Sidetracked Charley

My birthday is coming up and Facebook is again urging me to have a fundraiser and beg all my friends to donate to it. What is it about Facebook and these fundraisers? What is in it for them. Or what is the advantage of me begging my friends to give money to my choice? Facebook does not match funds. Wouldn't that be nice. Two years ago I asked my friends to donate to Stray Hearts Animal Rescue in Taos and they did. I really am not sure that Stray Hearts got the money. No thank you note from them. Did Facebook receive that thank you? If they did they didn't thank me for making it possible. In that year I donated to a lot of my friends' causes. I gave to save the elephants in Africa, and the giraffes in zoos, and promote the cause of stopping climate change, as if that was possible. Then Corona virus hit and my studio was closed down. All the events which I used as a way to sell my wares were cancelled. My studio went to the dogs, literally. Art was deemed non-essential but an...

Palisades in the morning light   While waiting for the "new normal" to reveal itself, it occurred to me that the new normal may be within me. And enough people who have changes within themselves after our year of isolation and that will create the new normal in our society. As I wrote that I immediately thought: If we can get rid of enough old farts. No not those that died from Covid but those that allowed us to die of covid. But I digress. The subject was to be changes in me. In the year of my sojourn or isolation I granted myself permission to make changes or to give myself permission to embrace changes which have been dancing around the edges of my existence. The big one was doing away with my long term rental. This has been taking up room in my mind for twenty years. But it was part of my "retirement" plan. When occupied it paid the mortgage. When vacant it ate up all my spare cash to get it ready for the next tenant. I came to resent that. My first tenants stay...

  As we move toward summer I am reminded of the family slide shows on the patio. We forced our neighbors to attend through offerings of Dad's BBQ ribs and Mom's cheese cake. We had thousands of slides. My brother took all of them after Mom's death with promises to get them copied for my sister and me. He never complied on that promise. The only pictures I have of my family are those I took or those I slipped out from under my brother's greedy hands. The only ones I miss are those my father never took. The ones he passed taking or printing because they were not the best. I would love to have the one of my brother falling into the Pecos River when he was showing off for Dad. But it is there forever etched in my memory. I have always had that sort of memory. Even now when I post a photo to Facebook I know the ones just before or just after I did not capture in pixels. And I also do not miss the holiday dinners. I miss being in the kitchen with Mom and my sister as we taste...

Life Finds a Way   My sister, the nurse who has worked this pandemic, says no. But this Thursday there was a glimmer of hope. The CDC said those of us who had received both vaccines and made it past the two week max antibody development marker could go without masks. Outdoors or indoors in less than max capacity situations but maybe not maintaining social distancing go barefaced into this brave new world. For me the news hit just as I was getting dressed to meet with other artists to decide if we could actually have an art season. I paused in my search for a mask (one of hundreds I made during this last year) to match my outfit. I did not abandon it but put it in my jacket pocket just in case. You never know. But I had decided to attend this event because I knew everyone who would likely be attending. They were all vaccinated. I had been keeping track on posts in social media. Our numbers are always small so it would not be packed. They would all be respectful of others. And if I a...

I live in rural America. And I love it here. I even most times love what I do not have because I choose to live outside cities. But some of the things I do not have cause problems defining where I live. I do not have a zip code. I borrow neighboring zip codes depending on who is asking. In the United States of America a zip code is five or nine numbers that are added to a postal address to assist the sorting of mail. There are about 43,000 zip codes. They are attached to post offices which the USPS wants to reduce. Post Offices are attached largely to cities these days. Once Black Lake had a post office and our zip code I am told was 87734. But the USPS deleted that post office because there was no city but just a large rural area with farms and ranches and people like myself which loved living in rural areas.  When the Black Lake post office was closed the zip code was moved to Ocate, NM which is over the mountain and through the canyon and most notably in an entire other county. ...