Regina Ratner

My name is really Regina Ratner. Instead, I’m known by the prosaic, yet complicated nomenclature, Kay Matthews.

First, let’s look at the Matthews part of the name. It’s my father’s name, of course, as the patriarchal practice of the progeny inheriting the male name (the means of establishing economic ownership) was de rigueur in the 1950s, the decade of my birth (and still largely true in the aughts, a word I’ve always recoiled from without even knowing its archaic meaning is “nonentity”). Except that it really wasn’t my father’s name, which was D’Urphy, from the Scots-Irish settlers who inhabited the southeast portion of North America that eventually became Appalachia. His mother divorced—very unusual in those days—the D’Urphy and married the Matthews—Bosque, as we knew him—but he never officially adopted my father. While D’Urphy/Matthews managed to physically leave southern Illinois behind he never managed to escape the hillbilly heritage that impugned his autodidactic generated self image.

My mother’s name was Ratner. Why oh why didn’t they let me have Ratner instead of Matthews, which wasn’t my legal name anyway. What a wonderful Jewish name that evokes the kosher deli on the Lower East Side of New York City where they served (it’s gone) cheese blintzes, onion rolls, and borsht. I could have been a cousin to Katz’s, the other deli on Bleecker Street where they serve pastrami sandwiches (my mother-in-law’s name was Katz). My mother’s family didn’t do so bad, either. Her father owned a couple of department stores in Denver and one in Phoenix where she learned the retail business. We could have been the Katz/Ratner/Schiller (my father-in-law) family.

The Kay part of the name is indicative of my father's imagined self image. He (apparently my mother was complicit) named me Regina Kay. Regina means queen in Latin. They named their middle daughter queen? But guess what they named their eldest daughter? Claudia. If she had been a he would they have named him Claude, Jr.? I shudder at the thought. But it gets worse. My younger sister’s name was Lana Riquelle. Lana after Lana Turner and Riquelle made up. Of course she never went by either name and was always Riki.

How does one live in northern New Mexico with the first name Kay. Hello, my name is Kay. “Que? Your name is what?” So all the old time Hispanos call me Kate. Which is way better than Kay but not as good as Regina, which in Spanish is pronounced Ray-hina. Ray-hina Ratner sounds pretty good to me. I know plenty of other people who’ve changed their given names, like Susan—to Tanya—and Brian—to Bari, but let’s be real, I’m Kay Matthews to everyone I know and Kay Matthews on Google search and Kay Matthews on the hundreds of La Jicarita articles, magazine articles, blog posts, and books I’ve written. So be it. But maybe Regina could have been a real contender. I’ll never know.

The Dog Park

In El Valle I have a dog door and Paco goes outside to run free whenever he feels like it. In Santa Fe, I go to the dog park. It’s not your typical dog park, where dogs run around in a fenced in space while their humans kibbutz and break up any fights. The Frank Ortiz Dog Park is 138 acres (I think) of piñon/juniper rolling hills with trails and arroyos and big open spaces where humans can hike along with their dogs or stand around with other humans while their dogs play.

While I’m a relative newcomer to the park, having arrived in May of 2022 and preparing to depart in April of 2023, I’m definitely one of the regulars who knows the names of the dogs that are also regulars and the names of the humans whose dogs play with Anka, my son Max’s two-year old German Shepherd. Paco is 12 now and doesn’t play with any dogs except Anka, who sometimes forces him to play.

There are summer regulars and winter regulars, however. After meeting all the dogs and their humans last summer—Rupert and Maria, Beau and Paul—they disappeared as soon as it was 20 degrees at 8:30 am and the winter regulars arrived. Now Anka plays with Buddy, a doodle dog, Juna (not sure of the spelling) another German Shepherd, and Riley, her best buddy. Rily and Anka can find each other anywhere in the park and take off running around the bushes, rolling on top of each other, biting each other’s fir, nipping each other’s legs, just rollicking around until Riley’s human—don’t know his name—has to go to work or I have to go home.

