Sitting in Moss Motors’s waiting area getting an oil change for the Santa Fe, because on Wednesday we’ll embark on a 4,000-mile round trip for an art show Karen’s in.
And since I’m “writing” on my phone — how I wish I could write everything in my Moleskine with my Parker fountain pen with blue ink, but then I’d lose my three readers — I’ve decided to succumb to the humanity of my already thick and middle-age thickening thumbs and from the next paragraph onward will not correct misspellings nor worry about grammar. Auto-correct and predictive writing, as we all know, can come up with wild interpretations of said misspellings.
Ya know, I shook hands with someone recently with much thicker thumbs. He even had a thicker hand, thicker neck and thicker forearms. I don’t know where I was going with that — other than to say that growing up in New York City doesn’t develop anything thick other than ones ability to schnoozr. That’s shmooze. I knew something would get misspelled and I’d have to clarify, because shnooze is something I wanted to. SME sure I clarified. All sorts of problems in this paragraph.
If you’re still reading, I must tell you that I am mot going to edit out anything in the previous paragraph, because I’m here to produce content for the blog and not worry so much about sounding good. In fact, I think the Provia laralgeal — that’s “previous paragraph” — proved nothing but that New York City residents are somehow thin-minded enough to pay too much attention to others’ thickness of body parts.
At this point I sound foolish and cringy even to myself but that’s ok this is about stream of consciousness. (Even if one doesn’t share one’s stream of consciousness.) But it’s not like I’m doing — going — to share a dream with you that, with stream of consciousness, would take me all oil change to explain and into overhaul of my car.
I’m really doubting whether to hit publish on this piece. It royally sucks — that almost autocorrected into something else but somehow corrected Lk on its — on its own — to ensure that I criticized myself. “Criticized” of course came up as predictive text.
Last time I was here it was with the Ford truck, which had a problem with the master cylinder. Or the master cylinder had a problem with something else. All I know is that the words “master cylinder” appeared in the paperwork with the total due, and it reminded me that in need to learn to correct certain automotive problems on my own.
If I did that, though, I might have less time to paddleboard or drive to Daily Donut.
I think that last paragraph was a lame attempt at humor but I’m going to leave it. I made a promise to you earlier than I wouldn’t correct the spelling of words, and with that goes the concomitant promise to you od allowing myself to look both foolish and immature. And random. And bored.
Which I am.
Typically, I’d try to work on my laptop while waiting, but Miss is always quick — I hope you know that that M word was misspelled from the name of the company to this; does society really say “Miss” so and so anymore? I kind of thought that was taboo. Has woke culture disallowed “miss”? If I meet a single woman, should I not say “Hello, Miss ___”? But I’d she really — *is* she really — single or is relationship status now always define by Facebook — “it’s complicated” — and is this single woman a woman in truth or is she really a non-binary entity. Should I instead not say “Miss” anything and instead use the greeting, “Good morning, You Complicated Non-Binary Entity”?
I actually did correct that last sentence’s spelling mistakes because I wanted to get one correctly spelled snark into this post.
And now, Dear Reader, I must choose to hit “Publish” or “Draft” or “Delete.”
The latter would be a waste of my time just now.
The middle option would be just that: middle; a half-measure.
The first — to “Lubkish” — Lubkishes are rare and predatory creatures lurking in the Wisconsin woodlands — seems appropriate because then my time here would have been productive.
Child adoption stories are like winding Texas Hill Country roads. To enjoy them fully, you have to start at the beginning.
So, first things first.
If you missed reading from the beginning of this series, you are encouraged — nay, exhorted — to go back and start from the beginning. If you start here, I’ll look like a crappy writer, and you’ll go away very confused.
Neither of us wants that.
So if you’re in a rush, slow down. Skip work if you must. (Don’t tell your boss I told you to.)
Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect anonymity.
I was able to locate an address that was connected to her name, though online information is often dated. Still, I sat on that information for a couple weeks. I knew how to contact her with a letter, but I didn’t know if I should contact her at all. Or, if I should, how would I write it in order to respect her privacy? Perhaps a husband or other family member, not knowing about me, would open the letter and this would cause a huge rift on her end. I spoke with a trusted friend, then prayed for three days, then decided that even if I never heard back from her, knowing she existed would be enough. The calm in knowing I could take a proactive step to reach her was enough. Nothing more was needed.
