The ocean is a grocery store.
At the end of piers, the tips of jutting land, on bridges or banks, in small boats and large, men shop for dinner.
Early today three men are casting from the end of a pier at sunrise. They have been up all night and one lifts the top off a five gallon paint bucket and shows me his catch – six red snapper.
” You take them to a restaurant, ” he says, ” and they will cook them up for you. “.
They cast their lines out thirty feet and weights carry the baited hooks to the bottom. When the line pulls taut they wait. Sometimes you have a bucket of fish in half an hour; other times it takes all night and a pack of cigarettes to fill your cart.
” Captain Shark’s is the place to get a pole, ” the talkative one tells me.
This morning I find bait and tackle at Captain Shark’s across from Maya Air next to the Hyperbaric Chamber. The store has fishing gear but also boating and diving items. It costs fifty Belizian to walk out with twenty pound test line, extra weights and hooks, a bag of frozen sardines for bait, and a Yo-Yo, a gadget used to hand cast and retrieve your line without tangles.
It will be a sad day when they ask for a license to fish from the pier.
It is a crime to lock the grocery when you have hungry men.
It isn’t here yet but Halloween is galloping down the road and the headless horseman will soon be here.
New Mexico and Mexico have much in common this time of year as our town celebrates both Halloween and Dia De Los Muertos or ” Day of the Dead. ”
There is no border between the countries of Mexico and the United States and buses run regular from Juarez to Albuquerque. Everyone here knows border talk is just talk and the cultures of North, South and Central America are merging like shoppers at a great flea market.
Brother Mark, visiting for a few days from Denver, wants a photo in front of the Breaking Bad Bus that takes visitors on a tour of Albuquerque locations featured on the popular TV series of the same name.
Shopping, we find pinon incense for his wife Leigh in one of the shops off the main plaza. There are also flashy ceramic tiles, polished rocks, pinon coffee, chili socks, wooden Indians, serapes, Day of the Dead skulls and statues, turquoise jewelry. One shop has Breaking Bad posters on the wall, and, in another, Sheldon looks at the world with his Big Bang Theory.
When you say the words Halloween and Albuquerque, over and over again, you start to lose your mind.
On the way out of Old Town, I scratch my head to make sure it is still up there, and, thankfully,it is.
I’m on my way soon for Belize and Ecuador.
I don’t, like this headless horseman, want to go anywhere without having something between my two ears.
.
If it crawls, slides, slips, flips,slithers, climbs, it is not safe.
At “99”, in Albuquerque, there are selections to fit Chinese tastes.
Today, Ruby has a taste for seafood, and, lifting up a black cloth, she goes after blue and white colored crabs that try to escape the small plastic tub that holds them for display. The crabs that run from her the fastest are the ones she grabs in her prongs and puts, with help, into her open plastic bag.
For meat and poultry she likes Sprouts. The meats at “99”, she says in basic English, are old and not good.
I don’t care for tree fungus, but find noodles tolerable. Worms are offensive. The most difficult skill is to eat soup with chopsticks.
Americans eat meat, potatoes, bread, hamburgers, french fries, sugar, salt. Chinese eat seafood, vegetables, fruits, nuts and rice.
The crabs try to hurt us with their scissor hands but they are no match for Ruby’s prongs.
On Sundays, during warmer months in Albuquerque, an old train barn opens its huge metal doors to the public. Vendors set up inside to sell their produce, art, clothes, soaps and lotions, health food, get signatures for green projects and alternative lifestyles, listen to music and enjoy the scene.
This Sunday, we come down to hear Chadd’s saxophone quartet – Sax Therapy.
It is quaint inside the train barn, good to see an old dilapidated unused piece of functional architecture used for better than a roosting place for pigeons.
Running across, and embedded in the concrete floor of this large open area, are rails that used to bring trains inside to be repaired, outfitted, cleaned, and re-conditioned. Now, the only Albuquerque train is Amtrak that has ticket sales in what remains of the original Alvarado Hotel. The real Alvarado Harvey House was demolished in the 60’s to make room for buildings that never followed, part of the 1960’s short sighted urban renewal dreams of government elected officials.
Seated at the south end of the train barn, Ruby and I watch dancers twirl to forties style big band music. A college singer croons Rosemary Clooney. Following them is Sax Therapy featuring two alto saxes, one tenor sax and one baritone sax. They do a Monk tune, a twenties style ragtime classic, and a Texas blues wail to start, then move to a show tune and Be-Bop.
Chadd negotiates his bari with ease, his eyebrows going up when he moves into the upper register and eyes looking to the ground when he goes real real low.
I’m not sure but think I hear a train whistle moving towards us in straight four four time.
When you get four saxes playing together you can almost feel your teeth vibrating on the crescendos.
Russell’s Travel Center sits on a New Mexico hill just before the Texas/ New Mexico State Line.
It is close to Endee, one of those almost vanished New Mexico towns that shrink smaller and smaller as time barrels forwards. At Russell’s you can gas up, have something to eat, buy food, use restrooms, draw cash from an ATM, and, most importantly, take a trip down memory lane.
There is a car and culture exhibit in the Travel Center that is a blast to the past.
While the 1920’s roared, danced around the edges of a champagne glass, the 1930’s were filled with clouds of dust and long faces.
The 1940’s were filled with World War 2.
