Thom’s shop is full of heavy steel automobiles from the fifties and sixties, stripped down, in various stages of renovation.Paint and body tools are resting in the shop where they were used last,collecting dust on the hood of a Chevy Pickup or the roof of a Ford mustang.
Hanging on wire lines in the shop’s paint booth are a detached hood and car door, suspended from a cable running from one side of the room to the other. The painter can walk around the hood and car door, unobstructed, wearing his respirator , careful to keep the spray gun moving, not creating runs and catching all the nooks and crannies.
When the final coats of paint are done,my nephew Weston’s El Camino will be a beauty.
Collectors want their gems to sparkle.
When you put lots of time, thought, and energy into a project you want it to be worth doing.
This car is no longer a car. It is a piece of family history.
In high school, Weston started banging out its dents, measuring from A to B, searching the internet for alternators and chrome. In college, he was home for holidays and fashioned new panels to replace rusted steel and grinder smoothed the rough welded seams. This week, he is back in the garage, with his dad, getting the El Camino ready for its final paint job.
He hauled his project to Thom’s country paint and body shop last week on a flatbed.
” You guys did a great job on this, ” Thom says, running his hand over the metal curves of the car, lovingly. ” We don’t see much here we have to do, a couple of coats of primer, a little touch up and then two coats of paint. She will be a beauty…. ”
When you have spent hours and hours wearing respirators, paint dust all over your levi’s and buried in the creases of your shirt, it is good to hear compliments.
After the paint job, Weston and his dad will haul it home, put in the glass, the seats, attach the chrome and dashboard, hook up the electric and lights, start her up and take her for a victory lap around the block.
This 1960 El Camino will find her place in parades, car shows and Sunday afternoon drives.
These crowns are made from paper with printed jewels on the side. They adjust to fit all heads and there are plenty to go around. Customers can take them for free and kids are not the only ones that wear them.
Kings used to be in short supply, one to a country. In this age of mass merchandising, mass consumption, collective thought and identity politics, kings are no longer protected or worshiped. Now,with social justice warriors on the warpath, we must all be kings.
If you were King for a Day, what edict would you have your scribes put on a scroll and tack to telephone poles around town? Would you start a new holiday? Would you erase everyone’s debts? Would you let everyone out of prison? Would you throw a party? Would you ride the streets in a carriage and wave at your adoring subjects? Would you open your palace doors to the common folk?
Even with our lofty rhetoric, America is still run by royalty.
Congress will never take their crowns off and our President will never be allowed to put his on.
These days the only reality and royalty we follow lives in Beverly Hills.
Some photographs resonate.
This photo, hanging on a restaurant wall in an Albuquerque Olive Garden, resonates. It is a black, white, and gray ode to old age.
These three old men have seen history and are sitting on a bench watching life pass them by. Old men often have histories that are burnished and worn like rocks going through a rock shop tumbler. Their rough edges have been smoothed and now they lean on each other as they watch glorious young women flaunting the latest designer clothes, their trim bodies moving against skirts and blouses that can barely contain their curves.
These old men sit and their conversation moves from wars,to divorces,to children,to politics,to sex, to money.
Growing old is unavoidable but sitting on the right bench, in the right place, with the right people, is, in my mind, still a few years off for me.
Fooling myself,however, is something I have experience with.
This fountain stands in a plaza in Albuquerque’s Old Town and this morning, while Alan and I walk the square, local birds play and preen in its cool waters.
Birds enjoy showers and they don’t need soap, soap dishes, or towels.
From their songs, I don’t think they have a care in the world, and, at the moment, neither do we..
If I could sing like these birds, I would sing opera and clean up several times a day when it gets hot just because I could.
This morning, I enjoy the fountain, the birds and my brother’s company. I whistle ” Bye Bye Blackbird ” softly, and plan on coming back soon. Our family used to come to Old Town once a month to eat at La Placita and browse the shops around the square.
Life, I have heard people say, is ” for the birds.”
I don’t, for a moment, believe a word of it.
Sometime last night this homeless statistic rolled her shopping cart onto Ronald McDonald’s premises and parked it.
The Albuquerque homeless problem is ubiquitous even if un-employment is low and jobs are rumored to be everywhere. Most intersections in the better parts of town have panhandlers holding ” I’m Hungry ” signs right under City Hall notices that tell you not to give them a dime.
When McDonald’s opens at five this morning, Javier will come out and shoo this squatter off but she will be back tomorrow unless she finds a better place under a freeway overpass where homeless people’s cell phones, at night, look like bedroom night lights as they lean against overpass stanchions and surf the net.