There’s another winter regular named Amelia, whose dog Santo also likes to play with Anka but Santo is trained like one of those dogs who go to the Westminster Dog Show. Also a German Shepherd, on command Santo sits beside Amelia, looks up at Amelia, walks backward with Amelia, and only goes to play when she says “go.” We all offer to pay the beautiful, young Amelia hundreds of dollars to train our dogs but alas, she’s too busy being a goldsmith and making her way in Santa Fe (her landlord left her without heat for three days).

Rarely do the summer and winter cohorts intersect, but the other day I was there in the afternoon substituting for Max who takes the afternoon shift when up bounces Beau, the big, black Labrador who loves to run between your legs and lean up against your body to profess his love. If you recall, my blog post “In Search of Lost Memories Instead of Time” revealed my accident with Anka that landed me in the ER with a concussion and a bruised rib, so I try to stay out of the way of bounding dogs. But I was so happy to see Beau I wouldn’t have cared if he’d knocked me over. I hadn’t seen him since summer and it was obvious he’d missed me, too. I asked Paul where he’d been and he said he only comes out when the temperature is above 40. Maybe that’s what happened to all the summer people—they’re afternoon people now.

I wonder if people meet each other at the dog park and become fast friends or even lovers. My conversation with them is usually limited to dog talk, but maybe other people start talking about human things rather than dog things and relationships evolve. When I was younger and unloved I fantasized about meeting someone at the Laundromat. I think this must have been triggered by some movie I saw or short story I read, but alas, I never did meet anyone there and I haven’t been to a Laundromat in 40 years. I didn’t have to remain unloved, though, and even better than the fantasy of a Laundromat I fell in love with Mark at the much more romantic setting of the La Mosca fire lookout. Now I’m too old for romance but I wish others the best of luck if their fantasy is meeting a lover at the dog park.

On Watching Football: Why Now?

I’ve written before in this blog about watching sports, particularly basketball (“On Watching Basketball” in the first Unf*#!ing Believable) and baseball (“Just Trying to Watch the Game” in Unf*#!ing Believable Redux, yet to be published), but the only time I wrote about football was to dis Beyoncé and Madonna while discussing the Super Bowl halftime show (also in the first Unf*#!ing Believable).

Actually, in the “On Watching Basketball” blog post I also wrote about football but only to reference the Buffalo Bills, Mark’s hometown team—that managed to lose the Super Bowl four times in a row—while questioning his ability to disassociate sports from his criteria used to judge just about everything else in life: “class structure, economic inequality, corporate greed , media misinformation, etc.” I also recognized that he “just got too much enjoyment out of watching the ballet of basketball, the gut wrenching physicality of football, and the beauty of the home run.”

This blog post is about the “gut wrenching physicality of football,” which I’ve found myself watching much more of lately. Maybe it’s because Jakob and Marcos, my grandson, remain Bills fans. Or maybe it’s because a couple of Super Bowls back I became aware of how hot the Kansas City Chiefs’ quarterback Patrick Mahomes is. After Mark died my friends Kai and Ki and I started the tradition of watching the Super Bowl at their house so we could evaluate the quality of the millions-of-dollars commercials that paid for the spectacle. Kai and Ki are the owners and chefs of the Sugar Nymphs Bistro in Peñasco who also fed me delicious food while we were watching the commercials.

This year I’m going to be watching much more than the commercials, however, because Patrick Mahomes is there once again. I actually watched two Sundays of football when the Chiefs worked their way through the playoffs. I even watched two football games last Sunday—the first time in my life—because I had to wait until 4:30 to watch the Chiefs and what was I going to do with the rest of this day I’d set aside for TV.