The 1950’s were a return to consumerism, family, stability and hard work chasing your dreams in a country that encouraged you to look to make bigger and better things, have bigger and better ideas, and hitch your coat-tails to the best of capitalism.
The 60’s were a crack in the Liberty Bell with dissent and revulsion by kids against morals and tradition.
This exhibit in the travel center holds icons of my 1950’S generation.
Roy Rogers, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Betty Boop, Elvis Presley are some of the 1950’s icons. Big chrome laden cars, soft drink machines, rock and roll music and parking meters were playing cards in our deck.
To nieces and nephews it is hard to describe rotary phones, push lawn mowers, Dewey decimal card catalogs, the KKK, life without pizza and hamburgers, black and white TV’s.
As old waves go out, new ones pile over the top of them.
Being on the bottom is rough tumbling, and, not much fun.
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.
Just down the frontage road from the Cadillac Ranch is the Cadillac Ranch gift shop.
It is before nine in the morning so it isn’t open but they have a sign out front that encourages lollygagging.
This gift shop is presided over by a twenty foot tall cowboy sporting a big hat. He waves to freeway tourists and wears a bright yellow T-shirt that says “2nd Amendment Cowboy”. Texas, a sovereign state, can withdraw from the Union when they wish and if you have guns you are more than welcome to sit a spell.
The fact there is a gift shop in the shadow of the Cadillac Ranch isn’t surprising. In Central and South America you have knick knack shops in front of most major cathedrals. In Egypt, you have little stands selling miniature pyramids and King Tut dolls close to Howard Carter’s greatest discoveries.
In the shadow of the 2nd Amendment Cowboy are three old Cadillac’s. Driving one is Willie Nelson. Elvis waves from inside another. The 2nd Amendment Cowboy’s smaller twin brother pilots the third car.
I will come back because I would love to have a little statue of a Cadillac buried into a cigarette lighter, or a 2nd Amendment Cowboy lamp for my living room table.
You can bet, as the day warms up, there will be the sound of target practice close by.
When you pull the trigger, in Texas, you want your bullet to hit what you are aiming at.
No self respecting cowboy would be caught without his artillery.
The shopping mall is not only a metaphor for the Christmas season, but a melody.
Jingle bells ring from inside closed stores as a security pickup patrols and deliveries are made to the back door. Stores open at ten in the morning and stay open till ten in the evening.
Palm trees and oranges mark this territory as Southern California but this shopping mall could also be in Arizona or parts of Nevada, Texas, or even Florida. Malls, once a new concept, brought customers out of neighborhood stores to shop in retail fantasy lands, closed down mom and pop places that had higher prices but kept neighborhoods together. Malls gave big business a chance to grab market share, streamline operations, centralize and advertise their brand. They changed America.
Christmas is promoted here as far as my eyes can see. Windows have nativity scenes, garlands are draped over light poles, decorated trees have presents wrapped underneath, snowflakes are sprayed on windows.
The last time Los Angeles saw a real snowflake was when Hell froze over.
High on a ladder, a painter keeps up appearances.
In California, there is no room for wrinkles, sags, or cracks.
California dedicates herself to the pursuit of Dionysus and when Santa rolls into town with his reindeer, real soon, he will be wearing yellow speedo’s, a bright red stocking cap, and a pair of dark sunglasses that would make a gangster proud.
Half of the world is in winter with temps in the teens, or worse.
Here, it is seventies with humidity but the sun shines more often than it hides.
Jose, at the front desk, says it is busy in San Jose most of the year and his hotel has more visitors from France than anywhere else.This morning there is a large French group departing, part of a tour that will get on a bus and go somewhere else for a few days, then a new location, then another. Being a low cost provider, this hotel fills a need for tour generators who need to keep prices down to capture travelers and market share.
There is no reason this hotel formula wouldn’t work anywhere. You buy a few houses next to one another, plumb in bathrooms and other refinements, and presto – you have a hotel that is like staying in a house. The furnishings and decorations are colorful, indigenous, typical of Costa Rica. Even if you wouldn’t want to live in an old wooden house at home with bright paintings and door handles from the twenties, it makes perfect sense here.
If I could take this hotel home in my suitcase and get through Customs, I surely would.
It is simpler though to leave it and come visit when I have a hankering.
The perfect trip is where you return with less than you left with, have a full stomach, and don’t start something you don’t intend to finish.
If the grass isn’t always greener somewhere else, the weather is better.
This little gift shop is not far from the Holiday Inn in Old San Jose, a hop skip and jump from the Municipal Square, a stone’s throw from the Gold and Jade Museo’s, several blocks from casinos.
Browsing, I come across an authentic bow with arrows with hard wood points and bird feather quills for stability and distance. Woven baskets from Panama and crazy masks peer down upon me as I shop the shop.There are imitations of pre-Colombian pottery on the higher shelves, safe from little hands, and carvings of birds and animals made from the Tigua nut.
I buy the bow and arrows and make arrangements to have them shipped home, paid for with my credit card. It is rather amazing that someone in a foreign country would give credit to someone they just met and will most likely never meet again. Combining trust with money has always been a touchy job..
How the hell did those ancient hunters hit running animals in rough terrain, in questionable weather, with these questionable weapons?
Their dreams were lots deeper than mine, all about life, death, spirits and Gods.
I’m going to hang the bow and arrows on one of my living room walls to remind me how easy I have it.
There are some days I can’t even hit the ground with my hat.
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