Sidetracked Charley

Great Mullen on Bear Trail A former friend told me nobody liked me but her. She alone could put up with my aloof personality and separateness. I had a husband who said something similar decades ago. He died recently, alone, in a jail cell. But my mother raised me to believe the naysayers in my life. I seem to seek them out. If this is friendship and love then I prefer to be alone. I have learned to make friends with myself. And enjoy my own company. Not having someone to meet for lunch does not prevent me from having lunch out. I do not need to go to church, as mother often advised, to meet the right man. As if life is complete only if I did. I am an introvert. Not a solitary human. I have found other introverts on my path. And we enjoy walking together from time to time. On yesterday's walk with two friends and three dogs I found myself hanging back to observe. I do that a lot. I was not observing my friends so much as our dogs; our truly best friends. They took the tra

Aspens turning on distant mountains Google has given up fonts with serifs. I remember those days with the calligraphy pen practicing the strokes which so naturally gave you serifs. I think I first did that in the seventh grade. I was so proud when I got it right. Now it seems kids do not even learn cursive in school.  And to be honest I love Arial with no serifs the most of all fonts. And my cursive daily looks more like printing. I must acknowledge Penelope, my roommate in college, who taught me prep school script which was actually printing. I practiced it in my first ever journal. I have a shelf on a book case which contains all the journals I have managed to keep before Y!360 and my first every on line journal. I still love journals and buy them. I have four currently with a page or more written in them. There is the garden journal which I am religious about only in the spring. Time to update it. And then there is my ceremony journal in which I keep records of phases of the

Shadows and light in Taos Once again I have been asked about where to live in Taos. And once again I had a difficult time explaining to the friend of a friend that I do not live there. Would not live there. I lived in Taos County for nine years and so wanted to leave that county I was willing to get a divorce to do so. I live on the other side of the mountain now. I try to explain to people how very different this side is. The Mountain Between us We're the wet side. We can drive through the pass to the other side in 45 minutes to an hour. But there is a huge cultural divide between the two sides. Taos was on the Camino Real and settled by the Spanish who took the land from the Native tribes who lived there. Then they enslaved them. The Moreno Valley was settled by miners at Elizabeth town and homesteaders who took advantage of the 1862 homestead act to settle the Black Lake area and the Moreno Valley grasslands. The Trujillos and Torres built huge ranches by blending

The Palisades in afternoon light Truth is where you find it. It can be in a book or a movie or a short scene from television episode. Or, quite frankly, for me in alone time on the road to Raton. Or maybe the road to Raton is just the processing time I need; the pause to meditate on the signs showing up in my life. There was this StarTrek episode with Harvey Fenton Mudd as a pimp for women to be wives of miners on a far and distant planet, Mudd's Women. He gives the women pills to transform them into goddesses and it turns out it is really an inside job. How we perceive ourselves is so much a part of how others perceive us. I first saw this show originally decades ago so it has been stashed in the back of my mind for a long time. Yesterday it joined up with another scene from something I just watched in season four of Longmire. It dealt with a rape victim and how part of her was stolen and she needed to call it back to her to be whole. Nobody could do it for her. It isn

The Play's the Thing We met in the laundry mat I was in an off campus apartment He was in just out of a marriage house. He invited me to tryouts for Night of the Iguana. I didn't much like him Don't think he liked me I got a small part and lights He had a bigger role A brain and a car. I first fell in love with the theater. The director fell for all I could do My neighbor was in charge of delivering me. I remember my first lines Spoken in an amateur play I do not remember our first kiss The first time we shared a stage I remember better. I designed the costumes and sets for the Importance of Being Ernest He slept with the ingenue I did a 20 minute monologue In Androcles and the Lion. I played Mercy In The Crucible Proctor laid the lead witch I danced the cast parties With every actor but him. Moving in with him Seemed just another role A part to be studied And memorized Line perfect. The curtain never came down I just exited

A call to remember things some best forgotten from decades past and gone. Dead she said. Not unexpected news how and where was. A cell in the county jail. The child of bright promise died a drunk. A man at the end  I thankfully never knew. I left to avoid knowing. The call became more about the past  we knew not him. Alone drunk in a cell the professor died. Jacqui Binford-Bell September 1, 2015