From that place of calm and peace I wrote to her, knowing that anything in return would be icing on the cake. There was a certain undeniable selfishness in my decision to write, of course, because anyone would be a little curious about meeting one’s birth mother, but the disruption on the other end would be completely unknowable.
After addressing her as Mrs. ___ (her married name, which I learned from the newspaper article), I wrote “My name is Howard Freeman, and the following information is confidential, so I hope you are in a place where you can have privacy.” I wanted her to be able to react privately to the contents. I outlined how I had first connected with my biological father, who offered to vouch for me if she had doubts about my intentions. With Bob’s permission, I included his phone and email.
Then I wrote, “If you are indeed my biological mother, I want to say first how grateful I am to you, how much I have always wanted to meet you, and how much I admire what you did in 1962-1963 to bring me into the world. You have been a ‘hero’ of mine, and that’s no exaggeration.” If she were to read this letter and not be able to or not want to meet, I wanted her to know that what she did was the “right” thing for me. I figured that she must have made peace with her decision in order to move on with her life, but if there was any remaining doubt, I wanted to dispel it. I was later to learn how shameful it was for an unmarried girl (she was 18) in the early ‘60s and from her social circle to go through what she did. I was her “secret,” which her immediate family never spoke about again.
After some brief family history and current family details, I gave her my contact information including my email address and opened the door for her to be in touch.
I concluded my letter with, “If you are not the right person, I want to sincerely apologize for what must come across as a bizarre intrusion. I am truly sorry.” Again, I wanted to protect her privacy if someone else read the letter. You never know someone’s situation. “Please know that I respect your decision either way, and if you are my biological mother and this is my only contact with you, please know that I have had nothing but love for you — always have, always will.”
I signed it “With deep affection, Howard Freeman.” I had wanted to say, “Love, Howard,” but that seemed miles away from where we were in a relationship that was both real yet unrealized. I put a stamp on the letter, wrote “Private and Confidential” in the lower left corner, and mailed it. When the letter left my fingertips on December 11, 2019 — an act within my control — I knew that the next step was out of my control. She’d get the letter or she wouldn’t. She’d read it or she wouldn’t. She’d respond or she wouldn’t. While these outcomes were out of my control, it was a different feeling than what I experienced as a child having no control whatever. These now were intentional moves. Surrendering to the unknown consequences of a well-considered action is different than the self-imposed powerlessness of obsession. I felt strangely peaceful.
I counted the days it must have taken for my letter to arrive on her end. I allowed for a few days for her to react, perhaps some more time for her to consider or discuss with family, and then on December 18, a Wednesday shortly after Noon, I was checking my personal email and saw a message that had the subject header “Life” and which had this first sentence: “Dear Howard, Yes, I am your birth mother.”
The feeling upon reading, “Yes, I am your birth mother” can be described only with words we reserve for music we hear that transports us, or a sunset that makes us pause with awe and wonder, or seeing one’s first-born child come into the world, especially looking into the eyes of my first son in 1999, since he was the only blood relative I’d ever met. Reading those opening words was sublime, ineffable. Yet, strangely, they were also normal. They made sense. They grounded me while also freeing me. Yet as extraordinary as those words were, they’d be eclipsed soon by meeting her.
They have 2 syllables in the first line, 4 in the second, 6 in the third, 8 in the fourth line, and just 2 in the last line. Cinquains do not need to rhyme, but you can include rhymes if you want to.
Child adoption stories are like winding Texas Hill Country roads. To enjoy them fully, you have to start at the beginning.
So, first things first.
If you missed reading from the beginning of this series, you are encouraged — nay, exhorted — to go back and start from the beginning. If you start here, I’ll look like a crappy writer, and you’ll go away very confused.
Neither of us wants that.
So if you’re in a rush, slow down. Skip work if you must. (Don’t tell your boss I told you to.)
Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect anonymity.
Thirty minutes later, I got a call. The name Bob Lewis appeared over the number I had added to my Contacts list. I let it ring perhaps four times, petrified, and then let it go to voice mail. Don’t ask me why; perhaps more fear about theory becoming reality. I immediately listened to the message, which started out, “Well, Howard,” and he laughed — it sounded winsomely conspiratorial — “be careful of what you wish for…” and he left a light-hearted but respectful voice mail. As I’ve pleasantly come to know, he laughs easily and also has a serious, intense side. Intensity, I’ve learned, is genetic.
