I‘m not actually unhappy, I just needed to put “blues” at the end of that. (Kinda makes you want to sing, don’t it?)
But it sure has been a cool, overcast, rainy day in Taos, one of those that reminds you you’re in the mountains. We visited a chilly farmers’ market in the morning and then came home to more or less hole up. I gave in and built a fire around 2:30 p.m., and a little later we took a long walk in a light rain. (Not as quick as a long walk off a short pier, but with similar results.) There was some spectacular cloud/mountain interface action from time to time, with backlit misty clouds and massive, thudding beauty, and then it looked like Indianapolis in February. All in all, the weather made for interesting recall of other times and places. The Talpa valley was so green and wet, the Rio Grande Del Rancho so high and fast. Falling away, falling away…
The other night I was weeding my files — real ones — and I came across my third grade report card from Miss June Deel’s class in Blacksburg, Virginia. The year is unimportant, but the card had a heading for “Physical Defects,” under which the box for “Eyes” was checked, along with a box that said “Corrected.” I’ll say. You wouldn’t believe how many times my parents told me that my glasses cost a whole FIVE DOLLARS, this when my allowance was a dime a week, implying that if I broke them, I’d be bumping into walls until I learned to be responsible and save. (Did I mention this was the third grade?) On the back of the card was a section for teacher comments, and the one that stood out was, “Has great artistic ability.”
“Has great artistic ability,” no shit, and never once did that get any traction with the parents. It was almost something to be ashamed of in my family. Artists were “those” people, the ones who lived outside of God and law and always paid the price. You could never get a job if you were an artist. It wasn’t safe to be one. This trumped-up circumcision of the soul goes back to a circuit-riding “shoutin’ Methodist” in West Virgina, riding his mule to a different church each Sunday, the Great Depression, racism, mental illness, and a twisted fear of life that is its own revenge, for all these pikers lived a long, long time. Come to think of it, maybe they were right about the poor bohemian weirdos they surely secretly envied. Pinching pennies (and a slew of other things) must be good for scrubbing arteries or something: my grandad had a dreamer’s heart and died at 75, but Granny lived a century.
As for the polecat incident, this is from the third grade, too: Blacksburg, Virginia, in the old, old days, when wooden desks had inkwells and the windows opened wide on warm spring days. There was an older student in my class, twice as tall as any of us, who’d been “held back” forever. He lived way up in a holler somewhere, came to class in overalls and barefoot. This is God’s own truth. One day before class he beckoned several of us with a sly smirk on his face and said, “Hey, y’all wanna see a baby polecat?” I didn’t know what he meant, but the others did, and we all crowded in to peek down in his overalls: sure enough, a baby skunk! You can guess how long that lasted. I doubt he made it to the fourth grade that year, or even the next, and I know he didn’t have “great artistic ability” cited on his report card.
“Good with animals,” maybe?
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