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.
Popsicle’s have been with us as long as I have been on this planet.
Back when my shoes were size five, we neighborhood kids would hear music marching down our street and see a big white ice cream truck with black speakers mounted on its roof. It was playing happy music on a dreadfully hot summer afternoon.
The truck stopped in front of our house as we stood out front with coins in our little fingers. It wasn’t a glamorous job for the drivers, but, then, people worked to pay their bills.
Grown men with two day beards were paid one to two bucks an hour to drive the truck and sell us treats. They smoked Marlboros or Lucky Strikes and had anchors tattooed on their right forearms. They took our money with a smile and always gave us back the correct change. A radio hanging from the truck’s rear view mirror played Patsy Cline or Hank Williams.Some of the men had fought on the battlefields in Europe and the Pacific.Others were just drifters.
The Popsicle’s were all flavors. You could get cherry, lime, orange, banana, pineapple, and half a dozen more tastes..The ice cream in the freezers was vanilla, chocolate, chocolate chip plus lime or orange sherbet for those who didn’t like ice cream. There were also ice cream concoctions covered with chocolate that were popular – Eskimo Pies, Dilly Bars, Ice Cream Sandwiches.
When you finished your Popsicle you were left with a stick and a joke.
” What is the most musical part of a turkey? (The Drumsticks)
” What did the horse say to the angry cow? (What’s your beef?)
” What is the mouse’s least favorite weather? ( When it rains cats and dogs)
” What do you call a girl in the middle of a tennis court? ( Annette)
Popsicle’s are still sticking around though I never see the trucks in neighborhoods anymore.
What is touching is the generation of kids that bought them from a white truck in front of their home during summer vacation now have gray hair, walk with a cane, or need oxygen to keep them going.
The popsicle jokes are still funny to me even if my gray hair isn’t.
This Memorial Day weekend boatloads of city folk are out and about.
On a usual hike up the Embudo Canyon trail in the Sandia Mountains Alex the architect and I encounter only a few bipeds.
Today, two parking lots are full of cars and dogs scamper across the canyon with noses to the ground. From the second parking lot it is a mile hike up Heartbreak Hill past a city water reservoir to a rock dam built in the thirties by a rancher with thirsty livestock. At the dam there are cottonwoods and rock formations that peer down at you as if you were on trial at a Survivor Series tribal council. There is no council this morning but there are rock climbers testing themselves.
Two rope lines stretch from the trail, up the rock face, over the top of the spires. A man in yellow reveals in conversation that the lines are tied to pitons on top and are for safety. The climbers, young and old, climb the rock face freestyle, but remain tethered to the lines in case of slips or miscalculations. There are two adults and three kids on this outing. It is the first time I have seen climbers here and the cliffs, though appearing formidable, are nothing more than child’s play.
On the hike back down to the parking lot, it is cool, an untypical spring day.
I don’t take up their offer to climb.
When you get a few years under your belt you start to decline stuff you have no business declining.
Piriapolis is a small Uruguayan town an hour bus ride from Punta Del Este.
A one way ticket on the bus lines COT, or COPSA, runs ten dollars. This is one of those side trips that gives a bigger vision of the country.The beaches at Punta Del Este are well spoken of but the beaches in Piriapolis are smaller, more accessible, with calmer waves.
Walking a wide boardwalk that runs parallel to the beach, I look down and see, peeking out of the sand, the head of a young woman. Her body is completely buried. I don’t know if she is asleep or her partner covered her while she was awake? I don’t know if she protested?
He is about to pounce when he looks up and sees me. I point at my camera. He kneels down and gives me a thumbs up.
It is a beautiful day and this couple has time to do whatever they choose. He chooses to cover her up like a kid playing in the sandbox and she chooses to let herself be covered up because it means he is paying her the attention she wants.
They have the beach to themselves.
Precious moments whiz past our heads all day, like bullets. A few hit us hard enough to be remembered,and, even fewer, get written down.
The sun drops dramatically.
In America, kids would be throwing a football. Here, the big dream is to play professional soccer and let your papa sit in a bar with a cerveza and cheer as you make a goal that wins an important game. It is a Sunday and there is, at the moment, on television, a game with the National team of Uruguay playing an opponent from Columbia. Mortal enemies on the playing field, the hollers from the bar became more pronounced as a goal is threatened or a player is cut down to size with a totally illegal trip, block, or kick.
These two little kids are playing catch and kick.
One kicks the ball to the other and the receiver steps into his return kick and sends the soccer ball screaming back to his friend. Tourists have long ago gone back to their ships and are now enroute to other ports on their itinerary. The sun is disappearing and these two boys will be going inside soon to have dinner, maybe do homework – their sisters having already diligently finished their assignments.
The soccer ball takes off the instep of one of the boy’s foot like a rocket. It is an old beat up ball with threads coming undone from caroming over these rough paving blocks. It is dirty and knocked out of shape. You can hear it cry when it is kicked. Still, it is good practice for these two future players on the Uruguay National team who will one day be lining up for a foul kick and remember what they practiced when they were so little.
Whether it is a soccer ball or a football, the dreams of little boys are not different.
Competition is important, team play is important, winning is important, friends are important.
There aren’t many bargains for the traveler but one is sightseeing buses you find in large South American cities.
These double deck buses run routes through the city like a regular bus but they stop at multiple tourist destinations where you can exit and sight see, then catch the bus home on its next return.
This big pink bus is parked a half block from my front door and with ticket in hand I follow a bunch of school kids aboard. To the very top deck most of us go and put on headphones that let us listen to guided commentary in our home language.
The kid’s teacher is a short slender young woman wearing sunglasses and a ball cap, a scarf thrown around her neck, pink tennis shoes and a large carry all bag. She has had to monitor her brood the entire ride, especially the boys. There are always high maintenance students. Without them, a teacher’s job would be a walk in the park.
This sightseeing bus is like riding on the broad back of an elephant as natives scamper out of your way, as clouds drift above like laundry caught by the wind.
The kid’s class photo, taken after touring, is cute, and, for some of these kids, this outing will be remembered fondly at school reunions where previous winners look like losers and losers have morphed into knockouts.
This twenty dollar scouting ride gives me hope that Montevideo will be a smooth, exciting, stimulating, enlightening city worth visiting.
Tomorrow I ride this same pink bus to Punta Carrera, the National Museo of Futball and the Botanical Gardens.
We all like bargains.
Next to the farmacia is a door that leads to an upstairs apartment that leads to a family that leads to a mom and dad that leads to a warm place for kids to grow up. When you look at a street of closed doors, faded or chipped or cobbled together, one never knows what is behind them. It is hard to guess what this schoolboy will see when the door to his home opens and he walks into his family bosom.
Kids don’t ask for a lot but they need a home, kind words and behaviors towards them, security, love, and a sense of belonging. These youngsters are brothers and sisters and they are, this afternoon, busy turning back into kids after school has spent all day trying to civilize them.
This afternoon this little boy knocks, peeps into a little slot where mail is dropped, yells out if anyone can open the door and let him inside?
He is excited and ready to dump his school stuff on his bed, then go out into the streets to play soccer with friends.
School isn’t for little boys anymore, but they still have to go.
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