Sidetracked Charley

  When I was in college at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque there was an incident at the Tierra Amarilla court house in Rio Arriba County, NM. The court house raid by Alianza Federal de Mercedes  led by Reies Tijerina in 1967 attempted to make a citizen's arrest of the district attorney to "bring attention to the unscrupulous means by which government and Anglo settlers had usurped Hispanic land grant properties." For reasons which escape me it made national news. And my Aunt Louise wrote me from Kansas City, Missouri and asked if I might want to come back to the United States until the revolution was resolved. I remember being shocked Aunt Louise had my address, and that the envelope had international postage on it.   That is just one incident on the whole line of separation, which was military or location based. The Hildebrand and Binford families were Midwesterners. Dad came back from service in Guam during the Korean war and was based in Roswell, New...

Self portrait in mirrored ball My Auntie Boo had one in her garden. It was blue. I was fascinated with it. I was also fascinated with Auntie Boo. She really wasn't my aunt, Mother told me way later, but just a dear friend of my mother's we called Auntie. Decades later I would meet my long lost cousin Judy, and she would tell me stories of her Auntie Boo, who really wasn't her aunt. All sources of more knowledgeable information were gone by then so we could never prove our Auntie Boos were one and the same people. But I like to think so. It isn't a far leap to imagine my Aunt Zelma, Judy's step-mom, and my mom and Boo friends. When you are young full names and addresses never occur to you to horde. She lived in a very old house in an old section of Kansas City, and she had this garden she seemed on the edge of losing control of. And in this garden was a blue gazing ball on a pedestal. I was enthralled with how it distorted the world around it. Auntie Boo'...