I walked from our house to a pond nearby. It was a warm morning for November, and I paced a few times before taking a deep breath. (It’s true what they say about taking a deep breath before doing something difficult.) I tapped on his number and heard the ringing on his end.
He answered and, knowing my number and that it was me, said something like, “Hey, hey, Howard!” While I can’t recall the exact words, I remember that the tone between us was warm, even intimate, and easy-going. The connection was instant. While I hadn’t really considered him as much over the years as I had my mother – I had no ill will toward him at all; I merely didn’t have the same mystical or physical connection with him as I had with her; I have since learned that mothers and sons, in particular, have a very special bond — he immediately took on height, width and depth when before he was but a shadow.
We found ourselves laughing, sharing information back and forth, finding commonalities and generally just enjoying each other not only as blood relatives but also as two men who had more in common now than an hour earlier.
Toward the end of the hour, I said, “Oh, Bob. I almost forgot to mention, I know my name at birth. It was ‘Robert Doyle Macey’.” He paused and then exclaimed, “Bingo!” That word, bingo, opened up the path to meeting my mother.
Bob had been reluctant to share even one of the very few details about her that he remembered from decades ago, and while the remaining part of our morning conversation is murky in my memory, I was able finally to find her through an internet search. Her maiden name was Barbara Doyle Macey. I had Robert Lewis’s first name, and her middle and family name.
When I saw the first photo of her, from 2015 in an article in her town’s local newspaper, I sat back in my chair. I had been able to answer the question, the superficial yet all-important one, that had been foremost on my mind since I was five. “What does she look like?” She was indeed beautiful, as I’d been told. More than that, though, this was my mother.
As much as I knew over the years that out there somewhere was a woman who had carried me nine months and given me life, a woman who had felt unable to care for me yet wanted me to have a good upbringing, a woman who might or might not still be alive or, if alive, might not want to see me, this was documented proof that she existed. I knew of course that I had a mother – I hear it’s rare that one doesn’t have one – but it didn’t become real until I saw her photo.
I wept.
I had built and fortified years of emotional walls and barriers. With that photo, those all came crashing down.
There’s something about doing lap after lap — and the 25-yard length achieves this effect more than does a 50-yard pool — that brings the swimmer into something like a meditative trance.
Between breathing and the repetitive and — if done right — well-timed flip turns, every 11 strokes give or take, the body falls into a rhythm where the rhythm becomes one’s sole focus. Almost all but that rhythm is tuned out.
Breathe, stroke stroke stroke, breathe, stroke stroke stroke, breathe, stroke stroke stroke, breathe, stroke stroke; turn. SLAP! You feel your ankles and lower calves hit the water with a satisfying completion of one length.
Repeat for 100 yards, rest; then 200 yards, rest; then 400 yards, rest…
The lifeguards, rotating every 15 minutes, wear red one-pieces or shorts and have skin made golden by hours under the Texas sun. They are only kids — probably college students at the oldest. The manager is in his late 20s or early 30s. They watch me because they have to, but maybe they watch me extra closely thinking, “I wonder when this old guy is going to push himself too hard and I have to drag him out. I wonder how much he weighs.”
That thought vanishes as I concentrate on my breathing.
I’m out of shape. Or maybe I’m merely pushing myself to a place I’m out of shape for. I start to consider stopping short of the next yardage I’m trying to reach. But I relax and tell myself, “I love swimming; I love to see the water rush by my mouth as I turn my head to breath; I love to feel the water move beneath my body and watch my arms extend out in front of me.”
It’s an activity — swimming — that’s not mimicked anywhere else in my life. Walking, running, lifting weights, even push-ups and sit-ups, are all found elsewhere in some form. When in the water, one either treads water (also not mimicked anywhere), floats, sinks, or swims. Water and swimming are, at some point, necessary partners.
When finished with my desired laps, I get out of the pool and feel both the hot sun and also the promised fatigue in my arms and chest and back.