But I have to admit, the “gut wrenching” display of players landing on top of each other and either slowly getting up or failing to get up often too much. Max and I were trying to watch the Bills/Cincinnati Bengals game— the streaming channel was on the blink—when the Bills player Damar Hamlin actually died on the field of cardiac arrest but was brought back to life. I saw many reruns of that wrenching moment and I’ve seen plenty of other violent, wrenching moments and ask myself, “Why is it that a game so physically brutal is the most popular sport in this country?” On the phone the other night John Nichols told me why he loves to watch football: “Yes, it’s violent, but it’s so interesting because you never know what’s going to happen.” I’m not sure that’s what millions of other fans would say if you asked them the same question, but we’ll leave it at that.

Then when we were skiing yesterday, Jakob and I chatted about the impending Super Bowl and he told me that at the last game they showed the owner’s wife dressed from head to toe in fur. I Googled the owner and saw that his grandfather, H.L. Hunt, was an oil tycoon and the inspiration for the character J.R. Ewing from the long-running TV series “Dallas.” OK, what NFL owner isn’t a capitalist pig (the Green Bay Packers are the only publicly owned team with a president, not an owner)? So, like Mark, I’ll put aside the notion of corporate greed and just enjoy the Super Bowl this year. Go Chiefs!

Death

Zadie Smith wrote a review in The New York Review of Books of Tár, the new movie starring Cate Blanchett as a world famous, narcissistic conductor. While Smith mentions that some movie reviewers asked, “Why do female ambition and desire have to be monstrous?,” the part of the review that interested me was Smith’s discussion of death. In this ambitious woman’s life, it’s her reputation that dies—“ego death”—not her corporeal being, but in Smith’s telling the two are inseparable. For someone like Lydia Tár, Blanchett’s character, the loss of prestige is death.

This makes me think about the many deaths I’ve already experienced and the ones that impend. I’m 73 (happy birthday to me), so there are going to be quite a few of the latter. Of the ones who are gone, there are those who leave behind something that makes it into the cultural zeitgeist: a book, a movie, a painting, a philosophy, or the fictitious Lydia Tár. Those who don’t make it in leave a memory of themselves to only a few others, and even then, that memory fades rapidly as the others’ lives proceed. When I think about those few whose memory I hold, it’s hard to reconcile who they were then, when they were with me daily or close by, with the fact that they aren’t anywhere any more.

This, of course, makes me think about my own death. Where do I fall into the scheme of things? A little fish in a little pond is probably about where I lie. In my 27-year old “Journal of Environmental Politics,” La Jicarita, I’ll be leaving behind a written record of an eventful time in in northern New Mexico but La Jicarita will die with me. It’s archive will live on in the Center for Southwest Research at UNM’s Zimmerman Library, but except for those who knew me personally there won’t be much memory of its editor. I always remember what Owen Lopez, former executive director of the McCune Foundation, which funded La Jicarita for many years, said to me at a party celebrating its fundees: “Well, you may not have accomplished much or won too many battles but at least you have a record of it.”

But I have some very important people with me in that little pond who I would classify as middle-to large sized fish and they’re not doing too well. One of them just called me on the phone to tell me he had a heart attack last week and spent three days in the hospital. “Why didn’t you call me from the hospital?” I asked, upset. “Verizon cut off my cell phone service for some unknown reason. I paid the fuckers.” He survived this time but the possibility of a next time is now much more likely. My other friend is in his 80s and barely hanging on. A beloved writer of novels and nonfiction, he’s hoping to make it through another winter, alone in his house crammed full of life’s detritus.

When they die there will be many people and family members who’ll attend their funerals and reminisce about their places in the world. When my partner of 34 years and co-editor of La Jicarita, Mark Schiller, died prematurely at age 62, we had a wake in El Valle that was crammed full of family, neighbors, co-conspirators, and friends from all walks of life. But the only ones who ever talk about him are the kids and me. That’s where I’m headed as well, and probably without a wake, as everyone who was at Mark’s will either be dead or been gone too long.

