Reflections on the Super-duper Bowl

Let’s talk Beyoncé. Was it singing? (and I’m not talking about whether she was lip syncing); was it dancing? (in thigh-high boots with 5 inch heels I’d call it stomping); was it an excuse for pyrotechnics?; was it spectacle? Was it . . . 75,000 tweets for CRAP?

I didn’t know until recently that she can really sing because I always dismissed her as a entertainment package, not an R & B singer in the tradition of Aretha, Etta and Laura Nyro (who was finally inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame) who stood up on the stage or sat at the piano and sang with their souls. Now we have Beyoncé and Lady Gaga and Destiny’s Child (with Whitney Houston, RIP, kind of in the middle) who prance around the stage in a little bit of satin or leather and it’s really hard to know what they’re doing.

Michael Jackson and Prince, our androgynous links from the Detroit, Philly, and Memphis R & B days, also crossed over to pop but they made it clear they could actually sing and dance. In his new book Telegraph Avenue Michael Chabon, in the voice of one of his characters, also laments the loss of R & B talent, not to pop but to rap: "But face it, a lot has been lost. A whole lot. Ellington, Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, we got nobody of that caliber even hinted at in black music today. I'm talking about genius, composers  . . .  knowing how to play the fuck out your instrument."

I think it was Madonna, though, who really fucked things up. When I went to Wikipedia to peruse her profile—one of the longest I’ve ever seen on that site—she’s quoted as saying she wanted to grow up as a “black kid;” Prince was one of her idols. Apparently she also wanted to be a gay one: my friend Terri says she thinks Madonna’s early style derived from the New York gay bars before AIDS. So the lack of her talent as a singer/dancer/actress converged with desires of who she wanted to be and voila, crossover R & B as pop spectacle via MTV was born: shake your booty and you can be whoever or whatever you want.

Some academic feminists (and men) would be aghast at my assessment. Many have found that Madonna is the perfect political icon talked about by the famous Judith Butler in her book Gender Trouble because of her reconstruction of identity. The infamous Camille Paglia wrote that Madonna liberated sexuality from its Puritanical roots. That is, until she also wrote about how old and plastic Madonna was looking and how unseemly it was that she was still shaking her booty. And then there was the critic who asked the question, “Is Madonna a glamorized fuckdoll or the queen of parodic critique?”

But really, what the whole thing reminds me of is Elvis, minus a few pounds. We watched him rise from a rockabilly white boy to a soulful crooner of love songs to a icon of Las Vegas glitter. Only now the glitter isn’t confined to Las Vegas; it’s at the Grammy’s, the Emmy’s, the Oscars, and, of course, the Super Bowl. I wonder if it all could have gone anywhere else, what with MTV, rap producers who have shoved aside the likes of Jerry Wexler, and the fact that making millions of dollars is the common denominator of 21^st century modernity.

I thought about watching the Grammy’s to see if they could prove me wrong until I got my Sundays mixed up. If I’d known Amy Winehouse would have been there . . . maybe I would have remembered.

The Phenomenon that is Scottsdale/Phoenix

This time I went to visit Max in Scottsdale, where he moved after living in Los Angeles, where I also visited him and described in my existential/fear and loathing blog post . The impression ones gets of Scottsdale is distinctly suburban, with wide, tree lined streets bordered by meticulously manicured lawns of grass—green grass in the middle of the Sonoran desert—cacti, ornamental cedar, pine, and palm trees, and bougainvillea.

Yes, there was bougainvillea in bloom in December, along with green-leafed deciduous trees and poinsettias lining driveways and porches in the Christmas spirit. There were also trees full of green and yellow parrots, jumping around and cackling to their hearts’ content. I assume that, just like in the movie “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill,” which tells the story of the quirky man who fed the San Francisco flock of parrots generated from a few stray birds that escaped their cages, these Scottsdale parrots share the same origin story. Except there didn’t seem to be anyone around to feed these birds; the only people I saw outside were the gardeners and plumbers and electricians who were working on the ranch style houses in their manicured settings.