This country has wealth but people are evenly divided on whether we should steal from the rich to take care of those who have and give nothing, or whether people are entitled to keep what they have worked for if they have broken no laws to earn it.
This cold morning, our squatter will come into McDonald’s and slump in a booth. We will buy him,her, or he/she a coffee and burrito. Even though we talk tough about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, we know bootstraps are not always handy.
Using band aids to treat cancer isn’t the best strategy but to leave a homeless hungry, with change in our pockets, would be criminal.
Halloween has crawled out of the grave for another year.
At a local Starbucks, Freddie doesn’t have to bone up on store policy, customer relations, or how to work the register. He hands out coffee and keeps his mouth shut because he rattles when he talks. This morning his fellow employees have a close hold on him and their cell phones, and, right now, are as dead to their employer as he is.
Mostly, these days, people are hooked up with their cell phones, deader to the world than even Freddie,and you can’t communicate with them unless you call them.
The boneyard, I glean from this morning’s Starbuck’s experience, is closer than I’d like to be and Halloween is definitely here.
Rubbing elbows with skeletons is not my usual cup of tea, but, in here, we don’t get to choose who we have drinks with.
What I really want to know is whether Freddy drinks Starbuck’s coffee, who is he dating in here, and what kind of golfer he is?
Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. Radiometric dating and other evidence say the planet was formed some 4.5 billion years ago. The world population is currently 7.53 billion people. give or take a few million.
Some currently accepted facts are:
1) Earth was once believed to be the center of the universe. 2) Earth is the only planet not named after a mythological God or Goddess. 3) Earth is the most dense planet in our solar system. 4) The gravity between the Earth and the Moon causes the tides. 5) The rotation of the Earth is slowing down. 6) The large amount of oxygen on Earth comes from our plant life’s consumption of carbon dioxide. 7) Earth has a very powerful magnetic field. 8) The Earth has an ozone layer which protects us from harmful solar radiation. 9) 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. 10) The first life on Earth started in the oceans. 11) Earth has relatively few visible impact craters. 12) The highest point on Earth is Mount Everest. 13) The lowest point on the planet is called the Challenger Deep. 14) Earth has one of the most circular orbits of all the eight planets. 15) A year on Earth is 365 days.
For 7.53 billion people, Earth is much the same in general, but very different specifically. An Amazon headhunter and a Wall Street stockbroker both have to hunt but their tools and techniques couldn’t be more different.
As far as we know, our planet is not stable and spins in space like a Christmas ornament blown by mysterious winds.
As far as we know, what happens to us might be of our own making.
As far as we know, facts are true until they are proven otherwise.
On Saturday mornings, the New Mexico Jazz Workshop jam is in order.
Open cases are spread on the floor, Real Books rest on stands,metal folding chairs have been unfolded, coffee is okay outside the rehearsal room, guitarists plug in amps, sax players suck on reeds, trumpet players move their fingers over three keys and look to the Gods for good chops.
We sit in a big circle and any person can call a tune out that they want the group to play.
Some tunes we can play well, some we can play, some we just pretend. Some play for fun, others have axes to grind. After playing the head twice, the caller of the tune solos first and then the spotlight moves to the next person around the circle, sometimes clockwise, sometimes counterclockwise. After everyone solos that wants to, the group plays the head twice and we wrap the tune up with a long fermata.
In the kitchen area of the workshop, by the frig and coffee maker, hangs a distinctive framed pencil drawing.
Jazz is about feeling but feeling doesn’t push your keys, blow air across a reed to make sound, provide air support to keep a true tone.
Feeling is huge, but, without chops, it isn’t going far.
This morning, in the rough, I don’t look for my errant drive. One of our foursome’s little dog, Winston, was bit by a rattler and died on another course a few weeks ago. A golf ball,even a new one, is not worth coming face to face with a poisonous viper.
Winston 1 never barked while we were putting though he sometimes ran up to the cup and looked down inside it to see what we were all looking at, then gave us a funny look when he didn’t see anything.
We all miss Winston 1, but Gary has already found Winston 2, a little bigger than his predecessor, looking much the same, but with a different personality..
Winston 2 spends most of his time, on the golf course,sleeping in his carry cage and exploring only when Gary lets him out on a leash.There are plenty of predators on a golf course and some of them have two legs.
None of us want to see a Winston 3.
Seeing a grown man cry is humbling.
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