I dry off and walk toward the locker room, hoping my upper body leads the way while also self-consciously shielding my stomach with a towel. It is that part of me and everything attached to it that would justify a lifeguard’s earnings, and then some.
The corner of Schreiner and Hays Streets in Kerrville, Texas.
There’s a building–pictured above–that has been somewhat of a dream of mine.
Like most dreams–whether of people, places or things–it is unlikely to come to fruition. Not only because I lack the skill set to make it happen (“skill” including the capital) but also I don’t have the immediate motivation to create it as I do to dream aloud of it.
But unlike many other kinds of dreams, my pondering it, ruminating over it, letting my eyes caress the details of it, this dream seems to be a socially acceptable thing, and so I’ll write about it.
The lot is up for sale, at least it was until recently. When I passed by last week, I didn’t see the Brinkman Commercial sign on it. If it’s sold, my dream still holds.
Here are its features:
Artist’s rendering of new Broadway Bank building. SOURCE: The Daily Times
A corrugated metal structure, which I’d keep, though I could see it getting hotter-n-hell with the material heating up in the summer. There must have been a decent cooling system there before, so I’d leave that to the engineers and architects to figure out. All I know is that the corduroy effect is a pleasant one to my eye, and it’s not the ubiquitous limestone or sandstone.
Even the new Broadway Bank building on Main and Sidney Baker, though its smooth exterior emits a nice modern effect, has a homogenous beige façade that reflects the primary demographic of its account holders.
The east side, on the corner, has a ~20 x 10 foot slanted roof “shack” that appears snapped onto the larger building almost like a LEGO piece. Lacking much light, that would need to be remedied if it were to serve as the retail place I would hope it to be. More windows of course, but maybe even a large skylight, since the harsher afternoon light might be partly shielded by the main building, or could be designed to be.
The two sets of huge sliding doors on Hays must stay. They are fabulous.
There’s a dirt and scrub lot to the south–the left of the photo where the trees are.
What would this whole building and lot be used for?
It would be a coffee house/artists’ maker space/retail shop.
It’s a block away from the newly renovated H-E-B. It’s two blocks up and one over from Pint and Plow. Therefore, it’s within walking distance of other frequently visited locations.
I may be unfair in my distinction here, but describing locations as how many “blocks” away from each other they are is a pedestrian measurement system. Drivers measure distances in time: 1 minute, 5 minutes, “about a half hour” away. Time in a car means nothing to a pedestrian, who walks about 3.5 to 4 miles an hour (if brisk). I knew exactly how long it would take me to walk twenty blocks in New York City, and there was never any “traffic” to speak of. Even meandering clots of tourists didn’t require me to slow down or be fined for speeding in a Work Zone.
Granted, places like Fredericksburg have most of their walkable area on the main drag. But it seems that the city of Kerrville will be stymied for economic growth–not only by not having additional businesses here but also the accompanying population growth of younger families that bring vitality and tax dollars–until we string together more areas to which people can walk and walk between. Again, Fredericksburg has proven that people will walk around in Texas in the summer. Consumerism, after all, makes us do crazy shit.
The inside of my building there on Schreiner and Hays would feel open and airy on the inside. It would keep the trusses exposed and perhaps have large fans pulling the hot air up and out. Convection? I’m purely speculating here and throwing around multi-syllabic terms to sound more informed.
You enter off Hays, through those sliding doors, which are open most of the year and create additional air flow. Much like Pint and Plow, there is a bit of outdoor dining in front (along Hays), and then most dining and drinking happens inside. Maybe some happens in the lot, which is cleared out, with those cool-looking light bulbs hanging from trees strung across the area. Picnic benches allow us to enjoy the climate most of the year (like Pint and Plow or Hays City Store).
As you walk through the main inside area, off to the right (the west side of the building), there is an artists’ “maker space.” Here, artists of various kinds can paint, do metal work, sculpt, etc. Maybe there’s a plexiglass divider to cut down on noise. Or maybe there are times that quieter creation (painting, jewelry design) can be done during dining hours, and other art (metal work with welding, carpentry with table saws) that’s done after hours. That space is rented out.
The neighborhood is mostly commercial, but there are some residences, so to keep the nighttime noise level to a minimum its license for live music would be limited to acoustic.
