In 1965, this gym was state of the art for our time in high school.
It had locker rooms for boys and girls, a weight room,offices for the coaches and staff. It had polished hardwood floors on the basketball court that gleamed and rows of wood bleachers that could be rolled out and back in depending on event requirements. In the gymnasium, band geeks performed concerts,the school had Homecoming, Pep assemblies,and yearly Prom. In P.E.,we guys rope climbed from the gym floor to the ceiling, touched an I beam and came down as fast as we could while our classmates watched and nervously waited their turn to climb up like Jack going up a beanstalk.
Money has been appropriated this 2018 to build a new state of the art sports complex for Manzano High School. The new facility is almost complete and all that is left to do is demolish this old – functional gym, scoop its pieces up with a big machine to be hauled away by another big machine.
In a world on the move, chasing its tail, collateral damage is just part of the new game.
Newer,Bigger Better keeps our country’s economy percolating.
Looking back is just for fools.
Brick and mortar are way too old school for our progressive modern lifestyles.
Tonight, at the Marble Street Brewery, in Albuquerque,” Group Therapy” commands the stage.
They rock out with ” Classic rock and roll “, blues, jazz , Latin, boogie woogie, funk, and even some gospel to keep the mood positive and the crowd seduced.
As our sun plummets, the brew pubs tanks look almost heavenly and food trucks, parked out front at the curb, provide new and old age eats to the hungry audience. The brewery sells its own brand of brews that come with names like ” Lizard Tail , ” Cactus Blossom, ” ” Marble Street Mirage” and they have started other locations in town as they begin their expansionary period.
Kids, not old enough to play adult games, play with blocks in front of the establishment and the neighborhood hasn’t yet been overwhelmed by street people drifting in from third street to panhandle, urinate on storefronts, exchange numbers for free medical care, bump fists to show solidarity.
At their drinking holes, Greeks discussed ” truth ” and ” beauty. ” Romans discussed ” taxes, barbarians and the provinces”. ” Americans talk about ” 401K’s, gas prices, Trump, and whether you can have a country without borders. ”
Kids, thank goodness, can play even in the worst of times and beer and music go together like salt and pepper.
The odds for shooting a hole in one,for the average golfer,on par 3;s, are 12500 to 1. For professional golfers, the odds drop to 2500 to one
In a tournament at the Tanoan Country Club, Scott beat the odds on the Acoma nine, #3, a 154 yard par 3 and shot his first hole in one after years of playing.
Using a seven iron, my iron shot was high, straight, hit the frog hair in front of the green, bounced, rolled towards the pin, and fell into the cup.
At first, none of our foursome realized what had happened but confirmed it on the green.
Now, when I hit an iron into any green, I expect my shot to fall into the cup.
Once you see you can do something, the odds of doing it again, increase.
The odds against me getting another hole in one seem suddenly bigger than they used to be.
Does shooting a hole in one make you a professional?
Golf is not a dangerous sport except to your ego.
It is not leaping out of an airplane with a small chute to land you safely. It is not driving a race car around curves over two hundred miles an hour. It is not getting tackled by a three hundred and fifty pound lineman who isn’t thinking of tucking you into bed.
This sign is posted at the Santa Ana Golf Course in Bernalillo, New Mexico.
We are in snake country in New Mexico even though New Mexico is one of our fifty U.S. states with Congressional Senators and Representatives and Spanish, as well as English, our official state languages. Despite our 107 year statehood,we have more in common with Mexico than the colonial red brick homes of Virginia, coon-skin hats and flintlock rifles.
Despite this snake warning, we golfers sometimes search for our bad shots in snake country. Our group of eight to twelve ” old men ” manage to play once a week, stocking up on ” birdie juice” to celebrate our one under par successes in a best ball team format.
If we had all paid attention to warnings in life, we wouldn’t be where we are today, riding around in golf carts while the rest of the world works.
Fish are streamlined for propulsion.
Their bodies create little friction between them and the water that supports them. Light filters down from the water’s surface where we watch them take graceful turns around their aquarium tank’s curves.
In another aquarium, jelly fish, who aren’t moving like the fish, have dangling tentacles shown off with back lighting.
The jelly fish are almost transparent, catching food in their tentacles and letting themselves be propelled by currents or by ingesting water and spitting it out to move in the direction of their prey.
They are other worldly.
Floating with ocean currents is smarter than fighting them.
Personally, I watch for tentacles, both in the water, and out, all the time.
Jellyfish aren’t the only organisms on this planet that have a sting.
This is not a happy tale.
Broken in a car crash ,Chris, flown by helicopter to the hospital trauma unit, is fed through a tube, breaths through a tube,has a sensor pinned into the top of his shaved head to reveal brain activity.