But that’s OK. My life is more circumscribed now and less fun, so thinking about death doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is how I’m going to die. Mark died of pancreatic cancer. He lived for 18 months with chemotherapy, some hospital visits, and in the end, he decided to quit eating. My mother died of an intentional overdose of drugs after she was diagnosed with a form of leukemia that made her susceptible to infection. That’s the route I plan to take when I decide I’ve had enough. A serious illness or an inkling of dementia will probably be the tipping point, but you never know. I’ll just have to wait and see and make sure I have the right stuff at the right time. Until then, I’m afraid I’ll have quite a bit of mourning to do and that may be worse than death.

El Valle Writer Wars

Thirty some years ago I landed in El Valle because I knew Bill deBuys, New Mexican writer of great esteem, whose second book, River of Traps: A New Mexico Mountain Life, was a celebration of the village, its people, its culture, its beauty. It was the story of Jacobo and Eliza Romero, of Tomás Montoya, of the Hispano community that kept the acequias, hay fields, and traditional practices intact during a period of transition that would profoundly change the demographics of the village once this generation was gone.

I arrived at the apex of their rule. Tomás, my closest neighbor, was the unofficial mayordomo of El Valle: Jacobo, the main character in Bill’s elegy, had died, but Eliza was still there along with the extended Montoya, Lucero, Romero, and Aguilar clans. Bill had left for Santa Fe but kept a studio he’d built next to Alex Harris’s house, the photographer of River of Traps, who’d high tailed it to North Carolina to teach at Duke.

Only one other full-time Anglo family lived in the village, Nancy and Larry Buechley, who’d been there since the 1970s. My family became the second full-time Anglo family out of pure luck: I knew Bill because we were both writers and he knew about a house for sale. But that’s pretty much all we shared and 30 years later I’m pissed: he’s been criticizing my forest restoration project for not being ecologically sound and for making it easier for poachers to go in and cut the big trees we’re trying to save by cutting down the smaller trees. In a sense, he’s right, at least on the latter point: anyone can drive by the access road that leads to our thinning project near El Valle and say to themselves, hey, I think I’ll just come back tonight and drive down this road and cut down a few trees.

If you’ve already noticed, I interplay “my” and “our” because I feel very proprietary about this restoration project. Over the past 20 years Mark and I thinned five or more acres near El Valle and Chamisal as part of a contract stewardship program run by the Forest Service. Villagers were allotted an acre of forest where they cut all the trees except the “leave” trees, mostly larger ponderosa pines, to replicate a more savannah like environment with an understory of grasses—and keep all the wood. The poachers Bill complained about cut the trees on one of the acres Mark and I thinned that bordered our current restoration project. I’m pissed about that, too.

“Ours” is a board of directors comprised of local people from El Valle and Las Trampas, a Santa Fe non-profit that did the NEPA work (environmental assessment) and wrote the grant for the project, and the Forest Service, that wrote the prescription. But I use “I” quit a bit because of my history in the stewardship program and my presence at the table developing the new one. So when Bill wrote the Regional Forester, behind our backs, that our project was enticing the poachers, we wrote back “ . . . we do not believe that thinning to remove ladder fuels from around large old trees is causing poaching. That line of thinking places the blame on the victims, which are in this case, the forest, the trees, and the leñeros [wood cutters] who are working hard to do things the right way.” That was way back in February of 2022. Then the poachers came in early this winter and cut down some more trees, in the same general area but closer to the village. This time Bill wrote the Forest Service and the project board that we ought to terminate our relationship with the Forest Service until they stop the poaching. We wrote him back again asking him to refrain from the blame game and I wrote an article in La Jicarita asking the same.

