A Horrible Year

Twenty twenty-three has been a horrible year. Other than during the Vietnam War or the invasion of Iraq I don’t remember feeling this much grief and anger at the United States and all who are complicit in our disastrous foreign policy. In the 70s, as the Vietnam War raged on, I was young and living with a college cohort who felt exactly as I did and who went with me—along with 500,000 others—to the 1969 Washington D.C. anti-war march. In the 1990s, I had Mark and another cohort of activists who raged with me at George Bush and organized into grassroots coalitions like Occupy Wallstreet.

Today, older, more infirm—which I will delve into a little later—and more constrained, I’m overwhelmed with outrage and helplessness at the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza. Mark isn’t here so I’ve had to transfer my angst to Jakob, who’s actually been to Israel and seen the apartheid state. Mark and I interviewed him in La Jicarita just before Mark died in 2010 and I reran the interview a few weeks ago. Jakob turned me on to all the Instagram sites covering the genocide—middleeasteye, Shaun King (who was just blocked by Meta), jewishvoiceforpeace—while I turned him onto podcasts—Useful Idiots, Jewish Currents On the Nose. Reading and listening to voices like Gideon Levy, the Israeli journalist for the Haaretz newspaper, Ilan Papé, Israeli historian, and Masha Gessen, Russian journalist, help keep me sane by validating the insanity of those perpetuating and defending Israel’s massacre of Gaza civilians and escalating murders in the West Bank.

Most of my friends and political allies also provide validation but there are those whose attention remains so focused on Trump when all I want to do is prosecute Biden for war crimes that I can’t really have a conversation with them. This fixation with Trump has led us down many rabbit holes—Russiagate and Hunter Biden—and diverted our attention from the depravities of the Democratic Party, but none compares to what Biden is doing now in the Middle East (and on the Mexican border). Independent journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, who just died, had this to say about the failures of the left: “The obsession with Trump the man—not Trump as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system—beckons great danger for all of us.”

I was reminded today when reading Mary Gaitskill’s “Out of It” column on Substack about how “people of her generation” grew up as defenders of Israel—she’s only a few years younger than me—that I’ve always lived in a Jewish cultural and secular bubble where Israel wasn’t even on the radar. My parents sent us to the Unitarian Church where all the kids in LRY—liberal religious youth—were also Jewish and provided my political, musical, and sexual awakening. My mother-in-law, who lost her extended family in the Holocaust, referred to Israeli prime ministers as Nazis. The only deviation I recall was reading Leon Uris’s Exodus, which was published in 1958; I I was around 12 when I read it. I was completely enthralled and had to ask my mother to hide the book until I finished my homework (geez, what a studious little kid I was). But at least that wasn’t as bad as Gaitskill’s admission that she was enraptured of the Six Day War at 13.

To end this year’s tale of horror I’ll try to be brief about my infirmities. After a four-year remission my interstitial cystitis returned, which required more trips to the urogynecology center at UNM Hospital for treatments that didn’t work. While there, I was diagnosed with pudendal nerve entrapment, which is a condition that makes sitting a problem. An hour in the car is painful; anything more than that is tortuous. I had to drive two hours to the hospital in Albuquerque for treatments that also didn’t work. I’m waiting for the treatment of last resort: botox, which I learned is used for all kinds of conditions, including migraine headaches. Then six months ago my right foot began to hurt and after numerous trips to a foot doctor, six weeks in an orthopedic boot, physical therapy, and a cortisone shot it’s even worse now. That’s what it took to get to an MRI, coming up in a week. And last but not least, my right knee, which has been deteriorating for a while, took a decided turn for the worse and walking Paco every morning is challenging. Will this be another descent into the medical industrial complex of getting from the primary doc to the MRI that takes at least six months?