Staff shift his body position every four hours, nurses monitor instruments, follow Doctor’s orders, clean up movements. He is pale, his left eye is swollen shut.
This hospital is modern, with waxed floors, clean bathrooms, refrigerated air, a cafeteria and Gift Shop on the first floor. It has departments for every part of the body, doctors, nurses and staff with name badges.Security officers carry weapons. Visitors check in at the entry and get wristbands.
Chris’s mom sleeps on a cot in her son’s room.
Modern medicine does amazing things, but, right now, we need a miracle.
This situation is even beyond a mom’s ability to fix.
Watching my friend fight for his life, all we can do is pray that God is with him.
Men are struggling right now just to keep the pieces together.
This is an All Gender Restroom at the UC Irvine Medical Center in Los Angeles, California.
The worst thing about this sign is having to figure out where all these genders are suddenly coming from, and whether I can open the door, safely go inside, and use the bathroom without breaking any laws?
Life has turned complicated.
I’m going to have to find a special California State Dictionary so I can understand this state.
Apparently, your sex/gender is what you personally decide to call yourself, and, we just haven’t been looking at things the right way over the past several thousand years.
Not certain about the bathroom, I go ahead and use it and am careful to lock the door behind me.
None of us are exempt from nature calls despite what we call ourselves.
An Eagles hit in the early 70’s was titled ” Take it Easy. ”
“Standing on a Corner in Winslow, Arizona” was a lyric that became a real park at the Corner of Kinsley and East 2nd Street in the real town of Winslow.
Winslow isn’t big, just a small town on old Route 66 that is a place to gas up and walk the dog. It only takes ten minutes to pull off I- 40 and find the ” Easy ” corner. This ” place of interest ” has a bench, a few statues, a plaque to memorialize it, and, this early morning, a radiance, the calendar flipped back decades.
This morning, a street crew cleans up, using weed blowers to scoot leaves and papers onto a tarp that will be tossed into the back of a flatbed. They wear lime colored vests and hardhats and give me a quick nod as they go about their business. There are restaurants and curio shops nearby that sell Route 66 memorabilia but ” Closed” signs are up in most of the windows.
Standing on the corner, I watch a You Tube video of ” Taking it Easy. ”
The song and message still sound good.
It sounds like it should be our new National Anthem.
Long term residents, going back to the 1940’s and 50’s, who are still alive, talk in the hospital waiting room about California being a Garden of Eden.
” Down that street, ” one says, “: there were acres and acres of orange trees….. ”
” And grapefruits as big as your head, ” another chips in from his chair as he looks out a huge window on the third floor.
” When we were little, ” a gray haired matron with granny glasses says, almost so quiet you can’t hear her, “my little sister and I would walk to an orchard and buy a bag of lemons for home made lemonade. Our mother made it so sweet…..”
The Garden of Eden has been sold, divided into planned communities with covenants.
There are still berry farms scattered inside municipal Los Angeles though, operations that take up a few city blocks,not bulldozed by progress. This strawberry patch is on the street I follow to the University of Irvine Medical Center where Chris is on life support.
I imagine a little Japanese man as this farm’s owner and operator, who opens early and closes late, who uses a hoe to keep furrows clear of weeds, who carefully carries boxes of strawberries out to SUV’s for domestic Goddesses. His grandchildren help him, and,for lunch, he eats rice and fish at the small table back of his stand.
Some people are born to get dirt on their pants, hold soil in the palm of their hand, taste a fresh picked strawberry and let the juice run down their cheeks.
This strawberry patch is grounding me to the Earth today.
My Dad grew strawberries in New Mexico, not so long ago, and we all loved helping him, picking tomato worms off vines, dusting for squash bugs, weeding watering troughs on either side of his fast growing black eyed peas and cucumbers and okra.
It calms me to be in this strawberry field, praying Chris falls on the right side of life.
I don’t try one of the old man’s strawberries.
It is good enough for me just to know that our government still lets people grow their own food, and, especially, inside city limits.
Government’s wagging finger, saying ” No “, never seems to stop pointing at us these days.
When you see clouds turn this color, the sun obscured, visibility shrunk, the odds of it being the ” End of the World ” increase. I expect to witness armed Angels riding down out of the smoke on horses breathing fire, drawn swords ready to take off unrighteous heads and cut out un-repenting hearts.
On my way to California to see Chris in a trauma center,whisked close to death in a car accident, these clouds are brewing in the desert north of Phoenix. They are the color of burning rubbish and are caused by forest fires to the north of Flagstaff.
Ancient man must have seen these same clouds.
They would have said the Gods were angry.
We say a camper was careless with his matches.
Pulled off the road, taking pictures, I preview the end of our world.
We don’t all get out of this life the same way, but where we go next is a true travel mystery.
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