Playing it safe at Walgreens with an old Santa Fe-Albuquerque controversy.
Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass at Walgreens.
Jim Belshaw (once Arnholz) at Under Charlie’s Covers.
Moon over huevos rancheros.
Gettin’ their kicks over old 66.
Playing it safe at Walgreens with an old Santa Fe-Albuquerque controversy.
Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass at Walgreens.
Jim Belshaw (once Arnholz) at Under Charlie’s Covers.
Moon over huevos rancheros.
Gettin’ their kicks over old 66.
Congratulations to … among others …
I had high hopes when I went to vote 50 years ago in a beautiful place at the foot of the Sierra Nevada.
I was 23 but Nov. 7, 1972, was my first time to cast a ballot because the 26th amendment and 18-year-old-vote wasn’t ratified until 1971.
I went with a couple of buddies — Craig and WJK — from the Inyo conservation camp 10 miles north of Bishop, California. Politically, the country was pretty torn up. We voted in a lonely hall in Round Valley. I sat up that night watching election results on on the lone camp TV, sitting on a plastic couch in the rec room with the camp dog, an ancient black mutt called Bummer.
Voting for the first time felt good but I got thumped. I voted for George McGovern.
Bummer was just there that night, not an omen. After leaving my California Division of Forestry assignment, I spent the next 40 years covering government and politics as a newspaper reporter and editor in New Mexico, voting in every election open to independents.
I voted early this election at the library in Placitas. I will be watching election-night results with a fun-loving blue heeler named Cowboy. I am glad to vote and I am as hopeful as ever.
When the counter is full at the Range in Bernalillo, I’m glad I live in a place where I can point the truck north on old 66 to Abuelita’s or Twisters, near the route of Coronado and homes of Puebloans who were already there, then east toward Placitas where Las Huertas Creek runs from a Sandia mountain canyon to the Rio Grande and close to that confluence at home consume my carry-out combination plate with green and sleep it off in a living room chair facing piñon-juniper foothills so quiet the croaking of sandhill cranes overhead wakes from me from an endorphin-ensured nap, satisfied by the chile-covered food, as the birds flying down from Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho circle upward, seeking a thermal for the flight south to Bosque del Apache for feasts on fields of winter grain.
It snowed earlier. Later in the day, this woodpecker wouldn’t budge from my neighbor’s hummingbird feeder. The hummingbird didn’t seem happy.
Jim Belshaw obit by Ollie Reed in today’s Albuquerque Journal: https://www.abqjournal.com/2541425/journal-columnist-championed-underdogs-knew-how-to-make-readers-laugh.html
Without radar, mountain reading is a challenging pastime. Here is October 9. But upon inspection of photos, maybe all I’m looking at is continuation of monsoonal flow from the south that first showed up in my neck of the woods on June 17.
I resort to taking pictures with my iPhone when I don’t have much to say. It happens more often these days. Here I am again.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m reading plenty and I watch many hours of news and punditry on TV. I have rewarding conversations via email with several friends. Cowboy is always here to listen, although his reactions are quick looks, usually sideways.
I began the late summer as I often do reading about the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The battle was in June but the reading impulse taking me back to 1876 always happens around my birthdate in August 1949. Lately though, except for escapes with E.B. White, I have switched almost entirely to the Battle of Mar-a-Lago.
I’m following this latest story of an endangered nation filing by filing, as well as the five or six other investigations encircling you know who. But I don’t waste my wind anymore. I saw this storm coming years ago. The important action now is in court. The court action sometimes stems from important journalism but I have no expertise in the law and am now seven years retired from newspapers.
I have little confidence in Congress’s ability to right the boat. The rule of law has to be shored up first. My hopes that the right side wins are all with the judiciary and the press. God bless Merrick Garland and Maggie Haberman, among many others. I’m not in it just for the show but I keep considering whether there has ever ever been a better time to be a lawyer or a journalist.
In my spare time, I also do a lot of tangential reading on the internet, one thing leading to another. It’s my wandering attention span that takes me there, a legacy of my daily newspaper experience. I’m also staying up later. It always took me several hours after deadline for my brain to be ready to sleep, even after I quit drinking in 1985.
At any rate, I recently have taken some of my favorite iPhone photos and have stumbled over memorable things about E.B. White, a son and a sailboat. Here you go:
As with the iPhone, when I’m restless and can’t decide what to do, I often pick up E.B. White. This weekend it paid off in a surprising way. Somehow I was led to the internet and a New Yorker piece from 2005 called “Andy” by White’s stepson, Roger Angell. Reading this led me to the discovery that White had a boat-building and designing son, Joel White of Brooklin, Maine, and that Joel White designed a boat I have always like the looks of — as well as admiring its name — Wild Horses. The boat was built after Joel White’s death at 66.
Sad as Joel White’s early death seems, I was happy to find out that the Brooklin Boatyard he founded in 1960 is now run by his son, Steve.
So, E.B. White and family carry on for me in many ways. Among other pursuits, I reread a lot of Roger Angell, including his fine New Yorker piece on aging, called “This old man.”
I’ll quit now. I’m going off on tangents again. But one more digression, a sentence and admission by Roger Angell in his “Andy” essay, remembering E.B. White. It’s an impressively honest thought from a profiler and stepbrother and one that may say a lot about writing in general.
“What’s been left out of my account, of course, is most of a life: his son, Joel, and Joel’s wife, Allene, three grandchildren—all grown now, with kids and life stories of their own—and the Brooklin Boat Yard, where Joe built a career and earned a reputation as a master boat designer and builder that matched or continued his father’s as a writer.”
Wait, one more thing. I was reminded in Angell’s essay about one of the greatest opening lines ever, the beginning of E.B. White’s story “Charlotte’s Web.”
“Where’s Papa going with that ax?”
–30–