On our walk this morning Paco and I ran into neighbors taking a day trip to escape a year similar to mine. We commiserated that yes, it had been a horrible year. They expressed hope for 2024. I’m afraid that I, along with the world, am on a declining path where my own descent won’t make much of a difference but that of the world will bring a greater amount of suffering to a greater amount of people. That’s a tough bargain for hope.

Who Are These People?

In these heightened times of political turmoil—local, national, and global—two issues are painfully revelatory of how broken our political systems are: abortion and Israel/Palestine. The first, the anti-abortion movement, the front runner in the culture wars, and the second, the real war of killing Palestinians, are imposed by an American government that rules that reflects the will of institutional systems supported by the bottom line: money.

Who are these people sitting on the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, the right to abortion? Who are these six people who voted to deny a woman the right to have purchase over her own body? The descriptions that come quickly to mind are: • They’re rich. They belong to the 1 percent. The have a guaranteed income for life. They use their positions on the court to accumulate more money from other rich people and corporations. • They’re mostly white. The only one who isn’t wants to be white. • They’re mostly men. • They’re mostly Catholic.

Who are these people sitting in Congress who want to send $14 billion more dollars to Israel to buy weapons to kill Palestinians? Other than the 18 U.S. Representatives, mostly women of color, who signed a Ceasefire Resolution for Gaza, these descriptions come quickly to mind: • They’re mostly rich. You have to be rich to run for Congress unless you have some secret PAC money that makes you rich by proxy. • They’re mostly white. • They’re mostly men. • There are way too many evangelical Christians for comfort, especially the guy the Republicans just elected as Speaker of the House.

So why do these people rule and legislate against women and Palestinians when more than half the country is comprised of women and over half the country supports a Ceasefire in Palestine? The Supreme Court six are just figureheads, doing the will of the minority who are desperate to opt out of modernity (equal rights, reproductive rights, economic equality, secularism, multiculturalism). The only way for them to do that is make sure the court recognizes corporations are people—Citizens United—so corporate money can rule against all these things that terrify them. With a totally dysfunctional Congress that fails to pass needed legislation to protect our rights, the Court is able to take them away.

The people in Congress responsible for this dysfunction represent the lobbyists of the military industrial complex and the Jewish right. Why would they vote for a Ceasefire and jeopardize all those campaign funds from Lockheed Martin and AIPAC? As Ali Abunimah says in his book, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse: “Today, Israel remains a taboo subject and any politician who wishes to see his or her career flourish knows better than to speak out against its policies. Hilary Clinton learned that lesson the hard way. Castigated as first lady for expressing sentiments in favor of a Palestinian state, she has become one of the leading pro-Israeli hawks as a U.S. senator from New York.” Abunimah’s book was published in 2006. Just go on Instagram or X to see Clinton’s support of Israel’s massacre in Gaza in 2023.

It doesn’t matter who’s in the White House in terms of the power of these systems. Someone like Trump may do more short-term damage than someone like Biden, but women are still second-class citizens and the blood on their hands from immigrant children or babies in Palestine is the same color.

Not in my name but on my conscience

The Ceasefire Now movement is urging everyone to write their congressional representatives and ask them to either sign on to House Resolution 786 calling for an immediate cease fire in Palestine or draft a similar resolution in the Senate.

I wrote Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez, a Democrat from Las Vegas who thinks of herself as a progressive, asking her to sign the house resolution. She (her office) wrote me back a letter full of pablum about how horrible war is, that Israel has the right to defend itself, and that President Biden is doing everything he can to provide needed supplies to the Palestinians at the Rafah crossing.

This is what I wrote back: “Your response to my letter is quite pathetic. As an American Jew and a Mexican American, you and I share the heritage of being both a victim and a perpetrator. By not agreeing to sign the House Resolution 786 you’ve chosen the perpetrator side with your unequivocal support of Israel. As a Jew, I stand against Israel as the perpetrator of apartheid and genocide. Without any acknowledgment of the history of how the Zionist movement began and turned Israel into the authoritarian, anti-democratic, nationalistic state it is now, your position is based on propaganda and lies. I’m enclosing this letter that was written to the magazine Consortium News, one of the few American publications that tries to tell the truth in a distorted corporate media world that regurgitates the American government’s position on Israeli.”