All I could think about while walking these streets was what it must be like five months of the year when the temperature is at least 100 degrees, and sometimes 115, and how much water it takes to maintain the grass and flowers and hundred-foot tall palm trees and backyard swimming pools (I saw those from the window of the airplane when I flew in). The water comes from the Salt River Project, an enormous system of dams and canals that first brought water to this former farming valley. Starting in the mid 19^th century farmers built canals to redirect water from the Salt River; in the early part of the 20^th century they used their land as collateral on loans that resulted in the construction of Roosevelt Dam, 76 miles northeast of Phoenix.

Back in the 1970s water irrigated 80,000 acres of citrus orchards: that landscape is now reduced to about 20,000 acres. The remainder is filled with the sprawl that is greater Phoenix: Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe (location of Arizona State University), Glendale. You only know you’ve passed from one community to the next when the sign on the side of the road tells you so.

So actually, the amount of water necessary for lawns instead of lemons, oranges, and grapefruit is already available. But I want to know what, besides cows, can live on green grass? I can assure you there are no cows grazing the Scottsdale suburbs to supply the local restaurants with grass fed beef. There are only people and palm trees and the occasional parrot, which until the Salt River goes dry can enjoy their aberrant existence in this Sonoran oasis.

But while we wait for the inevitable drying out, it seems the area is losing some of its oasis status for people, especially visitors. Since the passage of the 2010 immigration enforcement law (SB10170), which allows the police to determine the immigration status of anyone “stopped, detained, or arrested,” if there is “reasonable suspicion,” convention bookings have dropped by 30 percent. In a recent Arizona Republic article the mayor of Phoenix was quoted as saying, “What you may have read about our Legislature, don’t hold against the rest of us. The rest of us, we’re normal. We like diversity.”

Max and I decided not to spend any more time checking out how normal the Phoenix folks are and we drove to Albuquerque, another town that certainly appears to like diversity, although the New Mexico governor, like her Arizona counterpart, is doing her best to make it appear otherwise: at top of her agenda is overturning the law that allows undocumented immigrants to get drivers licenses. Albuquerque is also another sprawling western city, like Phoenix, dependent upon imported water to sustain its population.

But the good thing is that it’s situated in the high desert instead of the low desert and shortly after we got there, nighttime temperatures dropped into the teens. Which means there aren’t that many tourists who require resort hotels and golf courses and conventions centers like those of Scottsdale and Phoenix, which also means that Albuquerque has managed to retain some funky soul. Just ask Brian Cranston.

“If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution.”

That’s Emma Goldman speaking. I came of age at the time in history, the 60s and 70s, when we thought we were going to make our revolution and that dancing was going to be a very big part of it. We didn’t make the revolution but we did achieve the democratization of dancing, freeing everyone to dance any way they wanted or with (or without) any one they wanted. When you’re out on the dance floor jumping around to “Respect” who can tell who’s dancing with whom? We danced in cavernous halls to local garage bands, in dorm common rooms, at keg parties out in the woods, and in our bedrooms, in front of the mirror, practicing the moves.

Dancing is my life’s signifier. I experienced my first real kiss while dancing with a juvenile delinquent in the hall of the Unitarian Church in Colorado Springs, where I grew up. Our youth group, Liberal Religious Youth (LRY), which provided me with entrance into the world of sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, was sponsoring a dance for “disadvantaged” kids who had ended up at the youth detention center in town. I remember going home that night and lying in bed savoring the taste and texture of that incredibly sensuous thing that had happened to me. I never saw the bestower of that gift again.

LRY groups sponsored “conferences,” a euphemism for all that sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, at all the churches on the Colorado Front Range—Boulder to Pueblo. I got to dance with—and kiss as well— Denver bluesman Otis Taylor (excuse my name dropping) at one of these affairs. This was before he was actually known as a bluesman, as he must have been about 17 at the time. We danced up a storm, but I refrained from any further activity, being only 15 myself and intimidated by this tall, handsome man who was a lot more worldly than I. I never saw him again, either, until Mark and I went to his concert many years later in Albuquerque. I didn’t go up to remind him who I was; I’m sure it was a memory on my part, not his.

