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.
Rainbows aren’t discriminating about where they appear.
This hint of a double rainbow gracefully arches over an Albuquerque Wal-Mart that has its own version of golden arches inside.
Rainbows tell me that there is more than just here and now.
Scotttreks and rainbows have had conversations before, my last rainbow sighting in Belize on the way back from a snorkel trip at Hol Chan with sharks.
This rainbow is almost as good as the one I saw in San Jose, Costa Rica, outside the Hotel Aranjuez.
Rainbows are nature’s brushstrokes, and, as a painter, I’m hooked on color.
If I were a rainbow, though, I would find a better place to do my shopping.
In Charlie’s front entry, his project materials are carefully spread on the floor.
There are drills and hammers, paint brushes, screwdrivers, scissors and a set of instructions, if needed.
In Charlie’s newest project, the rocking horse rockers are made first with each part drawn on good wood, cut, sanded,primed and painted. The next step is attaching the separately made body and legs of the horse, to the rockers, with glue and thick screws. The last steps are doing details; a bridle, a saddle with stirrups, a mane, eyes, a mouth and tail with accessories from his wife Sharon’s sewing room.
The rocking horse, when time to visit arrives, will be loaded in the back of their SUV and delivered in person to Memphis, Tennessee.
At night, Meghan will talk to her horse softly, and, when things are tough, will wrap her little arms around the horse’s broad head and give it a kiss.
There is always more to a rocking horse than a set of instructions, screws and nails, and paint.
Charlie takes everything into consideration.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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