The letter I sent her was by two people named Ace Thelin and Forest Knolls. I have no idea who they are but the reason their letter in Consortium News impressed me is that they focused on the fact that Israel is the creation of western imperialism and settler colonialism, just like our own country, the good old USA. The same Manifest Destiny that white Europeans imposed on Indigenous and Mexican peoples to “bring civilization” to them is exactly what the Zionists brought to Palestine, to the people the Israeli government has lately been referring to as “human animals.”

It didn’t have to be this way. I recently read Amos Oz’s memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, about his upbringing in the city of Jerusalem in the era of the dissolution of Mandatory Palestine and the beginning of the State of Israel (his fiction book, Judas, also explores these themes). Oz’s family had emigrated to Palestine to escape Russian oppression and was living in close quarters with its neighboring Arabs. Many of the emigrant Jews were not Zionists: they were socialists, secularists, intellectuals, working poor, and a-political refugees who just wanted to live a quiet life. Although Zionism was actually founded by both secular and religious Jews, under the political machinations of Britain and the western powers, once the State of Israel became a reality, Zionism became an ideology, a national homeland with a national identity that to no one’s surprise is becoming a fundamentalist theocracy. And we know what happens when religious fundamentalism defines who is worthy and who isn’t: ethnic cleansing. Itamar Ben-Gvir, now the Israeli Security Minister was “convicted of incitement to racism, interfering with a police officer performing his duty, and support for a terrorist organization, Meir Kahane’s Kach Movement (he has also successfully sued the state for hundreds of thousands of shekels in compensation for wrongful accusations). Due to these convictions, the IDF thought it too dangerous to draft him when he was eighteen.”

And so the slaughter continues and the dangers of a full blown regional war increase daily. As a ground invasion impends, more terrorists will rise from the ashes. Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden will share that legacy. And bear (remember the hug?) blood on their hands. Not in my name but on my conscience.

The El Valle Fire

This is what I wrote in my June 4, 2022 blog post: “El Valle spent two days on the Ready list for the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire. The evacuation protocol goes like this; Ready, think about what you want to get out of your house if you have to leave; Set, put your papers, electronics, photo albums, and animal kennels if you have them by the door or in the car and be ready to Go, which means, get the hell out of Dodge. Then a cold front moved in, it snowed on the mountain peaks, and a few drops of rain fell in the valleys. The Taos County Sheriff took us off the Ready list and put the neighboring villages closer to the fire on Set instead of Go (through the grapevine I heard that not many of them had heeded “Go” and left).

"We dodged a (small “d” this time) bullet this time but it could just as easily been us, on the west side of the Sangre de Cristos instead of the east side in Mora and Guadalupita and Rociada and Chacon. Our ranger district could have lit a prescribed burn that got away in the very forest restoration project I’ve been working on for three years. Someone could have let a campfire get out of hand up in Las Trampas or Santa Barbara Canyon. Someone else could have thrown a cigarette out the window onto dry roadside grass.”

On Friday, September 8, 2023 it was us, although everyone was saying we again “dodged a bullet” because our houses didn’t burn, just the surrounding forest. In an ironic twist of fate someone set ablaze the large thinning project above El Valle on the ridge that separates us from Las Trampas. The slash piles were still on the ground. After the smoke cleared and I could see the thinned acres up on the ridge it looked like it had snowed: the piles were white ash. The next day, when the rains came, the piles were black.

It was a crazy three days. First, the fire erupted midday on Friday with huge billows of black smoke scaring the shit out of everyone. I was in Taos when my neighbor Marty called telling me El Valle was on fire. She was on her way home from Española. Whoever got there first would get Paco, my dog. Forty-five minutes later, in Peñasco, the state cops at the road block told me no one was allowed on SH 76, the highway you have to travel to access the forest road into El Valle. I yelled and argued that I had to get my dog. I called 911: “Obey the cops.”