After high school, at Antioch, we danced all the time in the C shop, the late night café where you could eat burgers and fries to the sounds of the Stones (Let It Bleed came out in the fall of my second year; I’ll never forget following the sound of “Gimme Shelter” down the hall to the common room wondering, what is that song?), Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Janis Joplin, and all that great Detroit, Philly, and Memphis R&B. When I was 20, during Christmas vacation, my mother, sisters, and I took a trip to Mazatlan, Mexico. On New Year’s Eve we found ourselves in a discothèque across the street from the beach that was crammed full of Anglo and Mexican tourists as well as locals of all ages, from grandmothers to babies. My sisters and I soon hooked up with some vacationing students from Guadalajara and danced the night away. A grandmother came up and asked my mother to dance, so she got some action as well. We ended up reconnecting with the students after we took the train to Guadalajara, and we danced another night away on the shore of Lake Chapala drinking sangria with tequila shots.

I dropped out of Antioch after a couple of years and in my subsequent drifting I ended up in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, where I went to work for the Forest Service for a summer. There were a lot of cowboys in Cloudcroft, and I met one named Emory who taught me to how two-step and play pool at the Lodge, the famous hotel on the hill. This cowboy taught me how to ride a horse as well, so I acquired two skills highly valued in northern New Mexico where I eventually ended up.

The trip from Cloudcroft to Santa Fe was a long one, in more than just miles. At the Central Clearing House I found myself working with all the twenty-something activists fighting the coal mines in the four corners region and the subdivisions surrounding Santa Fe and Albuquerque. We threw a fund raising dance party at the Mine Shaft bar in Madrid where the Family Lotus, Liza Gilkyson’s first band, played for all the Santa Fe elite, hippie entrepreneurs, and assorted desert misfits that comprised that heady town in the 1970s.  

From Santa Fe I moseyed down to Albuquerque and the University of New Mexico, where the dance scene revolved around Okie Joe’s, the student bar on the corner of University and Central. There, every Tuesday and Friday nights during happy hour (ten cent beer, dollar shots) the backroom blared “Brown Sugar” on the sound system or Cadillac Bob performed live. Everyone I knew went there, and Mark and I made it there as well on our first date. I discovered that he loved to dance, too, which was a prerequisite for any serious relationship between the two of us.

We lived for 20 years in Placitas, the former land grant community just north of Albuquerque that morphed into yuppiedom (see “You Can’t Go Home Again”) before our very eyes. Before that happened, though, there was plenty of dancing. A couple from New Orleans had regular dance parties where they turned us on to that city’s R&B/funk of the Meters, Allen Toussaint, the Wild Tchoupitoulas, and the Subdudes. At our house one New Year’s Eve we danced until two in the morning and finally had to let the fire go out to get everyone to leave. There were dancehalls everywhere: Placitas’s own Thunderbird Bar, where Tracey Nelson and Mother Earth, Cadillac Bob, and Sonny Terry and Brownie Magee played; Rosa’s Cantina in Algodones; the Golden Inn, where I heard Toots and the Maytals (it was so crowded you couldn’t dance but just moved as part of the group pulse); and the Line Camp up north where Buddy Guy and Junior Wells tore it up.

Once we made the move to El Valle we had to incorporate Ranchera dancing into our repertoire, which wasn’t very hard as it’s basically a polka move with a little salsa thrown in. And Mark learned how to two-step. We went to dances at the Indian gaming casinos, weddings, graduations, and Santa Fe concerts (the best was when Joe King Carrasco came up from Puerta Vallarta and played the Santa Fe Brewing Company to a crowd of dancing fools). What made it even more fun, though, was the fact that our neighbor and village patrón, Tomás, loved to dance, so when it was his turn to be mayordomo of the church he celebrated the village feast day with a dance in his barn and took us on Sunday afternoons to Las Vegas where we danced at the local bar.

