So many people move to Taos and bring their socio-economic blinders with them. The real estate industry is happy to oblige, however.
Just like the people from the big city who moved to my old home town of Chestertown, MD and think they’re living in the country because they buy sweet corn and tomatoes at the farmers’ market every Saturday, the pricey anglo “suburbs” around Taos are home to lots of folks with shiny SUVs who think they’re artists just from living by the mountain. A marketing triumph of a sort. Build a studio in the back yard using wetback labor, complaining all the while about the workmen and getting nervous about locking doors. Ah, but they’re in Taos now, time to complain about how things aren’t done here like in Bloomington or San Diego.
I moved in here and didn’t make a ripple — poverty and common sense will do that. I don’t complain about the mud, the potholes, or junked cars because I know they keep certain Texans out. I love the scraggly hippie children of the mesa for similar reasons, and because they’re doing what they want. My wife still misses sidewalks, although we didn’t have those near our old home in Maryland, either. Odd, that. Maybe it’s a nostalgia thing. I have been known to think of algae-laden ponds and swoon. On the other hand, perhaps most people haven’t suffered enough. A road is a road, for instance, not a strip of tax-subsidized asphalt for hermetically sealed travel capsules of the wealthy.
Speaking of which, we’re due for a new road car, and poverty has never been a goal. So let them walk naked and shiny in the same parade: I’ll dust off my butt and get in line. God is love and spring is beautiful.
And now for more backyard sitting in the sun…
No related posts.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I like your grumpy style, my old friend. You make me nostalgic in a different way – for the days we swaggered down the halls of Cooper High School, with our slide-rules strapped to our hips and ready for action. The thing about memory is that it comes right from the reptile part of our brains. We keep thinking we’ve moved to a different and more civilized stage of life, it keeps dragging us back to the mud from whence we came. Be that as may, I enjoy your rants on the human condition, which, if memory serves, I heard the beginnings of in those long-vanished high school corridors. I ranted some myself.
I am a little grumpy this noon. Maybe it was the Mercedes I saw leaving the Ranchos post office this a.m. A person has to watch for that reptile-brain stuff, especially all-American boys like me. The last new car I bought was in 1984, and my wife’s mother’s ’89 Dodge Spirit has the soul of a beat-up lawn tractor. The engine, too. I want to fly across the vasties at 90 mph. When I had my ’91 Nissan 240SX SE, even though it was thoroughly used, zooming across Nebraska was a joy. A third gear that’s good to 80 will do that to you, especially pulling out of rest areas on the Interstate or charging down the Rand-McNally whitespace roads.
Ah, those slide-rules. Never had to change a battery.
Remember that ’51 Ford of mine? When you looked under the hood that summer in 1963 you wrote HOPE on the dust on the carburetor. This was the vehicle, you saw in dismay, that was supposed to take us all to Padre Island and, it was devoutly hoped, back to our lives as would-be college students. Believe it or not, it actually got me back to Abilene. I don’t know what sort of accomplishment that was. That car died soon afterwards, but I still mourn it – my first set of wheels.
I saw it happen in Denver, during the 60′s, Santa Fe in the 70′s and 80′s. . . . and now in Taos in the 2000 decade, out of state influx of people fleeing three “coasts” of the U.S. driving up the cost of real estate, to the point of it being absurd. Locals crying, “We cant’t afford to live here”. A 300.000 condo in this One Horse Town, I don’t think so! and just for the record, the Broadcasting World can do without Don Imus.
If it had the straight six, the prayers were warranted. If it had the V-8, I probably shoulda chilled.
Flathead 6. Still, it was the last car I could actually fix myself, and it needed lots of fixing. Starter was often out, and rolling starts were the work-around. God, how I miss that bucket of bolts, little as I would tolerate any of this now.
I hear ya, Gilbert. And boy do I agree about Don Imus.
K.J., yeah those old Ford Flathead sixes never were as good as the Chrysler versions, for some reason. But there was something direct about tuning a car by turning a screw that regulated the flow of gas. Lost knowledge now for most people, I expect.
Ford Flatheads? Before my time…GAS? Before our grandkids time I’m thinking. Don Imus? LONG past time.