No one got through this road block from Peñasco but somehow Marty got through from the other direction, got her animals, and stopped for Paco. He wasn’t there. Meanwhile, I was at the Sugar Nymphs Bistro in Peñasco using their Wi-Fi to talk to Marty and my other neighbors the Buechleys, who were in El Valle and got to Paco first. They took him to Ojo Sarco where they would shelter.

Along with other locked out El Valle neighbors, also using Sugar Nymphs Wi-Fi, we were constantly on our phones, talking to other neighbors, finding out who was in and who was out, telling our families that El Valle was burning, and fielding calls from other friends offering houses and help. I slept at the Sugar Nymphs house where Kai offered me some pot to try to sleep (no Xanax in my purse, my only possession). Instead of sleep I hallucinated for two hours on only two tokes. Marijuana has never been my drug of choice.

Early Saturday morning I got two texts: “We got into El Valle.” I threw on my clothes, left a note for Kai and Ki, and raced home. No one was manning the Road Closed signs. The helicopters and slurry planes were in full force: hundreds of water drops over burning trees with slurry laid across wide swaths of smoke. Those of us who made it back in packed up all the stuff we weren’t able to pack on Friday and waited to see if they (the county sheriff or state police) were going to try to throw us out. Once again they closed the El Valle Road but they didn't make us leave.

Then the rains came. It hadn’t rained all of July and August, our monsoon season. Several drenching rains put out all but the most resistant, deeply embedded embers that kept roots and rocks hot as hell. Dozens of fire fighters combed the acres, squelching the smokes, strengthening the natural boundaries that corralled the fire between the two villages.

It’s now a week later. The crews are still here, remediating the bulldozer lines that had to be laid at each end of the village, chipping all the trees they cut to create the fuel breaks, fixing fences, once more passing through the burned acres, just in case. We finally got our mail, a week after the road closure sign went up; we have to have a talk with the mailman, who unlike the UPS and Express drivers who barreled through, obeyed the admonition. I’m walking through all the detritus of the fire, measuring where it burned hottest, where it skipped over, where it validated other thinned acres accomplished by home owners with agency help. Once the survivor euphoria wears off there will no doubt be lambasting from thinning deniers—"let nature take its course”—or the village crank whose private lands across the river burned. Compared with what happened a year ago not so far away, I say, let’s rejoice and give everyone a pat on the back before we descend into dissecting what happened and why.

Life in the Lookout

My son Jakob gave me a copy of Phillip Connors book about being a fire lookout in a remote tower in the Gila Wilderness. I’d heard about the book before but had never gotten around to reading it. As a former fire lookout myself—and writer— you’d think I’d have sought it out, but better late than never. Now it can be gist for a blog.

Connors and I share many of the same lookout qualifications: familiarity with Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac’s adventures in North Cascades lookouts; a love of solitude (dogs don’t count); time to write; and hiking and backpacking in the wilds of New Mexico. We also share a deep understanding that being a fire lookout is a contradiction in terms. The job, which no longer exists, required one to report fires seen from the lookout to the Forest Service dispatcher who would then send fire crews—hot shot crews, helicopter crews, tanker crews, spotter planes, retardant planes—to stomp out the fire. I was a lookout in the 1970s, Connors in the 2000s. During my time there was only the hint of aknowledgment that perhaps the decades of suppressing all fires in our national forests had created an unhealthy and overstocked forest that made them more susceptible to extreme, uncontrollable fire. By the time Connors got to his lookout in the Aldo Leopold Wilderness—sister to the Gila Wilderness—the FS was gauging each non-manmade fire for its “let burn” potential to improve forest conditions by managing low impact ground fires.