Then there was El Grupo, our radical compadres who were fighting both the Forest Service and urban environmentalists over community access to forest resources: the environmentalists were promoting Zero Logging on public lands, regardless of who was doing the logging and to what extent, while the Forest Service was imploding from ineptitude and institutional paralysis. El Grupo—activist community loggers, grazers, acequia parciantes, journalists, lawyers, and academics both brown and white—used to go dancing at the Chamisa Lounge in Española to let off steam and enjoy each others’ company amidst the lowriders, ex-convicts, and regular working class blokes who patronized the bar.

Mark had an extensive 45 record collection—rock, R&B, blues, Motown, pop— and when we still had a turntable that could play them, and before they warped, we’d put them on and dance around the house. Later we danced to albums, then tapes, then CDs. He died before I got Wifi and began playing Pandora on my iPod. I have a favorite dance station, “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted,” that plays all the great R&B and Motown hits that we loved to dance to. I miss Mark the most when I find myself dancing around the house to “It’s Too Late To Turn Back Now” or “Be My Baby.”  They say that couples who are together for many years start to look like each other. Mark and I, together for 34 years, only looked like each other when we danced, a synchronized dance team that will never be replicated. On this second anniversary of his death I can still dance by myself, to all the music that evokes these memories, and while it is soothing to my soul, it also breaks my heart.

A Dog's Life

I was in Albuquerque the other day with my two dogs, Paco and Star, who know nothing about being in town, so I took them to the dog park as a facsimile of country life. You’ll notice that I use the pronoun “who” when referring to them: considering how often the word “that” is used instead of “who” when referring to people, I think it’s OK to extend the little used “who” to pets “that” we treat as humans.

While I was at the dog park I met up with this lovely Mexicana, a volunteer at the local animal shelter, who was there with six little dogs, all damaged goods. Four of them were hers, the ones she had rehabilitated at the shelter and adopted, and two were “unadoptables:” one who bit other dogs (she had trained him to keep a ball in his mouth so if he opened it to bite he’d lose his pacifier) and the other whose cast had recently been removed but he continued act as if it hadn’t (no one wanted to adopt a cripple who was actually mental).

She told me in vivid detail each dog’s abuse history. I won’t go into it here, but suffice it to say it illustrated the Hobbesian interpretation of human nature. It also elicited a conversation of how the cultural differences in both Mexico, her home, and northern New Mexico, my home, are revealed in the way humans relate to animals. She didn’t accede to political correctness when discussing a dog’s life in Mexico, but I tried to explain it in more utilitarian terms: a dog is supposed to protect the property or round up the cows while a cat catches mice and “rattas” (gophers).

I cop to the bourgeoisfication of owning animals. Sometimes I go so far as to think there must be something wrong with anyone (of my class) who doesn’t own at least one: Mark brought home more strays than I did; both my sons are smitten; my mother adored the two kittens I dumped on her in college; and my two closest friends have four dogs each. My father, who I’ve already written about (see The Swim Team), claimed he was allergic to animal hair, so we had to make do with a parakeet.

After I dumped the kittens on my mother I also dumped college and acquired my first dog, Chani, who I dragged across the country several times, including a trip on the subway from the East Village to the Bronx (the subway police made me get off at Times Square and find a box to put her in; today they would have just kicked us off). I found Judge, a huge Husky-type mix, in the woods of eastern Oregon where I was working as a seasonal employee for the Forest Service. It took me many tries to get near him, but when I finally got him in the car he collapsed and had to be carried in and out of my cabin for a week because his paws were rubbed raw. I brought him back to New Mexico and had him until the infamous dog poisoning in Placitas, in 1981, when some deranged person set out meat laced with poison and killed hundred of dogs over the course of a couple of days.

