Paintings come in all sizes according to the shape of an artist’s vision.
Many artists begin painting using pre-stretched canvases you can buy at Hobby Lobby, then matriculate to larger sizes,then begin stretching their own canvas over manufactured frames, gesso the canvas, and paint up a storm with brushes, knives, sponges, cloths, and anything else that grabs their fancy.
When one makes big art, issues come knocking.
Are walls big enough to display the compositions?
Should you put an inexpensive frame on a work you have spent hundreds of hours to complete?
Do you have a vehicle big enough to move them?
Keeping these art works safe is a duty, finding homes for them is a calling, having them near is comforting.
Mom’s come with a myriad of tangibles and intangibles, and, right now, my mom’s tangible art works are safely stored.
Mom intangibles I also keep stored, in other places.
You can’t put a price on intangibles.
Crazy glued to the dashboard, these critters listen to talk radio.
They are also familiar with Top Fifty tunes, political lies, opinions, advertisements, trivia, propaganda, ” Fake News” and World News. Some of these critters seem like animals we should have as friends, others look like aliens come to take over Earth and send us to salt mines worse than the ones we are already working.
Hollywood cranks out critters each year, as fast as screenwriters and makeup crews can design them. Our television and movie oeuvre is full of ” out of this world ” characters invading Earth, demons terrorizing children from dark places, galactic battles, romantic meetings between vampires and humans.
These guys and gals seem approachable. They have little tails, pointed ears ,protruding snouts, cute penetrating eyes. They have red and white stripes and dots, camouflage that is useless in our drab urban world.
Glued in place, they have their best conversations when their driver has locked his car and and gone to pick up a pack of cigarettes , a six pack of beer, and lucky condoms.
They have a point of view that heats up as the temperature inside the car reaches 120 degrees F.
The thing interesting me the most is the mental stability of the human who glued them to his dash.
If sticking plastic critters on your dash was a sane idea you would see it more often.
The Sandia Mountains are pink at dusk. The setting western sun turns them the color of watermelons, for which they were named by indigenous Indians thousands of years ago.
Sandia’s peaks were thrust up in the last ten million years during the formation of the Rio Grande Rift and they form Albuquerque’s city limits on its east side. The rock core of this range consists of granite, approximately 1.5 billion years old. The rock is covered, at lower altitudes with natural grasses, cactus and junipers, and, at higher elevations ,pine trees and wild oak. There are trails leading down to up and up to down both sides of the mountains and there have been fatalities here to careless visitors.
Sandia Cave, an archeological site discovered in the 1930’s, shows evidence of human use from 9000 to 11,000 years ago although some say the area was salted with artifacts from somewhere else to make a false history seem to be true.Those ancient peoples would never have been able to dream of a tram ride that would take them from their front doors to the mesas below where they hunted.
We take the tram up today and Joan, visiting, waves at me from a platform where the tram docks at the top.
When people visit Albuquerque, there are sights to see, things to do.
Joan is a good traveler.
Her feet are on the ground even if we are two miles into the sky.
Snakes don’t have fingers, toes, arms, or legs. They are coldblooded and need sun to get stirring. Cultures throughout human history have worshiped them, reviled them, and eaten them.
For photography and curiosity reasons, Joan, visiting from Boston, has pinpointed snakes as things to see and do in Albuquerque.
The Albuquerque Rattlesnake Museum is reviewed on Trip Adviser, open for those tired of New Mexican chili, curios, Navajo pottery, white church spires looking down on a park gazebo,adobe architecture, private residences with signs warning “Trespassers Beware.”
These snakes are behind glass. They represent more than one species and are hidden before our eyes in their captivity, the same colors as the leaves, rocks, sand that surround them. They are not loquacious creatures and use simple rattles to warn us away.
Snakes don’t win popularity contests, but, this morning, they are strangely beautiful, quiet, pensive in their captivity.
Snakes don’t hold a candle to human scheming but, this morning, they are exceptionally photogenic.
Route 66 is the most famous United States highway that joined others to became the U.S. Interstate Highway system that linked our 50 states, made remote places accessible, let restless spirits roam to where they belonged, spawned a history of music, posters, legends and stories.
From November 26, 1926 until June 26, 1985 the 2,448 miles of highway joined Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico,Arizona and California. It started in Chicago and ended in Los Angeles and brought millions of people to the Pacific Ocean, the end of the line for souls tired of the Depression, the Crash of Wall Street, the Dust Bowl, World War One, World War 2., conformity and financial ruin. California sparkled in their eyes like the gold in its rivers and mountains.
Roads have notoriety in human history. The Romans built roads to link their empire. Jesus rode a donkey on a dirt road into Jerusalem. The Oregon Trail opened the West to city slickers looking for a better life.
