Sidetracked Charley

My father and his father The Ruskin Heights tornado was this dividing line in my life. And in the life of our family. I have wondered from time to time what the alternate timeline would have been. We went to Kansas City for the funerals as a family and we came back as isolated individuals living in the same house. What had always united us before, fishing trips and camping and building things, was gone. On hiatus. Mother had a secret. A lump had begun to grow in her breast. She would ask me during our bathroom talks. She would invite me in to talk while she took a bath. Talks that Dad and my brother were not privy to. She had come back from KC with a pain in her right shoulder. She went to Dr. Fitzpatrick who thought she had a lingering infection from the mastitis. He treated that with more antibiotics. Then he thought she had bursitis. He treated that with heat treatments. The lump was supposedly drainage. But it kept getting bigger. That was what the whispered talks were about...

Windows off Main Trinidad, Colorado Every dying town has its cave people. I have been doing research on the Village of Angel Fire, New Mexico for an article I just finished writing. I live five miles south of the village near what was once the town of Black Lake. It once had a store and a school and a church and a post office. Now Black Lake is where they shot the Montana scenes for Lonesome Dove. I love old towns with history. Angel Fire is not old and it does not have history. No old school house or cemetery with tell tale dates to contemplate. It has no grand buildings or even a real main street. No sidewalks. Angel Fire was incorporated as a village in 1986 severing itself from the ski resort of the same name opened in 1965. The resort is still upset. As I was preparing to write this blog it dawned on me I have no pictures of Angel Fire. It has nothing worthy to photograph beyond the mountains which surround it. It has no park like Los Alamos, also a young town, and wh...

Artists work alone. They work in studios and closets and what was once the guest room. The remodel garages and garrets and garden sheds so they can work at their passion. When forced to by patrons, gallery owners or economic necessity they dress up and make nice. But we are introverts. We are most comfortable with ourselves and some medium to make art with. But we are happiest in those rare arrangements of artists called workshops. I was lucky enough to be one of an arrangement of eight this weekend. Only two I knew before but like birds of a feather we know our kind almost instantly. For me the excuse for the weekend was the risers on my flight of steps I am redoing. Have been redoing for seven years. Okay maybe more. And when I heard about the workshop in tempered glass mosaic I found my medium for those 12 risers. No expensive tile. Just cheap recycled tempered glass from the Restore store. The kittens had already demonstrated how easy it was to break. In the workshop I learne...

I wouldn't be twelve until June. But the Ruskin Heights tornado and all which followed that week made me grow up fast. Mother was focused on Dad and his grief and loss. And I was left in charge of my five month old sister and my not quite ten year old brother with Aunt Amy. I had not a clue about baby schedules and what Aunt Amy once knew she seemed to have forgotten. Mother's schedule with funeral directors, etc. caused Debbie to be weened fast. Aunt Amy and I puzzled over how to mix formula. She was the mother of my two high school aged cousins. Debbie showed an instant distaste for Gerber. Aunt Amy and I resorted to blenders. Amazing what you can blend up. To this day I can recall infinite detail about Aunt Amy and Uncle Bill's kitchen. It had windows all along one wall. I was happy in that kitchen mixing up baby food for my sister with my Aunt Amy while the other adults seemed to have vanished. Uncle Bill, my mother's brother, and Amy's husband was a pol...

Round Up Like many people who live in rural areas or on the outskirts of small villages I am an introvert, who on demand can pretend to be in an extrovert for short periods of time. I have had to do so to be in art fairs and give lessons at my studio. Tourist season stretches my performance ability because they seem to travel in packs or even herds. I first noticed this tendency when I was still teaching skiing. Frequently a class of ten would all be from the same group or family. And it wasn't just in class but on the slopes. They moved like a herd down the ski hill. I liked the first run of the day when there was only me and maybe one or two others on a hill. My family camped to get away from it all - and that included people. We didn't attend Parrot Head conventions at campground tent cities with generators. Being a photographer fits me. I and my camera and my dogs out in a lonely place. Painting probably suits me even more because I can stay in my studio and zone o...

Aftermath of Ruskin Heights Tornado May 20, 1957 We were settled into Albuquerque by then. It was just beginning to dawn on me we were not moving anytime soon. All my aunts and uncles (but one), my father's mother and stepfather, and those cousins I knew were still in the Kansas City area. My baby sister still very much a baby. There were three networks on TV. One was not CNN. There was no 24/7 news coverage. NBC, CBS and ABC had sign off times and sign on times with test patterns. And between test patterns just snow. Mother found me in front of the test pattern that May 21st, 1957 when she woke up to get the day going for the family. "Turn that off," she said handing me my baby sister nodding off in my arms. "Help me with breakfast. What are you watching that for anyway." "I am waiting for the news," I said, as I put my sister down in the play pen. I had just that year, as part of social studies, developed an interest in the news. We...

Antelope on the Eastern Plains I have always said it is about quality and not quantity. But I frankly never thought I could have both. I was born a year before the baby boom. Not sure how my folks worked that since my father was an US Air Force pilot. And there was WWII going on. Never wise to question your parents too much. The story is he was flying over Omaha when I was born. I think it was the city and not the beach. But my parents and both sets of grand parents died before I could figure out what questions would be important later. I was never all that rooted to truth. Growing up I found there were my father's stories and my mother's silence. Mother was the truth holder and she held it very tightly behind pursed lips. Dad was the source of legend. I liked Dad's version of life far better. It was grand, and exciting and it did not result in those vertical wrinkles on your upper lip. It gave you laugh lines instead. It would be decades before I discovered that was...

Last Wednesday it was announced, totally out of the blue, that the parent company, Santa Fe New Mexican, was closing the Sangre de Cristo Chronicle, our local paper. And right before tourist season, totally without notice, and they believed we would all latch on to the tit of the Taos News. We all met on chats and Facebook forums discussing how this would effect us, and our visitors during the summer. We like to think we are the electronic age and the internet replaces all other media. But that really is not true. There are still a vast number of people who are unconnected to the information highway. There are people like me even, who staunchly refuse to go the smart phone route and chip apps. I have friends on the internet that do not Google. And how does a stranger in a strange land know where to begin - The newspaper. There is information out there in the ether but sooner or later it has to be downloaded and printed out for those unconnected or out of their comfort zone. Bot...