, doing group projects, and getting indoctrinated in a variety of subjects that might or might not lead to paying the rent. There are student loans to be paid, job interviews, moving, trips to Europe.
This is Calley’s Day and she receives, on a snowy day in spring, a Bachelor’s Degree in Business with a specialty in Accounting.
The speeches are dull but there is pomp and circumstance as participants march into the auditorium wearing gowns and caps with tassels and ballooning sleeves and dignitaries give themselves Honorary Degrees and remark on the importance of the occasion and how graduates should be committed to contribution, caring, and consensus. Once it is all over, all file outside to take photos and celebrate.
Graduating from college is still an achievement, even in 2015.
It is good to congratulate a niece, done with class and on her way to a backpack trip to Europe.
Uncle Scott will watch her cat Pickles.
Pickles, we all know, will have a better life, no matter what, and he never had to go to school to get it.
The real surprise is snow in Flagstaff in May.
As everyone we talk to says, with laughter, ” This is so Flagstaff.”
A cool morning in Surprise, Arizona, you can hear paddles striking balls several streets away from the Happy Trails pickle ball courts.
“There are 15,000 pickle ball players in this area,” a woman educates me as she sells new pickle ball paddles and takes names for her E-mail list at her vendor stand by the entrance to the courts.
This morning, while much of the park sleeps, men over 50 warm up, talk strategy, stretch, get their game faces right. Once individual games start there are paddles slammed into the ground, curses, and strained expressions. All the results of the pairings are written down on a bracket board by the scorers table. This is a tournament to crown the Happy Trails Pickle ball Champions in doubles, men over 50, 2015.
Pickle ball goes down on a small court with lots of stretching and reaction, strategy and competition. Even old guys don’t lose their desire to crush other old guys, even if they all have beers after the tournament and talk about good shots whenever and whomever they came from.
Having your name engraved on a silver cup becomes for some, at some point in their life, a great prize. Bragging rights can be some of the best.
After watching the tournament, I still don’t know where the name pickle ball comes from?
Nobody here looks like a cucumber.
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