If Route 66 kept going, across the Pacific to the Orient, I would put my bicycle on it and pedal all the way till everyone I met spoke a different language.
Roads that take me to new places are hard to say no too.
The saying used to be ” An apple a day keeps the Doctor Away. ”
In 2017, there were 27,339 Starbucks stores globally.
Back in World War 2, coffee kept pilots awake on long flights to targeted cities, helped wives and girlfriends who watched the postman walk up to the front door with fear. On Route 66, coffee was served in diners for five cents a cup to wash down blue plate specials, chicken fried steak with mixed vegetables, potato’s and gravy. Coffee was a working man’s drink.
At a recent European Cardiac Society Congress,however, coffee was recognized as having significant positive correlations with keeping coffee drinkers alive. According to their most recent scientific study, older people drinking two cups a day of Joe had a thirty percent reduction in mortality rates. Coffee was discovered to lower one’s risk for Alzheimer’s, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, liver disease and Parkinson’s.
This sign, says, with certainty, that ” three cups a day keeps the Doctor away.
With Doctor’s track records, mortality should be on every patient’s mind.
If drinking coffee made us young again, Starbucks would triple in size overnight.
In 2018, it still costs to park, but inflation has kicked up the price.
In older times, Albuquerque Old Town visitors would pull their 55 Chevy’s into parking spots under towering cottonwoods, next to adobe walls built in the early nineteen hundreds. They would not lock their car doors and drop quarters into the slots of this triangular collection box to keep legal and be within walking distance of the Main Square.
Sometimes, there was an old man sitting in the shade reading a newspaper, collecting quarters from the parking box and secreting them into a sock in his right suit coat pocket. There was a half empty flask, bearing his initials, in his left suit pocket.
There were few patrons then that didn’t pay. In the fifties, people had money in their pockets and a conscience.
I miss seeing the old man reading his newspaper, tapping his feet to Mexican music on his little GE radio, waving at families coming to Old Town on a Sunday afternoon for a stroll down memory lane.
For city folks, parking has always been a big deal.
We don’t take our cars to heaven, but, if we did, this old man will be waiting to collect our quarters in the big parking lot just out front of the Pearly Gates.
Paying parking for eternity sobers up even the worst drunk.
Five o’ clock a.m. comes early and us boys head to the McDonalds at Lomas and Juan Tabo in Albuquerque most every morning of the week. Some of us read the newspaper, others do crosswords, some eat, most drink coffee, most tell jokes that are occasionally funny, and I catch up on travel posts.
Art and Robert are looking up the age of Martina Navratilova for a newspaper brain challenge while John waits for an answer to his latest question. J,B, buys coffee and Claudia serves up another morning like the last. Mario and Sid will come in around six thirty.
Having coffee every morning, at the same time and place, with the same people, gives me the feeling that the world is stable.
Claudia gets paid to be here, and, bless her heart, she puts up with us.
By tonight we more than likely won’t know much more than we think we already know.
If we could find cheaper coffee and a place closer to our homes, we would probably go there.
At a certain age, compromise is what you settle with.
Most people call these ” clouds ” and stop.
A few go further and describe them as ” beautiful clouds,” or, if a scientist, ” atmospheric conflagrations. ”
My aunt called them ” buttermilk ” clouds when she was hunched in a bird blind shooting photographs of eagles nesting in the top branches of cottonwood trees on her ranch.
Tonight, these graceful puffs of smoke move languidly through the cerulean sky, just before sunset turns the heavens reddish yellow.
These cloud fingers are delicate as a concert pianists hands,look like Octopus tentacles reaching for prey near a coral reef, resemble the crust on a fine pastry in your town’s best bakery.
No matter how you describe this natural phenomenon, the safest posture is to bow your head and appreciate your good fortune for a world you didn’t make but get to live in.
The creek is in better shape today than fifty years ago.
Then, creek banks were crowded with brush. Now, you can stand on the bank and easily cast your tackle. There are still cat tails in the creek but they are controlled by a local wildlife biologist for a monthly stipend.
Fifty years ago there were perch in the water, small fish that strike impulsively, put up a fight, and have lots of bones to work around at the dinner table. We ate them fried in a blanket of corn meal along with cornbread, black eyed peas and Texas toast fixed by Grandma. In the creek, we kids waded in undershorts seining for minnows to use as bait. For city kids, the creek and the ranch were a place to look forward to visiting when school shut down for the summer.
The water today is dark, opaque, ten foot deep in the middle. It’s surface is a mirror reflecting trees on the other side of the bank. Like so much of nature, you can feel a lot more beneath the surface than you can see.
Growing up, I had no idea I would be fishing the creek when I got old.
Even the future can’t swim away from the past.
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