Drive In movies, in the fifties, were a popular family outing and also a place where teens, borrowing the family car, could get away and explore birds and bees in the back seat of station wagons.
The latest Hollywood movies were projected onto huge screens and patrons watched from their cars with sound provided by little speakers that hung on a partially rolled down car window. If you got hungry you walked down gravel, between cars, and bought Cokes and popcorn at a cinder block concession stand that had restrooms, tables to sit and eat, promos that told about coming attractions.
At night it was cool and pleasant and if you didn’t like the movie you could watch shooting stars or look for aliens on their way to Washington D.C.. The movie screen was enormous and much better than the little black and white television in your living room.
The 60th anniversary of the Sandell has arrived and the featured movie this Saturday, August 29th, is ” Love Me Tender ” with Elvis.
Deep in Jesus country, Elvis still gets air time. He is remembered as a rock and roll legend, a womanizer, a great entertainer who died middle aged and alone with a drug problem. He sang great gospel, served in the military as a regular enlisted man, and never lost his Southern roots.
Finding an operating drive in movie these days,that still shows movies, is almost as impossible as finding a roll of Kodak film, or a camera that even uses film. Technology is zipping past us more quickly than we can process its need or ethics. Humans being ruled by artificial intelligence is no longer the crazy science fiction we used to think it was. Drones are almost to our front doors delivering packages.
Clarendon is a small Texas town where my father, and his sisters, were raised and went to school. They used to ride a horse to class during the Great Depression.
When Elvis burst on the scene he must have looked, to them, like a madman.
He was a harbinger of things to come.
ABQ Marketplace on Louisiana has eclipsed Winrock Center, the original Albuquerque Mall.
While Winrock is now huge piles of dirt, exposed steel, jack hammered asphalt, chain link fences and construction signs, ABQ Marketplace is stocked with big name stores, food and restaurants, and stylish clothes that are already moving out of style. This evening shoppers jockey for parking spots and neon lights compete for human attention.
I sit outside the Apple Store and wait for Ruby to finish browsing Bebe’s. Watching her decide between dresses is a lot like watching paint dry and it goes easier if I sit out front and surf the net to see what Russia, China and the United States are up too in their latest wrestling match.
The Apple Logo is prominently mounted, above the Apple store’s front doors, highlighted by a spotlight. In diminishing light, clouds look as if they are plotting rain.
As powerful a mind as Steve Jobs had, he has moved on and other’s have picked up reins of his wagon and are driving it hellbent down winding mountain roads as outlaws try to steal his intellectual property.
Taking a bite out of an Apple has historic repercussions.
We still pay for Adam and Eve’s first unauthorized bite.
The Albuquerque Bio park is an oasis of water in the desert.
There is an aquarium, rose gardens, a gift shop and museum, a restaurant, and a little train that blows its whistle as it takes kids on a sedate ride through the grounds. The Park has been here over thirty years and is a result of private and public money pooled.
In the aquarium, Alma and I are below ground level, separated from fish by large glass panels that are the edge of their world and the beginning of ours.
In one tank, jelly fish float, almost transparent aliens with internal power plants lit up like Christmas ornaments.
Taking pictures for her Facebook pages, Alma returns to Marinduque in December. With family, a coconut farm, and the beginnings of a pig farm, she has reasons to be there. We humans have roots that keep us grounded. Jellyfish hold to nothing.
Recently an uncle who raised her and her brothers and sisters, after they were abandoned, passed. Working in Chicago, all she could do was wire money back to the Philippines and say a prayer for the man who took her in when no one else wanted her.
To have a hard life and still be enchanted speaks volumes about the human spirit.
This dark blue Ford Ranger has seen better days.
Once, it was new on the lot and a salesman kicked its tires, opened its doors and sweet talked clients into the driver’s seat to take a whiff of its new car smell. Windows opened and closed, air conditioning cooled and the heater warmed. The engine purred.
Now, doors are banged and there is rust where its skin has been punctured, windows are rolled down and have cracks that look like road maps. You aren’t going to see Cadillac’s or Volvo’s or Mercedes in a McDonald’s lot. You see old cars, used cars, cars that have things wrong but still get people to work if they are lucky enough to have a job.
On this vehicle the message is the same from every direction – Jesus Saves.
If someone driving this beat up pickup feels saved, I want to pick up their Bible and see what they have highlighted in yellow.
Automobiles can be terminal.
They are speeding metal coffins containing mortal bodies that crumple when hit, collapse when rolled over, compress and crush what is inside them when physics takes charge and momentum meets momentum.
Along New Mexico highways there are small Memorials built by roadsides to say good bye to loved ones who have become traffic statistics. The crash sites have been cleaned up, bodies interred, obituaries written, tears drained. All that is left is small remembrances by friends and family planted at the point where a spirit left this Earth and moved into the next world.
These heart felt and simple Memorials are often just simple white crosses with a name and date on them.
Some are elaborate with photos, dates of birth and death, artifacts from a person’s life like a high school graduation tassel or a string of prayer beads or a quote from the Bible written in indelible black ink on a cardboard sign.
i seldom stop but Memorials add up. I pass one at a time, but they have a cumulative effect, cause me to look at my speed, pay closer attention to the road, drink more coffee to stay awake.
The vast expanses of New Mexico reach away from the highways and it is hard to figure how two vehicles collide when there is so much space to avoid it?
Still, cars are machines operated by humans and human error is unavoidable..
A roadside Memorial is evidence of great pain and great love.
One wishes every death had such a Memorial to go with it.
This is what this road trip looks like from behind the wheel.