Waldo, who looked like the movie personality Benji, also succumbed to the poisoning, but he wasn’t strictly my dog. He lived with three families in the village and took turns gracing us with his presence. We tried to tame him—let him sleep inside, took him in the car to go for hikes—but he bought into the philosophy that “it takes a village.”

We also rescued Dutch, an Australian shepherd, from somebody’s bathroom in a trailer park (they left him there all day while they were at work), and adopted a dog named Pooper, from friends with too many other dogs, and renamed him Scooter. Our El Valle dogs were all rescued, too: Luther, after being hit by a car in Taos, and Django, who someone dumped in a culvert on our road. Mark picked up Sammy, a cocker spaniel, running down the streets of Chimayó after folks at one of the stores near the Santuario told him, “You better take him before the dog lady gets him,” the implication being that while the dog lady meant to be kind by rescuing dogs, when you end up with 20 of them all living in the same yard, it’s still a dog’s life.  

The summer after Mark died I had to put Django down, as she couldn’t walk anymore, and Sammy went in December, blind, deaf, and incontinent. Before Django and Sammy died I vowed that I would wait awhile before I got another dog. I gave away my chickens, too, thinking that for the first time in 40 years I could go away on a trip without having to get a housesitter or persuade someone to babysit my dogs or cats (there were 15 cats through the years, but I’ll save that for another story). And this time I was going to choose the dog, not have it choose me.

Or have them choose me, which they of course did. I rescued Paco up in La Junta Canyon when I was there with a bunch of folks looking at the diversion dams that carry water from the Rio Pueblo watershed to the Rio Mora watershed (this is another story as well). He looked like a blue heeler puppy (maybe he jumped out of a rancher’s pickup; heelers are definitely the dog of choice in northern New Mexico) but he turned out tall and lean and has no interest in cows. Star, who, like Waldo, isn’t strictly my dog, is also a heeler mix. She actually belongs to my across-the-road neighbor who got her to keep his other dog company, but she prefers Paco’s company and basically lives here. The deal was sealed when I started letting her sleep in the house (she’d already made herself at home in the house via the dog door, which I close at night). And while I sometimes take her to Albuquerque and the dog park, she really prefers El Valle, so I don’t take offense when she decides to stay home and check in with the neighbor.

So there you have it. I figure animal pets are like children: you take what you get and love them all.

Existential Thrill—or Fear and Loathing—on the LA Freeways

My son Max picked me up at LAX around 5:30 in the afternoon. He’d warned me that it was the worst time of day for traffic, but the 4:00 flight from Albuquerque was the only nonstop flight of the day and I really did not want to change planes on such a short flight. Little did I know that the car trip from LAX, to Pasadena, where Max was staying, would take longer than the plane trip from Albuquerque to LA—and with more existential angst and near death experience than any number of take off and landings on a mode of transportation with which I have never come to terms.

Max already had an hour’s worth of bumper to bumper traffic under his belt when I got in the car so we decided to take an hour off and have dinner near the airport. He asked his smart phone where the nearest Thai restaurant was and then the GPS app showed us how to get there. While the GPS map was correct this time, it was only seducing us (or Max; I’ll never trust a GPS device even if I could figure out how to use it) into a much more sinister relationship as the night progressed.

I have an aside here. The first time I visited Max in California was on my trip to Del Mar (see “Who Are These People” blog post). He picked me up at the Ontario Airport and we headed south. I innocently asked him, “So where are we now,” and he answered, “I have no idea,” and I said, “Well then how do you know how to get where we’re going?” and he answered, “I just go where the GPS tells me.” And he meant it literally: she told us which highways to follow, which exit to take, and what streets led to the house. Her voice was very confident and directive: do what I say or you are lost forever on the LA freeways (as opposed to “beneath the streets of Boston”).

