“What do you want to eat tonight?” she said, leaving it up to me. Whatever I wanted to make, in other words. That’s how we ended up with apple pancakes and bacon in the living room. After a hard day of screwing around on Twitter and Medium (marketing!), hosing the ants off the hummingbird feeders, and avoiding calling the mortgage broker, I was ready for some comfort food. Turns out the lady has an email address, by the way.
I’m such a wimp. That’s what the dermatologist called me. I was in the room where he was doing eyelid surgery on my wife. “You wanna see?” he asked before he stitched her back together. I knew he was proud of his work, but I said no and pissed him off. He goes diving in the South Pacific. There’s a fish tank in the wall.
My wife met someone today named “Thistle.” It might be “Willow,” though. She’s not sure. Very Taos, at any rate. But you have to give people credit for reinventing themselves here the way so many do. While this is a local industry, it does take a mess of hot lust to name yourself after a plant, animal, saint, or natural feature of the landscape. (I once met a woman named “Feral,” which seems to cover all the bases.)
Sometimes people do it to their children. When we first moved to northern New Mexico and I was freaking out so hard, there was a time sitting outside at a restaurant when the family next to us let their toddler plop down in the dirt and suck on gravel. Drool and pebbles were running down her chin. I thought the kid might choke to death and couldn’t eat my cheeseburger. One of the group spoke up, but the mother was cool because her little girl would be exposed to all these natural germs and develop more immunity against diseases! Of this I have no doubt, but right there is the perfect storm. Assuming she survived, she might go by “Phloem” or “Nimbus” these days. I don’t know if I could take that, so this is something of an existential threat. I told my wife that were I to be miraculously re-inserted into Taos as a younger man and even more miraculously gifted with a son, that I would have to go the other way and name him “Carburetor.”
[chortle, guffaw]
“I don’t think that’s funny at all,” she said.
Oh, but I did.
There’s also this pet name I never get to use and that is “Fremont.” All I have to do is think of a kid named Fremont and I start to laugh—lacking same, I turn to pets, but the thing is useless on a cat. Put them all together, though, and we have “Fremont Carburetor Farr.” Hilarious yet sound! Resonant and full of greatness!
She liked that one even less, but now I have to use some version of it in a book.
It’s been a brilliant summer so far. If I didn’t wander outside of this chilly (!) adobe, I’d never know it was almost ninety degrees outside. It never gets above seventy in here. Hell, it never gets to seventy, except in the winter when I have the wood stove cranking. Just thinking about that gives me the willies. We gotta get out of this place, you know. Winter. This place. Hoowee, chilluns! Thank God I have a new approach. (I do?)
Anyway, just look at what two seconds of wind accomplished. It was a fine breezy afternoon and then kaboom. It could have been a dust devil. It could have been a zephyr. Ha-ha, zephyr: “A soft gentle breeze.” I call them zephyrs, anyway, these out-of-nowhere blasts that blow the lawn chairs into the sagebrush. Just two seconds, mind you. A bunch of rakes and stuff fell over, too.
Meanwhile, I may have mentioned a perfect house we didn’t score. That was because after we decided to give it a shot, our buyer’s agent learned that we only had eighteen hours to submit a bid and that there were two other buyers ahead of us who would probably offer close to the asking price—which I was hoping to aim well south of. I had no idea Fannie Mae foreclosures worked like that and didn’t like being pushed. In any case, we couldn’t move that fast. I’ve kept my eye on it, though, and we’ve had fun pretending that we own it.
Then kaboom again. Yesterday morning it “fell out of contract,” and I got busy. Our buyer’s agent made some calls. I was figuring what we could pay. My wife was trying to pay attention, but one of her oldest friends had died in Maryland and you know how that goes. A little tension there, but in the end it didn’t matter. After lunch we learned that the property was still under contract after all, but to the second buyer who’d submitted a bid before the invisible deadline several weeks ago. Well, damn. Another swoosh and whoop and put the chairs back up the way they go.
I didn’t even have time to start worrying. Onward!
Well, I said we did, didn’t I? Just thought some of you might like to see a little bit of “old Taos.” Much of Llano Quemado—the southern-most neighborhood in Ranchos de Taos—qualifies. The last half of the video shows the narrow street beside a church. It feels like old Mexico every time we drive by.
It was different sort of day for us, with just one trip to town. The noisy neighbors were unaccountably and fortunately gone. The weather was warm and breezy. We had bratwursts and veggies to cook for supper, with caramel butter pecan cream and carrot cake for desert. After dark we walked fifty yards down the road to watch the town fireworks, which seemed a bit tame compared to shows in years past. The spontaneous neighborhood blasts were considerably louder and a few skyrockets almost as colorful.
Enjoy your holidays whenever and how you can—we did!
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