The retail space on the corner would sell merchandise like Pint and Plow has, branded around the space. It would also sell some of the local art made on site. And, of course, it would sell what seems to most people as a square peg in a round hole but, for me, is an essential: snap shirts.
I know.
Seems a bit random.
But without the snap shirts, the whole project just doesn’t come together for me.
I’ve decided to bring myself down to earth in this post, given my quasi-… no, my very real — if well-meaning — recent soapbox post, which always puts me in a position of standing too high up, wobbling as it were on a crate that was meant for carrying items rather than one man’s opinion.
I will tease myself.
Long ago, one of my relatives was playing Trivial Pursuit and the question came to him, “What man-made structure is 13,000 miles long, 30 feet wide and 20 feet tall?” The relative, probably distracted with something else like getting more beer and pretzels, but needing to give an answer said, “The business building at Harvard.”
This was not the correct answer.
The answer, I might have conjectured if I were in the room back then, is “The wall separating the U.S. and Mexico in 2020.”
This, too, is incorrect.
What’s worse is that I am usually pretty savvy about maps, topography, and having a sense of direction. I am my own best GPS. But with our trip back from Ruidoso to Kerrville, one of my reasons for taking the route we did was ostensibly to see part of “the wall.” This was not only unfulfilled but also was innocently — nawwww, c’mon: naïvely — conceived.
I lobbied successfully for the blue — and longest — route home.
As I mentioned last time, we had three routes we could have taken, and I lobbied successfully for the longest of the three.
Why, you ask?
Well, along this route, there appeared to be on Google Maps an unusual landmark/structure — not sure even what to call it — and it was this entity that was in part causing my intrigue.
You see it, don’t you?! Help me out here.
When I zoomed in on Google Maps, I saw the following land mass:
Well, you say, it’s obviously a mountain range, you north-easterner, you Yankee.
It didn’t seem so obvious to me at the time I decided to lobby for the longer route. I did the two-finger zoom-in on my phone and became convinced of my belief:
The thick black line ran concurrent to the U.S.-Mexican border.
The thick black line had a distinct start and finish.
The thick black line appeared to have a sharp incline from north to south. Surely this was an indication of something vertical — like a wall! — that Google had to make slanted in order to show it at all.
I swear I could make out on the southeast end a small guard tower and at least two armed border patrol agents eating lunch.
In short, it sure as hell looked like a man-made structure — like a wall!
‘Twas not.
Like the Great Wall of China, which is incorrectly said to be visible from space, so the U.S.-Mexico wall is no more visible from that height than is Cinderella’s Magic Kingdom Castle, or the Empire State Building, or even Cowboys Stadium. (Well, maybe that’s visible from space or, at least, that’s what folks say with conviction.)
Here is what I saw on Google Maps as we passed by what I thought would be two border patrol agents eating lunch in a guard tower:
Beautiful, as these things go, but definitely not a wall. No guard tower. No armed border patrol agents. No lunch.
The fake wall notwithstanding, I thoroughly enjoyed the ride along the border, and even the section of I-10 that followed. I thought that last part, which ran more than 450 miles along the Interstate, would be boring.
It was not, as there were plenty of aging and abandoned houses and old buildings, all of which would have made great photos were I allowed to stop. But I was not.
There was even the gas station where we filled up, took rest breaks, and where there was no employee to be found — it, too, seemed abandoned — so I took a soda and Snickers bar, waited for quite some time at the counter, even said, “Hellooooo!” a couple times, then left some cash on the counter and got back on I-10.
On Monday we drove the nine hours from Ruidoso, New Mexico, back to Kerrville.
The most direct route was of course how we’d driven there the previous Monday and was actually 8 hours and 22 minutes on paper (see here what I mean by “on paper” in a digital world), but I wanted to see another part of Texas, which would lead us down through the Mescalero Reservation, then skirt El Paso’s northeastern edge, and run along the U.S.-Mexico border for what appeared to be 20-30 miles before landing us back onto I-10 — one of the main arteries of American driving.
(I thought I-10 would be boring; I was wrong. But that’s for another post.)
So that’s what I wanted to do, and I proposed the alternate route to the family. But since the proposed drive was forty minutes longer than the most direct route — ten minutes longer than what I thought was an acceptable delta — I lied. I said that my detour — the reasons for which I explained as important to me, so at least I was candid when it came to my self-interest — would be only about “a half hour” difference.
