Once the sun drops below the Albuquerque city limits, street lights switch on, programmed by computers.
The man made lights aren’t strong enough to make everything visible so, at night, you move from one pocket of light to another and guess what is down that alley, or behind that fence, or on that roof.
Tonight, brother Neal and I run into downtown’s neon’s, flashing signs, street lights cycling from green to yellow to red to green. Car headlights appear like gigantic bug eyes as gawker’s cruise. Earlier, street food vendors were parked in the middle of closed fourth and sixth streets selling their specialties but most of them have since closed up and driven home.
At Sadie’s, Neal and I have our right hands stamped with a black owl that lets us re-enter the bar if we decide to leave and want to return. My jazz teacher, Chadd, plays with a Latin band playing tonight and we came down to hear him play.. The opening act Cuban band is just setting up on stage and we realize quickly we will have a wait before Chadd’s group finally gets on stage.
Compensating, we take our black owls outside to fly old Route 66, admire the beautiful renovated Kimo Theater and grab a burger at Lindy’s, a downtown eatery dating back to the 1940’s. This Downtown area has been trying to rehabilitate itself in the last decade and has made some progress though families and sane people don’t often come down here after dark.
When Chadd’s band, Barrutanga, finally marches on stage in a crazy Latin band homage to New Orleans, it is after eleven.
Neal tells his wife, later, that it was an experience.
Experience, I have been told, is what happens when you make the same mistake twice.
The only mistake we made was arriving at nine instead of eleven.
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.
Sitting in this Albuquerque McDonalds feels like sitting inside the Diner in the 1942 Edward Hopper oil painting – ” Nighthawks. ”
Early this morning, Javier is busy cleaning this fast food franchise made of glass, plastic, tile, low voltage lights, lightweight chairs and tables, all under the ubiquitous corporate logo – M.
Javier works diligently, methodically, pulling tools out of his maintenance closet by the soft drink machines where homeless fill up yesterday’s paper cups with today’s free soda. He greets us in Spanish and opens the door at five when we queue for coffee.
Javier soaps his windows,then carefully uses a squeegee to remove the soap from the glass. He cleans his squeegee with a rag he pulls out of his back pocket. He looks for imperfections as he goes and his windows are a work of art.
Big business, some say, is good for America.
Big business, others say, has turned us into a plutocracy..
Edward Hopper’s painting seems comforting this morning, less stark than our present situation.
Clean windows in a dirty world are a thing of beauty.
Moriarty is a small town thirty minutes east of Albuquerque on Route 66.
Annually, the city hosts a Pinto Bean Festival to honor the lowly pinto bean and those rural folk that live in this area in manufactured homes on subdivided one acre plots that get more sparse the farther you move from I-40.
Pinto beans get their name from their mottled brown and beige color, like a pinto horse. Take pinto beans, a flour tortilla, some green chili and a little meat, if you have it, and you have a burrito that has been New Mexico survival food since settlers moved here hundreds of years ago.
This Festival is a collection of booths.
In one are two women gunslingers wearing revolvers and shooting up business for a local indoor shooting range. There is a group who want to restore an old Whiting Brothers gas station sign as a relic of the loved Route 66 that held states and communities along its route together like crazy glue. There are games where you toss a bag into a box, spin a wheel for free food at a local Denny’s, try to toss a ring around a soft drink can for a free drink. There is a station to get blood pressure checked and another to meet Jesus. Roberto sells hats made from palm fronds from Ecuador and kids play on swings with recycled automobile tires providing a soft landing for their falls.
One of the more moving installations is at the entrance to the Fair where two men are taking donations to support the Moving Wall coming to Moriarty. The Moving Wall is a scaled down version of the Vietnam Wall in Washington. It has the names of all the men and women who died in that hapless conflict in a far away place.
Vietnam casualties reached small towns across America and on the walls of VFW’s in hundreds of communities are pictures and names and military rank and rate of young people who lost their lives in foreign jungles.
Pinto beans help you survive when chips fall on the table and society begins to crack like a dropped ice cube.
I pick up two bags on my way out of town.
New Mexico was once at the bottom of a great sea.
Over millions of years, carbon creatures died and drifted to the bottom of that sea and became preserved in silt. Layer upon layer of silt turned to stone and the fragile bodies of once living creatures became captured and preserved. My Geologist brother Neal likes nothing better than hiking mountains, looking for geological treasure chests and opening them to find fossil pieces of eight.
This morning we return to a quarry he was introduced to in junior high school.
A teacher brought he and a friend here to scrape away layers of shale and discover ferns, brachiapods, and other marine life. These days a teacher wouldn’t risk the field trip but that trip set two kids into lifelong careers.
As I look up at the quarry walls this morning i can easily see geological epochs as they were deposited in layers. Even a foot thick layer took thousands of years to form..
Neal knows the layers we are looking for on this dig and finds us a promising hunting spot in the side of a crumbling bank in mountains that used to be under water.
Hawks fly over us on a clear cool fall morning and we have brought our small cardboard boxes for specimens, rock hammers, scrapers, newspapers for wrapping what we find, bottles of water, a few apples and sunflower seeds, and lots of hope.
Any day you can poke into pre- history and find something only you are seeing for the first time in 250 million years, it is a good day.
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