This isn’t the first time I’ve wrangled with Bill. During the bitter 1990s and early 2000s’ wars between the environmentalists and community loggers, e.g., Forest Guardians and La Companía Ocho, Bill was the statesman-like conservationist, unwilling to get down and dirty to advocate for his fellow norteños against the lawsuits that greatly contributed to the death of community based logging companies. La Jicarita got plenty muddy and didn’t shy away from critiquing his “above the fray” positions that often failed to hold the absolutist enviros to account. So there you have it. Neighbors who don’t much like each other and don’t see eye to eye. Nothing new there (see Unf*#!ing Believable “It Takes a Village . . . or it Should Take a Village”) just another tiresome El Valle story dispelling romantic notions.

In Search of Lost Memories Instead of Time

Max and I take our dogs, Paco and Anka, to the Santa Fe Dog Park every morning. It’s acres of arroyos and mesas spotted with piñon/juniper that the city converted from a dump to an icon. For me, a lifelong rural dweller whose dogs are used to entering and exiting the house via a dog door to run free, it’s a godsend. We complained that it was too hot this summer—had to get there before 8 am—and now that it’s winter we complain it’s too cold at 7 because the dogs are still on Daylight Savings time. Exactly two weeks ago we were walking back to the car from our morning walk when suddenly I found myself in the car with Max telling me he was taking me to Urgent Care. I asked why and he told me he just found me lying on the ground, mumbling incoherently. He’d been walking ahead of me but heard me moaning and saying that I’d tripped over Anka. I don’t remember falling. I don’t remember telling him I tripped over Anka. I don’t remember walking to the car.

The Urgent Care was closed so he took me to St. Vincent’s Hospital Emergency Room. I remember him telling me where we were going but I don’t remember walking in or being admitted. I do remember telling the nurse or doctor or whoever it was in the room with me that I needed to pee. I don't remember if I walked to the bathroom by myself or they wheeled me there.

Back in the room they took some blood, gave me an EKG to check my heart, and then took me somewhere for a CT scan, to check for an internal head bleed, which was negative. Back in the room again the doctor came in and said I probably had a minor concussion but he was giving me a prescription for a urinary track infection. I asked him, perplexed, if they could tell I had a UTI from blood work and he said no, you gave us a urine sample.

Now, of all the things I don't remember, this is definitely the weirdest. As any woman knows, peeing into a cup for a urine sample is not easy. You’ve got it get it right under the hole or you get it all over your hand or lose it all into the toilet. How in the world was I able to pee in the cup and give it to someone while non-compos mentis? And just as weird, as someone with a long history of UTI’s, I had no idea I had one because I had no symptoms.

So they sent me home with antibiotics and a very muddled mind. I never recovered those lost memories, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Apparently before I fell and hit my head I fell on my side and either bruised or broke a rib. It’s under my right breast and tender to the touch. It hurts like hell when I lean over, try to lift anything, cough, sneeze, or breathe deeply. And despite all this pain, I stupidly went to El Valle a week after the accident to visit my friend and housesitter Marlys and load a bunch of wood into my car to bring down for the rental fireplace.

Now I’m in such pain that when I go to bed I have to lie all night on my right side because if I lie on the left the rib sags and hurts even more. A doctor friend told me it usually takes six weeks to heal a damaged rib. Another friend told me to try the Kinesio taping that athletes use for injuries. So I abrogated my Amazon boycott and allowed Max to order it from Prime because I couldn’t find any in stock in Santa Fe. Pain often skews your moral compass. I probably wouldn’t last long under torture. And I REALLY hope it doesn't take six weeks to heal because I REALLY want to go skiing as soon as we're blessed with a little more snow.I have to assume it will come or I'll go crazy. It's been a tough year for all of us.

Mental Health or Therapy Crisis?

The October 16 Sunday NYT Opinion section dedicated its entire 18 pages to “America’s mental health crisis.” A selection of columnists took on a variety of issues from the personal to the political: “the overlap between bias attacks and mental illness” in a discussion of the Covid pandemic impact on the Asian community; can conservatives only get help from conservative therapists; the dismantling of the “recovered memory” movement; and “Does going to therapy make you a good person,” or the general push in society right now that we should all be in therapy. It’s these last two essays that I want to talk about.