Monday night at 9pm as we reached Junction, Texas, (we’d left Ruidoso about 10:30am and lost an hour crossing from Mountain to Central Time) about 70 minutes from home, my middle son complained that I had to stop for one final bathroom break. After I chided him for making a fuss over a half hour difference in routes (well, forty minutes…actually 38 minutes according to Google!), I also reminded him that he didn’t have the prostate of a 57-year-old man.
I was speaking into a gale.
London, Texas. A developer has purchased this building on the “main drag” (where there are no STOP signs) and plans to turn it into a boutique B&B.
My further intent with this route was to be able to perhaps snap off a few photos along the way. Lately I’ve become enamored of the sagging and even dead architecture and industrial matter one sees along roadsides and in decaying towns. Perhaps it makes one feel more alive: to see dead things.
Other than a pale rouge building in Ozona, Texas, with its windows busted out and some cream colored curtains blowing through them toward the street, like soft sobs over departed tenants — a building that didn’t take a good picture — other than that, I was locked to the steering wheel, and after about Hour 5 was often reminded of my detour. There even came a point when the three-member crew came near mutiny and claimed that I hadn’t asked their permission. This was patently false: when I lied about the longer route — because even writing here I call it a “detour” when in fact I like to think I was exposing everyone to an “additional exploration” on our return trip — taking 30 minutes longer (as apposed to 38-40) and asked them if I might take this route out of my own fascination — to wit, “to please consider indulging me” — each family member in his or her turn consented. There was a bit of grumbling, a bit of neutrality, even apathy, but consent they gave. I held them to that.
I’ll admit to being a bit of an ass about it, but since I’d arranged the whole trip and did most of the driving to and from and most of the cooking while there, I figured that my indulgent request was less a matter of gaining consensus than of exercising divine right. Operative word: “ass.”
The Mescalero Apache Territory, just south of Ruidoso, sits at 6,611 feet. I mention that because it felt like we were driving uphill for a while from Sudderth Boulevard and Route 70 in Ruidoso, where the altitude was 6,900. A couple of us admitted our ears were popping.
But this census-designated place — that’s a thing: “CDP” for short, meaning it’s a “place” only for the purposes of counting heads, of which there are about 1,400 — had gained some notoriety in the descriptions of it by my oldest son, who claimed that when white people ventured uninvited into that territory, there were reports of said whites being scalped.
I struck back, “Surely you’re kidding.”
“Seriously!” he said seriously.
“Where did you see a report about this?”
“Well…I’ve heard people talk about it.”
Ah. Well. That settles that.
It had sounded a bit too on the nose: like the next detail he’d describe would be how they’d whoop and dance in a circle around a bonfire, or perhaps around a King Ranch edition Ford truck, with what was left of the family of four from Highland Park who simply were looking for some turquoise earrings and hand-woven rugs but took a wrong turn after their ears popped and they became disoriented.
What was undeniable, however, was the seeming isolation and even poverty as we came over the ridge and passed Apache High School. Perhaps much of the housing on either side of the highway was set back — in fact, a number of dwellings were; I say “dwellings” because I could see only steep gravel driveways leading from Route 70 West up into the pine tree woods but no buildings; I have no idea of detail beyond “dwelling” — but what was visible from the road was sparse and generally disheveled. Tools and equipment lied haphazardly in yards. Run-down siding protected the interior of buildings from the winter snow. Vehicles like faded ornaments dotted the space between road and trailers.
I tend to give Native American peoples a pass when it comes to not more aggressively or obviously bettering their station in life. That statement alone has so much white-person baggage and bias that in many circles it’s worthy of scalping.
Perhaps I “infantilize” them, as today’s phrase bandied about by white conservatives is applied to black Americans who are part of the Black Lives Matter movement. But much like black Americans brought to this continent against their will and treated inhumanely for centuries, so indigenous peoples already here were unwitting hosts who saw their across-the-pond relatives — for we are relatives, that is undeniable — arrive and offer not gifts to be received and enjoyed without strings, but make deals with them that were outside the realm of their cultures and therefore entered into naïvely. Not even naïvely, but blindly. For these same white Europeans who duped them would be the first to cry “foul” if Martians came — or, shall we find a different and distant planet to draw aliens from, since Mars is kind of a done deal now and waiting for its first Musk-Virgin-Braniff Hotel — and made an exchange in the Martians’ favor that was completely beyond our cultural experience and wisdom to understand. The only reason we whites justify what we’ve done is because it hasn’t happened to us. Yet.