But that’s about where our shared interests end. He’s married, hates cows, worships Aldo Leopold, and ends up with a book of “deep reflection.” I had a love fest in the lookout, being single and in my early 20s, was being schooled in the concept of inhabited wilderness, would end up living next door to cows for most of my life, and only got an article for New Mexico Magazine out of it.

I found out about fire lookouts at my first FS job ever on the Lincoln National Forest in Cloudcroft after I dropped out of Antioch. I was a campground patrol who drove around visiting with all the Texans who came to the mountain air for heat relief and moved from camp site to site camp every two weeks—the limit at each site—in their campers and RVs. I soon began an affair with one of the fire crew, a local boy who taught me how to two-step and took me camping on horseback. When one day we visited the district fire tower I knew being a fire lookout instead of a campground patrol was the job for me.

Luckily enough, I got that job the next season in the La Mosa Peak fire lookout, sister peak to the majestic Mount Taylor, near Grants. They took me up in a helicopter with all my gear as there was too much snow on the ground for the fire trucks to reach the tower. I had to come back down to get my dogs, Chani and Judge, and the fire truck dropped me off at snow line and I hiked up for my initial two-week stay. Unlike Connors, who lived in a cabin below and climbed the tower every day for work, I lived in the tower, already high enough on the peak to provide the necessary vista. My dogs lived in the tower with me and whenever company came they’d stand as sentinels on the catwalk and bark their heads off.

My visitors included my first lover, a young geology student doing an internship at one of the uranium mines on the forest boundary. In the 1970s the uranium industry was ubiquitous around Grants: drilling rigs combing the forest for potential mining sites (I had to learn to differentiate their diesel smoke from a forest fire); the open pit Jackpile mine at Laguna Pueblo; and milling processing plants near Milan. Gino was a fun-loving guy who had no intention of being a uranium miner so we had a lot of fun at night in the tower and hiking and camping in the canyons below the peak.

After he went back to school I had a brief fling with the helicopter pilot stationed on our district, then a longer affair with Danny, one of a group of friends who ended up buying land on the other side of my FS district, out in the Zuni Mountains. Then, in my second season as lookout, I met Mark, a poet who was schooled on Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder and thought nothing could be better than having an affair with a fire lookout. That was the end of the love affairs: we were together for 34 years until he died of pancreatic cancer. After La Mosca, we took turns working the Cedro Peak fire lookout in the Manzano Mountains, closer to the house we were building in Placitas and where I took baby Jakob to work with me.

Conners and my environmental politics diverged most profoundly when Mark and I moved to El Valle, a land grant village in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico. Here, as members of a land based community that maintained the traditions of grazing cattle, cutting firewood, and irrigating fields and gardens from rivers on public lands that their ancestors previously owned, I relied more on my neighbors than the environmental heroes like Leopold, John Muir, or Ed Abbey as guides to what was ecologically sustainable for both the land and its inhabitants. Instead of writing a paeon to the wonderful luck of being a fire lookout, which Connors does admirably, Mark and I ended up publishing a newspaper that examines the conflicts that inevitably arise from perspectives, like Connors and mine, that tend to diverge based on lived experience.

That’s not to say I didn’t share the quotidian joys that Connors and all the lucky lookouts who’ve graced these peaks experience in one form or another: golden eagles flying every night, black bears with whom I competed for raspberries, bombing nighthawks, fire crews who stopped by for a visit, the view of volcanic plugs from my outhouse, lightning storms that had me hovering on the floor with Jakob, and walking my beloved dogs. I don't particularly treasure the times the two came back to the tower with porcupine quills in their snouts (and in Judge’s case, in his mouth) but they’re all my memories, good and bad. I’m sorry Connors’ generation was the last one to be there, on top of the peaks, beneath the clouds, looking out at the world.

