Sidetracked Charley

Black Lake, NM   This view welcomed me home in my traveling days with art fairs. This was my view as I emerged from Guadalupita canyon, home of Coyote Creek, and I am sorry to say I do not know this mile marker. I always know mile markers. I was the navigator when my family traveled. I had a notebook and kept important notes. Maybe not always for my family but important for me. Other kids had to memorize their address and telephone number incase they got lost but in the beginning for me, living in the Missouri countryside or the a New Mexico air base it was the turns I would have to make to get home or my father's name, rank and serial number. I discovered when accidently abandoned outside of Liberal, Kansas during a trip at Christmas the license plate number was important. The highway patrol officer was impressed. Also important for me when we traveled about the country was how long. How long would we be at this base, this camp, this trip, this school. When I moved to Black Lake I...

Heading Out   My last Microsoft ten computer crashed. I still have my laptop and I have been surviving with it while I made up my mind about trying an iMac. And figuring out whether I wanted to transfer all my old photo files once again from the cloud to McMac. Meanwhile I casually asked the local computer guy if he could just copy the hard drive to an external one and he did. It was then I remembered the trunk of photos in my mother's basement. Of all her age relatives she was the one with the space for storing the family's history. And it was there my sister and I discovered the trunk after Mom's death. It was too heavy to lift and locked. We managed to pick that and found it full to the brim of Kodak black and white prints of complete strangers. My mother once had photo books she had carefully arranged photos in. Attaching them with those cute corners you licked in exactly the right place to slip the image into. And she would use a white or silver ink to label under each...

  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...

I have one of those minds which seems to remember everything but where I put my keys or reading glasses. I can chimp back through visual images and recall exactly who I was with and what the joke was just before or after the shot was taken. Or remember word for word the song playing on the car stereo as I pulled over to capture that particular column of clouds. It's a gift or a curse. This morning driving south to feed two kitties there was a dead dog beside the highway. And images of the family dogs through the years clicked through my brain like a slide show. Then I identified this particular dog. I called her Ghost. A neighbor owned her and mistreated her. And another neighbor and I would feed her because she often looked close to starving. Not that he wouldn't or didn't feed her but that she was afraid to go near enough to him to be fed. One of the first things I did for Ghost was remove a choke chain from around her neck. It was way too tight and too small and ...

Sometimes we are so involved in an activity, habit, addiction we lose why. What purpose does this serve in my life. What do I miss most? Friends. No, not the 460 Facebook credits me with. Friends in that particular context are those I have granted permission to see my posts. There is at least three I know are deceased but they pop up on shared memories from time to time. Like the memories of pets long gone they can bring tears to my eyes. Like life not all friends are missed. My father, during one of those dad and daughter dinners when I was in college, explained that if I, in my lifetime, had more than five friends I could count on in times of trouble I should consider myself very lucky. As I recall this dinner at a fine restaurant followed a major issue in the dorms. To me, at the time, it was a huge thing. My best friend got kicked out of college, I got put on restrictions, and the person causing it all declared victory but moved to another dormitory.  My father had been t...