I have another aside. In California when people discuss freeways they are always prefaced by the word “the”: the 10, the 405, the 110, the 5. Nobody had ever been able to explain this to me until Max suggested it’s because everyone spends so much time in their cars on the freeways that they develop a very close relationship and “the” expresses that intimacy. They are not just some amorphous highways but something they share, “the” highways that get them home. And speaking of getting home; on the LA freeways between 5 and 7:30 p.m., in the thousands of cars that are trying to get there is one person, by him or her self, spending that hour or two every day in the car by him or her self. I suppose this only increases the intimacy: you, your car, your highway.

Back to the story.  After dinner we got in the car and headed to Pasadena, this time following the car GPS map that led us right into downtown LA because you have to go there to get to Pasadena. First, the guy in the pickup didn’t want to let Max into the right lane where the GPS was telling him he needed to be to get on another freeway, so after Max nudged in anyway the guy pulled up beside us on the left and gave us the finger. We made it onto the freeway only to discover it was the wrong freeway (Max sometimes actually knows where he’s supposed to be going). So we had to get off and drive around a few blocks to get back on the freeway going the other direction. We were trying to turn left at a light; the turn light was red but there was nowhere for the oncoming cars to go as traffic was blocked up on the other side of the intersection. The two cars in front of us turned left, traffic still hadn’t moved, so we started to turn as well when one of the oncoming drivers decided he didn’t really like the situation and decided to drive right into the side of our car—almost. I didn’t actually see what happened as my head was in my hands, but obviously he stopped. Max was more than a little rattled at this point, but we got back on the freeway and suddenly the exit onto the correct freeway was on the opposite side than what the GPS indicated and he crossed five lanes of traffic at the last minute to make the turn.

By this time I was saying my mea culpas—I’ll never fly into LA during rush hour again—and my hail Mary’s—please god get us to Pasadena, Max is too young to die. I was aghast thinking about how he had been doing this while I was at home in New Mexico where I see maybe five cars driving down the hill from Truchas to Chimayo on any given day. But he’s not doing it anymore; we drove to Scottsdale, a sanitized component of a sprawling megalopolis, but one with few freeways, many wide streets, retirees who don’t go anywhere, and yes, many of whom belong to the Tea Party ((don’t ask me why Max is living there, even temporarily). I just know that if it’s your kid in a car on freeways sometimes sanitation is good.

Good Samaritans

How many times did I break down over the years without a cell phone and AAA insurance (and usually no money, either). Let me count the ways. Pud hauled Mark and me into Blue Springs, Missouri, where he worked on our car all day at his house while we whittled away our time in a 1950s motel room before paying him about what he probably had to pay for the parts. The eighteen wheel truck driver with track marks up and down his arms, hauling lumber from Mendocino to LA, picked Jordan and me up after our VW bug died on Highway 1 and drove us across the Golden Gate Bridge, down Van Ness Avenue to Mission, and down Mission to nineteenth street, where our friends lived. “Wouldn’t want you girls to get picked up by just anyone, you know.” I was parked on the side of I-25 one night trying to figure out why my rear wheel was loose, when this nice man pulled over behind me and tried to figure it out with me. The next thing we knew we were both lying in the ditch and our cars were down the road ahead of us, totaled. Another man, drunk, had plowed into both our cars, the force of which knocked us head over heels. After the cop drove the helpful man and me to his trailer in Bernalillo—he kept saying, “I never liked that car anyway”— he got his wife’s car—she kept saying, “You’re so lucky, you both could have been killed”—and drove me home to Placitas. Good Samaritans all, no?

So it’s thirty years later and Paco, my dog and I are driving down to Albuquerque, via the Jemez Mountains after covering the protest at Los Alamos National Laboratory on Nagasaki Day, and my trusty Subaru (the nicest car I’ve ever owned) suddenly tells me it’s overheated, via the temperature gauge and a written exclamation on the dashboard where the odometer reading usually is. This time I have both a cell phone and AAA. Except that when I dial my son Jakob’s number to tell him I’m broken down and won’t make it to dinner, a voice comes on my phone and tells me my service has been “deactivated.” I have over 1,000 unused minutes on this phone because there is no cell phone reception where I live, in El Valle, so the only time I use my phone is when I’m in my car, like now, and I need to call someone and tell them why I’m in my car instead of where I’m supposed to be.