Building a House

I find it hard to believe that I built a house from scratch back in the 1970s, especially after today’s three-hour bout with my dilapidated hoop house door. It’s hard for one person to screw boards together without another person applying the needed buttress and even harder to hang the dang thing once you’ve managed to get the boards in place. But the door is fixed and rehung to protect the in-house seedlings in case the temperature drops below 32 degrees, which alarmingly enough, on this 22nd day of May, has been happening on a regular basis.

Actually, Mark and I and numerous friends and neighbors built that house in Placitas, where Mark and I lived until the early 1990s with our two children. Neither of us had any building experience. Mark was a man of the mind—a steel trap one at that: poet, keeper of rare books, jazz aficionado, fledgling artist, and master of Trivial Pursuit. I was a college drop out who had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. We both ended up in Placitas because of the time and place: the freedom of the early 70s, the search for a different kind of life, and the draw of that hackneyed New Mexican “enchantment.”

I somehow got it in my head that I was going to build a house before I met Mark. With money from my mother I managed the down payment on five acres of land outside the village in an area where other twenty something’s were also building houses from scratch. I considered several design options, all adobe of course, and finally settled on two stories with a gambrel roof so one could stand up straight in any room of the upstairs. I drew up blueprints. How I managed to do this I have no idea. There was no YouTube to see how to design and draw up plans for a house because there was no Internet (at least for us plebeians). I hired a man with a backhoe to dig the foundation. I must have gone to the library for adobe building books because I had him dig the footing wide enough to lay the adobes length wise, not side wise, for better insulation.

Then I met Mark, which was quite fortuitous because although he didn’t know anything about building, his landlord and friend Tom did. We hired him to teach us how to prepare a footing for the cement truck, lay cement block for the stem wall, and stack adobes. We mixed all the cement and adobe mud for this in wheel barrels and laid all of it ourselves. Of course before we did all this I had to persuade Mark that building a house was a good idea when he thought spending his time working at a bookstore or library—he was working at the famous Living Batch Bookstore in Albuquerque when I met him—and writing poems and reading books for fun was a better idea.

But he got into the rhythm of things until we got to the second story and he fell through the staircase opening and the piece of plywood that had been laid over that opening fell on his head. The cut ran from just above an eyebrow, up his forehead, and then halfway across the top. They stitched him up at UNM Hospital—hundreds of stitches in two layers—and then put sandbags around his neck until they could determine if it was broken. It wasn't. But his enthusiasm was quite broken and he lay in bed for a good long while recovering. In the meantime I was back at the house building the rafters from two by twelve rough lumber. All I had was a skill saw. All I’ve ever had is a skill saw. When I needed new boards cut for the hoop house door I went to my neighbor’s house and he cut them with his table saw. When I had to replace the molding on my windows I went to my other neighbor, who’s a woodworker, and he cut them with a table saw. Or maybe it was some other kind of saw, as he and his wife have every woodworking tool ever invented. Mark had a jigsaw for a while but I don’t know what happened to it. And yes, of course, we had and have a chainsaw, but that’s a requirement to live here.

Anyway, I had to wait for Mark to recover before we could lift the rafters into place—along with any other bodies we could round up. There were many more adventures along the way, like Tom hanging on a rope over the dormers attaching the tin and me, pregnant, carrying Mark buckets of plaster up two tiers of scaffolding. And here I am now in a house in El Valle that’s almost three stories high with lofts above the second floor. We had to buy a really big ladder to paint the window trim and plug the hole under the rafter where the bats were getting in, but I hired a crew to stucco the house twenty years after we moved in. They were on three tiers of scaffolding. I don’t even go up the ladder anymore.

So I do what I can these days like fix hoop house doors and replace molding and paint first floor trim and then I have to call in the troops. It’s hard doing it by myself but it’s also good there’s no one around to witness how badly my house building skills, which were never really that great, have deteriorated. We only built a house through sheer will; sadly, a house that is no more. Here’s the blog I wrote about going back to Placitas after twenty years to look at it. But hey, we know we did it even if it’s not there.

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.