Ahead, there is a long rolling strip of Interstate split into two lanes with shoulders and entrances and exits. There are road signs, overpasses, and vehicles. Always there is sky and empty land stretching away from the road as you eat up miles and look for a good rational talk radio station coming to you from an underground bunker somewhere in Kansas where cows, corn, and missile silos peacefully co-exist.
Clouds hover like cartoons waiting for words.
I-40 is a main path connecting east and west and I am somewhere between Gallup and Flagstaff. This is Indian country, one of the highest concentrations of Native Americans in the country. Along the freeway you whiz past billboards promoting blackjack, cheap meals, entertainment, and hotel rooms. The casino parking lots have big rigs silent as drivers catch sleep and divert themselves from tedium.
Travel is what happens between your starting point and arrival point. It is often boring enough that I count cars, fence posts, telephone poles.
There is nothing happening here that anyone with an imagination would want to write about.
Los Angeles has Forest Lawn and Beverly Hills. Memphis has Graceland. Florida has Cape Canaveral. Texas has the Alamo. Albuquerque has the hit television series ” Breaking Bad. ”
This television show is a crime drama and crime and Albuquerque have more than a casual acquaintance. One can’t truthfully claim that Albuquerque is as bad as the show portrays it, but low life drama is not as uncommon on our streets as we residents would wish.
” Breaking Bad ” reigns as the Guinness Records most watched television series of all time. Its actors have won awards galore and the series has a cult following even after its dramatic final episode. A spin off series ” Better Get Saul ” has already been created and follows the vagaries of Saul, an ethically conflicted lawyer, who gets paid to keep guilty out of jail and lives off the change jingling in criminal pockets.
Those of us who live here tend to accept our city as ” already broken. ” We accept the way Albuquerque is – a laid back, sprawling country town pretending to be a big city. We are not surprised to see a Mexican flag flying in front of City Hall and Indians/non- Indians selling turquoise jewelry under the porches of the La Placita restaurant in Old Town.
Neal, Joan and myself finish our Old town stroll and drive to lunch at our favorite red/green chili haunt – El Patio, by the University of New Mexico. On our drive we pass locations from the Breaking Bad series and find them to be as sleazy as the TV show shows them.
In a terminally ill world, Walter White and Jesse Pinkman are all too familiar.
Reality and fiction, these days, look like twin brothers.
Albuquerque, for all it’s bad reputation, is still where I live and call home, by my own choosing.
I don’t expect our city, even with Hollywood’s meddling, too ever change what it is, a northern territory of Mexico.
When I travel to foreign ” Third World ” destinations, I am never far from my comfort zone.
This morning the clean up crew is roosting in a tall dead tree across the bridge that gets you over Percha Creek into Hillsboro, New Mexico.
This tree is dead as their breakfast and gives the buzzards a good place to open their wings and catch the sun’s heat, talk about yesterday’s trips over hillsides, tell grisly buzzard jokes.
Buzzards are a part of western living. In the evening, before the sun goes down, you watch them gliding on updrafts of wind off the hillsides, not in a hurry, conserving energy.
This morning they look big and healthy.
Buzzards, for those who haven’t been paying attention, share many things in common with the Hillsboro residents.
Even if you don’t see them, there are residents in coveralls sitting in these tree branches too, waiting patiently for the next town person to move up to the graveyard on the nearby hill.
In a place like Hillsboro, the pickings are small and nothing goes to waste.
Anything you get your hands on here is worth something to somebody.
The General Store and Cafe is not really a General Store.
You can’t buy barbed wire, bullets, hard candies scooped from an oak barrel. There aren’t bags of flour to load into wagons, fishing hooks or Doctor Edward’s best elixer to cure aches and pains in all places.
The Hillsboro General Store and Cafe has food and gifts and memorabilia. There are ancient fans dropping from high ceilings, glass bottles and posters, an old manual cash register that still works, a funky front door that opens with a little latch bandaged up with white tape like a patient in an emergency ward.
This morning town residents and visitors sip coffee, chat, tell stories, use free wi-fi.
Breakfast is good and there is something comfortable about a place where everything is older than you are. This is a community but John tells me it is nothing like the old days when people watched out for each other, kids raised hell within limits, and a favor was always repaid. When John’s wife, Susan, wants to call her kids she still has to drive out of town on a hilltop by the Hillsboro graveyard to get cell service.
The General Store and Cafe, in operation since 1879, will go on longer it seems, until no one wants to open up and light the stove.
With over a hundred years of life here, you can feel ghosts.
If this place makes it another hundred it will most likely look just like it does now.
The sun fights hard to get through single pane windows that haven’t been washed on the outside since the last rain.
Some got advice from Oprah and when she retired they lost their advice fountainhead. Some find guidance at church. Cable channels are replete with soothsayers, doom mongers, all around screwy prophets who have kind words out of one side of their mouth and dire warnings out of the other. News stands are packed with visions of financial collapse or piles of money waiting to be taken home in a wheelbarrow and all you have to do is buy the $99.99 wheelbarrow.
Some of us have simpler ways to get advice.
At China King, a Chinese buffet on Juan Tabo in Albuquerque, one of the girls brings my bill on a little plastic tray with my own personally picked Chinese fortune cookie.
I open it with a slight crunch and carefully pull out a paper banner with words printed in light blue ink that are fuzzy.
” The answers you need, ” it reminds me, ” are right in front of you. ”
I pay my bill and go back to work full and happy. Since everyone has advice, it shouldn’t be expensive. It is true you don’t have to travel far for answers.
It is knowing the right questions to ask that stops me cold in my tracks.
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