After the voice tells me that my phone has been “deactivated” it gives me some options, one of which is to “reactivate” it. So I press that number, and after a few false starts I actually get someone from India on the line. I explain that even though I have all these minutes on my phone it’s been deactivated and I need to reactivate it so I can call AAA and get rescued. He tells me that he will gladly reactivate my phone but he can only do that if I call him from a different phone than the one I need to reactivate. It’s only a matter of seconds before I’m yelling, How in the hell am I supposed to call you from a different phone when I’m stuck out in the middle of nowhere (actually, I’m about 22 miles from Bernalillo) with an overheated car and no phone? And he’s calmly answering, I’m sorry ma’am, but you have to call me from a different phone before I can reactivate your account.

But I have one more option. After I hang up on the man from India my service informs me that if this is an emergency I can call 911. I decide that the situation now qualifies as an emergency—my hood is up and I’m obviously stranded, but no one has stopped—and I reach the 911 operator. I explain what the situation is, describe where I am, and she says she’ll send someone out within 45 minutes.

So I wait. And wait. I decide to get out of the car, even if it means standing in the hot sun. Thank god the backseat is in the shade so Paco has some protection. I wait some more. Then, after dozens of cars have passed by, one stops. It has a missing backseat window covered by a flapping shade, and a young girl gets out and asks if I need help. I ask her if she has a cell phone, and she does, but it doesn’t have a signal here by the side of the road. Then the driver gets out, and I know right away he’s a Mexican national. He speaks no English, but the young girl translates, and I tell him, you can’t check the radiator, it’s too hot, and thanks, but if you don’t have a cell phone there’s not much you can do.

Later, when I’m telling my son Max about what happened I tell him to guess, by category, who was the first person to stop and help me, and without hesitation he says, a Mexican. That’s because years ago when he broke down coming up La Bajada hill in his funky Subaru the only ones who stopped to help were Mexican nationals who put him in their van, gave him something to eat, and took him to his grandmother’s house in Santa Fe.

But there’s another category to come. I wait another half hour (no sign of whoever the 911 operator supposedly called to come help me) and a Mercedes Benz passes me, pulls a U-turn, and comes up behind me. A black man and woman both get out of the car and she immediately says, honey, do you need help? Don’t worry, we’re pastors, this is what we do. She has a Bluetooth in her ear, he has an iPhone, so soon I’m on the line with AAA and after a lot of explaining through a garbled connection, the operator tells me she’s sending a tow truck (but it’s up to the driver whether Paco will be allowed to ride in the truck with me and the driver). When I tell the woman pastor that it’s been about an hour since I called 911, she says, this is unacceptable, how can they leave a single woman out here on the road by herself, you need to call them up and give them a piece of your mind.

Meantime, the man has retrieved a jug of water and a partially filled container of antifreeze from his car and says, I’m going to fill up your overflow and maybe it will flow back into your radiator reservoir, maybe it’s low and that’s why you overheated. This is the first time I’ve ever heard that there can be a reverse flow back into the radiator, but what do I know? Then we wait a little while and he tells me to turn on the car and let’s see what happens. The temperature gauge is where it’s supposed to be, so he says, we’re going to follow you into Bernalillo. Keep the windows open and if the temperature gauge starts to go up stick your arm out the window and raise it with your hand up. Then we’ll all pull over.

So they follow me most of the way into Bernalillo. My car does not overheat. Just on the outskirts of town they pass me and pull over in front. He sticks his arm straight out the window for a minute or so, then turns it up, then lowers it back to straight. I stick my arm straight out the window, they gaily wave at me out their windows, he turns onto the Albuquerque bypass, and they’re off to do some more pastoring.