Perhaps my difference in thinking about indigenous Americans and blacks brought from Africa is because I have seen a black man become president, another become a Supreme Court Justice, another successfully lead a Fortune 50 company, and one of my closest black friends become a doctor and then retire at age 50 — 45 even. Now a black woman has been put forward as vice presidential candidate because it’s one party’s sense that this is the best or even only way to win: to put forward a black person as that party’s champion. It’s not affirmative action — giving a leg up to someone who needs it — it’s action that says, “We need you. Please give us a leg up.”
That’s different.
It’s welcomed.
Perhaps the news leaves out more than I can imagine. But when was the last time I heard anything at all significant about native peoples? When have I heard any descendants of the Lenape Tribe demand reparations for, or simply inalienable squatting rights on, the island that was craftily manipulated away from them by the Dutch and then maintained at a healthy distance from them by the English? Certainly, some Lenape great-great+-granddaughter has an opinion on what has become of her ancestors’ beloved Mannahatta? They didn’t even want to “possess” the land, since the land never gave her permission to be possessed by any people, let alone by an uninvited people who offered the equivalent of $24 for it.
So it was over this unexpectedly ear-popping ridge we drove, through the Lincoln National Forest until we reached US-54 south at Tularosa.
We left behind us the set-back homes of the Mescalero Apache and the “sacred land” of Geronimo, whom the Mescalero website describes as:
…highly sought by Apache chiefs for his wisdom. He is said to have had supernatural powers. Geronimo could see the future and walk without creating footprints. He could keep the dawn from rising to protect his people.
MescaleroApacheTribe.com
We white Europeans do create footprints, footprints that tend to be indelible.
And yet, for Europeans like me, who have lamented and confessed yet done nothing to redeem the past, those footprints may be washed away by the waves lapping against the shore, but they also are remembered by the ocean.
The two hummingbirds got within two feet of me as I sat at the porch table looking northwest, about 45 minutes after sunrise.
For the last little while, these two have been buzzing about two feeders filled with sugar water that the owners took care of before they left on Sunday. And which I will want to fill if these marvelous little creatures indeed drink up to three times their body weight as claimed. I doubt the accuracy of measuring this — how does the ornithologist capture one from its life long enough to weigh it? — but given that they beat their wings at an average of fifty beats per second, I don’t doubt their need to eat almost constantly.
The lesson for me being: if I want those three slices of key lime pie today, I must do about ten thousand jumping backs before Noon.
Today is our second full day in Ruidoso. It’s glorious. It’s a tourist town with a year-round 8,000-person population, swelling of course during ski season. Surely there must also be a swell during late July and August, because the cool evenings and mornings (61 degrees today) sandwiching the high-altitude-hot days (mid-80s) offer the near-perfect getaway from the south central Texas summer heat, which peaks at 100 for days on end and cools overnight just enough to keep your coffee warm for the next morning.
As I write, I can feel my t-shirt heating up against my skin. My shirt is grey, certainly no magnet for sun rays, yet the sun’s penetration is almost distracting. I grab my left side with the palm of my right hand, and it feels like I’m standing too close to a bonfire. To be sure, though our galaxy’s star is 94 million miles away, it emits so much heat that — I once heard but cannot now verify — if it were the size of a pinhead and we were standing within 65 miles, we’d be evaporated in heat.
Glorious in its own right.
The sun now hits the thin string holding up the hummingbird feeder with the red base. I see what look to be tiny shimmering droplets moving up and down the length of the string. Glistening. Mysteriously moving past each other. Tiny droplets. Not stopping; all at a uniform speed, gravity seeming to have no effect whatever.
I stand and move to the edge of the porch to get a closer look at the feeder. Below their steady marching up and down on the string, a column of black ants appears to swim up and down inside the semi-opaque liquid, until you realize that they are actually on the outside of the clear plastic well.
For a minute, you gave them credit for having an ability you were unaware of.