Years ago, in the 1990s, when the “recovered memory” movement took hold, I had a first hand experience with it. According to the article in the Sunday Times, it was during the 1980s and early 1990s that therapists all over the country were helping clients “unearth” repressed memories of childhood sexual and emotional abuse. In 2005, Harvard psychology professor Richard McNally called the recovered movement “ the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.”

Mark and I were in a truck headed up the mountains with a friend and fellow activist to check out a timber sale that was being protested by the local land grant. I don’t remember (again, a common complaint) how the conversation got started, but the friend informed us that her father, an esteemed medical doctor back east, had sexually abused her when she was a child and had also tortured her by sticking her with needles. We, of course, were flabbergasted and didn’t know what to say, but she blithely went on and on about it explaining that her siblings didn’t believe any of it and nobody ever knew about it until she unearthed it in recent therapy. I guess our silence was emblematic of that insidious behavior called political correctness. We’d already concluded that our friend was a little crazy to begin with, what with her sometimes bizarre behavior, medical complaints, and beguiling intelligence, so we decided to let “abused” be the unprofessional assessment of causality.

This got me thinking about another encounter with abuse that took place right up the alley from where I grew up in Colorado Springs. In elementary school a Catholic family moved into the neighborhood with a passel of kids—seven—who became our best playmates, especially Beanie and Bunker, whose real name he would inform us was Edward Rodgers with a “d.” Beanie’s real name was Susan, and there were three other sisters I didn’t play with as much, but the really interesting thing about the family was the fact that their father was an FBI agent. He would be gone for long periods of time and sometimes the mother would ask my mother if our live-in “nanny,” the young business college student who traded room and board for watching us while our mother was at work, could spend the night at her house when she felt spooked. All we knew was that the mother was the “nervous” type and the kids were a bit wild and made our play lives much more interesting than it had been.

Then, as adults, my sister and I discovered that a movie, “Ultimate Betrayal,” had been made about this family in 1990 when the sisters revealed their FBI father, Edward Rodgers Sr., had sexually abused them when they were our playmates. All the sisters were leading dysfunctional adult lives and persuaded their older sister, Sharon, who had apparently repressed the abuse, to file a lawsuit against their father (Sharon and Susan filed the lawsuit and the other two sisters testified). Marlo Thomas, who portrays Sharon in the movie, had this to say in a 1994 article in The Washington Post: "This isn't a case of false memory or repressed memory. The other sisters said, 'I've known this all my life,' but Sharon wouldn't allow herself to admit that."

Edward Rodgers, who retired as an FBI agent and became a child-abuse investigator for the 4th Judicial District Attorney's Office (El Paso County) in Colorado Springs (unf*#!ing believable!), denied any of this ever happened. His three sons, including Bunker, denied it as well. He never showed up in court and the jury awarded the sisters $2.3 million that was never paid. Colorado’s US Representative Pat Schroeder introduced a bill in November of 1993 that would allow them to tap into Rodgers's FBI pension, but I couldn’t find any more information about whether that ever happened.

The last essay I read in the mental health NYT issue was called “Does going to therapy make you a good person.” The author, Mychal Denzel Smith, questions whether he decides to go to therapy because he actually needs therapy or because he should be in therapy because everyone else he knows is. The therapists he interviews concur with his assessment: their clients tell them “I just feel like I’m supposed to be here.” While the article goes on to explore whether this therapy craze has become a binary—in therapy good, not in therapy, bad, I must say that the whole idea of therapy gives me pause for thought after these two stories of abuse. Smith states in the essay: “But the biggest issue, which therapists themselves told me, is that the fixation on therapy as the go-to cure-all leaves little room for people seeking other forms of healing.”

I wish I’d had the chutzpah to suggest to my friend with recovered memory that maybe she should have looked into some other healing for herself.