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?
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.
The Armijo hacienda began as one of the first homes in Albuquerque, but was long ago resurrected as the popular Old Town restaurant, ” La Placita. ”
Haciendas were self contained economically, spiritually, emotionally.
Several generations of family lived, worked, sustained themselves in these compounds where they farmed, herded livestock, made clothes and tools, used medicinal plants, entertained themselves at night on back patios under the stars. There were haciendas within yelling distance all the way from Mexico City to Santa Fe, nestled in the Bosque cottonwoods by the Rio Grande. Skirmishes with Indians and bandits were always part of their landscape.
In the 1700’s, this would have been a hard but peaceful life, far from the treachery of Europe and Old Politics, the power of the Catholic Church, the restless marching of armies across continents,flags of discovery and conquest planted on beaches around our planet.
Having lunch in a La Placita dining room, open ears can almost hear the animated dinner conversations of these early settlers.
Their conversation would not be much more different than ours today with family, friends, community, politics, religion, and gossip the main concerns.
The difference, between then and now, is that then, families lived, ate,worked, and talked together.
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.
Bennett’s Amusements moves in the day before an event, fences off their area at the Festival, back up huge equipment trucks, rides, and promotions. Agile carnies pick up wrenches and assemble a superstructure of steel connected by hundreds of feet of electric cables to a main generator run by diesel gas. Plain ole country dirt turns into an amusement venue.
In this circus there aren’t any animals or strongmen, no bearded ladies or human freaks. These are all protected species now, and midway visitors in 2017 are mostly interested in rides created by country bumpkins with time on their hands and a love for machinery.
Bennett’s, a small time outfit, moves across country, handling amusements in fields, shopping center parking lots and county fairgrounds.The king of the circus, Ringling Brothers, shut down last year and all that is left of the industry is ma and pa operations like this one.
Kids, these days, don’t run away to join the circus. Many just want to sing rap, get interviewed on television, and drive a nice muscle car..
I don’t know what is coming to replace Bennett amusements but it is not likely going to be something I like.
What people do to amuse themselves tells you who they are.
McDonalds was one of the first corporate giants to infiltrate American communities with cheap hamburgers, fast food, employee training programs, marketing strategies, toys for the kids, drive up windows, extended operating hours. You can dine in any corporate or franchise store and get sameness.
McDonalds leapfrogged across the United States leaving stores wherever its arches touched ground. Their business formula is so profitable the company has planted its logo worldwide and a generation of kids choose Egg Mc’muffins over frosted flakes.
Now Mickey’s has a new employee – the Big Mac Kiosk.
Machines make great employees. They aren’t late, don’t do drugs, don’t have fights with their spouse, don’t steal, don’t need a health care plan.
How does a society survive when its people are replaced by computers?
The Big Mac Kiosk shows the State of the Union better than a President’s speech.
This exterior wall is hung with mining mementos.
There are picks, shovels,axes, some wrapped with gauze, injured from too much use. There are scythes, traps for animals, lanterns, hammers, levels and long thick nails used to secure railroad ties upon which cars carried ore away from deep mines.
In the eighteen hundreds, young tough men prowled these streets.
Daily, they went underground into tunnels secured by hand cut timbers, never certain they would come out alive. They ate bad food on metal plates that doubled as gold mining pans in the river that tumbles through town and into the valley below.
In the winter, snow was up to their waists and bitter cold seeped through cracks in log houses that had been stuffed with newspapers and torn shirts to keep Old Man Winter from sneaking in.
Iron stoves, vented through the roof, got so hot they looked like meteors.
The sign on the wall says ” No Sniveling. ‘
If something can be done, do it.
If you can’t do it, find someone who can.
The pioneer spirit, in America, in 2019, is fighting for it’s life.
At seven in the morning, South Fork, Colorado is Closed.
The Rainbow Grocery, down from the Rainbow Motel, opens at seven this morning. The Rainbow gas station, next to the Rainbow Grocery, is open but their coffee is not good enough to make me want to pour a cup this early in the morning.
Across the highway, as fifth wheels and pickup trucks pound past, I spot the new Gallery Coffee Shop with lights on and movement inside.
Waiting till a seven thirty open, in front of the coffee shop’s locked front door, with last night’s raindrops still beaded on outside tables and chairs, I keep my dry spot on a bench and watch a delicate hummingbird cutting through the air like a seasoned helicopter pilot.
He sticks his proboscis into one of the plastic flowers of the hummingbird feeder just above my head and loads up with sugar.
When I raise my phone to capture his image, he darts away.
When the shop’s proprietor sees me, he unlocks his shop early and I step inside,order myself a hot coffee and pecan fried pie made by the Amish in nearby Monte Vista. We talk some about his ” artist ” life.
The western art displayed on the big open dining area walls took Frank thirty years to get to the point he can finish a small canvas in weeks instead of months. He tells me about his ” process of art ” as well as coming to South Fork from Texas in the summer months to paint and help his wife run their small business because his wife especially likes it here and there are tax advantages.
It takes skill and patience to make all these little lines in a cowboy’s face, make a horse’s mane look real on a flat surface. Frank says he has been drawing since he was ten years old and his wife right now is at a business breakfast in Monte Vista but will cheerfully take the reins of the shop in a few hours so he can go finish a new watercolor in his studio.
Hummingbirds, I Google, are cold blooded and, at night, perch on a tree branch, let their body temperature sink to conserve energy, and sometimes go into a torpor if it is really really cold.
In their state of torpor, the hummingbirds can dangle from a branch by one foot and appear dead.
We humans also know about torpor, but we don’t dangle from branches.
Leaving Antonito, Colorado, it is not hard to see two gleaming towers off to the east, the sun glistening off silver spires made out of hub caps, flattened beer cans, wire, window casements and whatever other material comes into the hands of it’s builder.
You drive a few blocks to the east, off the main highway, and, in a residential neighborhood, you come to temples created by a Vietnam vet who came back home after the war.
Dominic Espinosa, who prefers to be called ” Cano”, lives nearby the castle, in a little trailer, and tends to his garden, living off the land as he did when he was a kid with eleven brothers and sisters, his mother a cafeteria worker at a local school. There are interviews where he explains that ” Jesus lives in the castle, ” and that ” God built it. ”
Besides Jesus there are two crossed arrows at the entry to the yard that warn that alcohol and tobacco are poison, but marijuana is the best answer to many things.
It is normal to wonder about people, but the fact that one man would so consistently pursue a goal most others would label eccentric, causes me to think about personal obsessions.
On a personal level, Scotttreks not far from Cano’s castle.
Cano uses metal and wood while Scott uses words.
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