Max, and the others I query, are a little slower to guess my second Samaritans were black; it’s not a large profile in New Mexico. But like the “others” (as Hank Williams sang it, “just a picture from life’s other side”), those who stop to render aid are the ones who have been stranded themselves: the poor, marginalized, or discriminated against. Someone driving a Mercedes Benz may give you pause for thought, but like the Okie who once picked me up in a Cadillac, the car or where it’s going doesn’t much matter: it’s where they’ve been.

"A sense of liberation"

In her book Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, Susan Gubar says than when she found out she had this cancer in her early 60s she felt almost “euphoric” because it meant that instead of a prolonged death enduring pain or dementia—what she envisioned—she was going to leave this world at a time in her life when she was still successful in her career, was in a good marriage, and her daughters were grown and on their own.

I’m the same age as the author and I’ve been around a lot of death lately. Mark, my partner of 34 years, died of cancer in his early 60s (described in my Diary of a Bad Year series of blog posts). Butchie, eulogized in my previous blog, died less than a month ago of cancer. Last Sunday I went to a wake for Sebia Hawkins, a longtime anti-nuclear activist who also died of cancer having just survived an aneurism that set her back for more than a year. Ed Quillen, publisher and editor of Colorado Central and longtime columnist for the Denver Post, dropped dead of a heart attack in early June. So it’s not surprising that I’ve been thinking about “the right time to die.” Susan Gubar described her situation as a time between a life cut short—certainly how I felt about Mark’s death—and debilitating age, which I’ve seen far too often in my parents’ generation.

While my kids are also grown and on their own they just experienced the death of their father and they’re still quite young; one just out of college and the other starting a family. We’ve been lucky enough—and privileged enough—to make it this far together, so I’d like to see them through a few more years.

The critical component to this “through” is that “I” see “them” through a few more years. I distinctly remember the day I realized that my own mother and I were reversing roles: I needed to be the one upon whom she could always depend instead of the other way around. It was a gradual process, but my feelings that day were stark: I felt the loss of the person she had always been in my life, and I wasn’t ready for it, although I was already a mother myself.

Now I’m that person in my kids’ lives, and I don’t want to be the one who will depend on them. I want to keep editing their papers and articles; keep counseling them on life choices; discuss Habermas and the “Orientalist” gaze; and spend money on them. Neither do I want to be the person who can’t weed whack the grass in the orchard; irrigate the hay fields; fix the lose pipe under the sink or replace the gasket in the faucet; split my kindling, or any of the other daily tasks I’m confronted with in my house and on my ten acres.

What these things contribute to, of course, is my sense of who I am, which is constructed from what I do in the world, how I am related to others, and how I take care of myself. On NPR the other day I heard an interview with a woman from Japan who was discussing the cultural impacts of growing old in her country. Historically, when one got older than one’s usefulness, grandpa or grandma was thrown off a cliff or left out on the mountain to starve—literally. Now, with 21 percent of the population 65 or older, that’s not going to happen, but the idea of usefulness continues to resonate, and several of the people interviewed on the program expressed their terror at becoming a burden on their families and society and vowed to end their lives before that occurred.

Nora Ephron died last week at 71. She had no illusions about what it meant to get old, even in the good old USA. As Susan Gubar hopes for herself, Ephron left this world still writing the articles, books, and screenplays she’d been producing for most of her adult life, despite her complaints about loss of short term memory and the elasticity of her neck (she also left two grown kids, oddly enough named the same as mine: Jac[k]ob and Max). I doubt if she felt Gubar’s initial “euphoria”— Ephron had the same illness my mother had, a form of leukemia that makes one susceptible to infection, hers being pneumonia—but it seems she left at a time when she felt she was still who she had been for most of her life: a successful writer, a mother, a wife, a warm and funny person.

When I read back through this piece I realize I give rather short shrift to the “what I do in the world”, or the “legacy” part of the equation. That’s a function of the ephemeral nature of the effect one has in a dynamic world, the disappointment that elicits, and the fact that I was so often implicated—happily so—by the day-by-day demands of the life I chose. I had the luxury of making choices about how to live, but choosing “the right time to die,” if it’s allowed at all, is going to be a daunting task.