I've Known a Lot of People!

Lately I’ve been going through all my CDs playing ones I haven’t listened to in a long time or completely forgotten I have. Yesterday I stumbled on “Get Out” by Larry Freedman, a longtime Albuquerque based keyboard player who’s performed with various local bands over the years. He’s a phenomenal musician whose blues piano covers and originals on this CD are a delight. This led me to his other CD, “It Is What It Is” with Joanie Griffin and Combo Special. Joanie was the lead singer with Cadillac Bob, a great Albuquerque band and the Thunderbird Bar’s house band (in Placitas).

It got me thinking about all the interesting people I’ve met over the years who may or may not be well known but whose company has enriched my life. Unfortunately, so many of them have disappeared from my orbit, either because of geography—my relative isolation in El Valle—my age—I’m getting old—or just the natural ebb and flow of people over the course of a lifetime.

I think I met Larry at the REI in Albuquerque when I was doing a book signing for my Hiking Guide to the Sandia and Manzano Mountains. He’s a big hiker and skier and his then girlfriend was working at the store. He brought me his CDs one day on his way through El Valle to go hiking in the Pecos Wilderness. The last time I saw him he was playing keyboards with remnants of the Combo at a wedding in Placitas.

Ah, Placitas, so many old friends and kooks from there who I haven’t seen in 30 years, like Larry Goodell, whose parties showcased his poetry performances or his boogie woogie piano playing. John Kennedy, with whom Mark and I collaborated on a spoof called the Placitas Unreal Estate Newsletter to protest against the developers, wrote pornography for a living. Artist Roger Evans, who lived up in the hills below Tunnel Springs, constructed his house and swimming pool out of ferrocement.

Jackie Boaz was the curmudgeon who I worked with in the Forest Service while building a house in Placitas. She helped us cut the vigas for the house and we helped her tear down a cabin in the woods so we both could have the oak flooring. She lived down in the Manzano Mountains with her partner Sandra and let me stay there once a week with baby Jakob when I was on duty in the fire lookout. I don’t think anyone in the local Forest Service office ever discussed her sexuality because they were too afraid of her temper.

Speaking of the Forest Service reminds me of Pete Totemoff. I skied Santa Fe the other day with my grandkids and there was music and beer flowing at the Totemoff midway restaurant, named for the eponymous Aleut Indian. He helped Bob Nordhaus build the Sandia Peak Ski Area and Ernie Blake the Santa Fe and Taos ski areas, but I knew Pete when I worked the fire lookout. I think he was working with the fire crews but I’d see him when he’d visit the tower or at the ranger station, flirting with anyone and everyone—as long as they were female—including me. A notorious womanizer, he was also funny, kind, and a whizz on skis.

My Forest Service seasonal employment days were long over by the time we moved to El Valle from Placitas. So instead of working with some Forest Service kooks I went into battle with them over policy issues like clearcuts and ski area expansions. That meant forging a relationship with my local district ranger, Crockett Dumas. Crocket was a tall, lanky cowboy who wore blue jeans, snap shirts, knee-high laced boots, a handlebar mustache, and a ten-gallon hat. He raised and rode long distance, cross-country racehorses for fun but surprisingly enough, given his background, he was perhaps the best district ranger I ever met in my long history of district rangers. He actually initiated policies that reflected his commitment to the local communities he served rather than his DC bosses that ended up getting him transferred out of the district for being too chummy with us.

“Us” was a real mishmash of people, of course: Hispano land grant heirs, Picuris Pueblo Indians, hippies who came out with Wavy Gravy to establish the Hog Farm, alt generation back to the landers, professionals, traditional farmers, organic farmers, you name it. And then there was Tomás, my next-door neighbor. A big bulk of a man born and raised in El Valle who’d done just about everything to stay there—or have something to come back to when he couldn’t stay there: herding sheep in Wyoming, canning tomatoes in California, running a little store and gas station in the village, driving the school bus, driving the fire bus, serving as sheriff (I don’t think that lasted too long), and raising cattle. He took us, the gabachos, under his wing to teach us how to be buen vecinos and we did things for him that only privileged gabachos knew how to do, like navigate the Office of the State Engineer for money to rebuild our presa, or acequia dam, and go online to register him as a fire bus driver when that became mandatory.

Tomás died in 2009, a year before my partner Mark died of pancreatic cancer. Cancer also got Tomás, along with diabetes. In 2012 my friend Butchie Denver died, also of cancer. Butchie got the name “Denver” from Bob Denver, aka Maynard G. Krebs from the TV show The Many Loves of Dobey Gillis. How she ended up in New Mexico is a long story, but I met her as an artist/activist from Llama, north of Taos who had my back as we fought the powers that be over development, land use, and water rights. She was a power to be reckoned with, and like Jackie Boaz, often got things done because everyone was afraid of her.

Now, at 72, one of my closest friends is John Nichols of Milagro Beanfield War fame, although he’d much rather be known for any of his other books, of which there are 23, both fiction and non-fiction. He lives in a dilapidated adobe in Taos, having lost his former homestead to an ex-wife. But he’s never asked for much, just the energy to fly fish his beloved Rio Grande or hike and snowshoe to his favorite Lake Peak. At 81, however, and in ill health (he’s been plagued with heart disease since he was young) John can’t do those things anymore. But he can still write! His latest book will be published in a few months’ time. We sometimes walk in the park if the weather’s nice, during these frustrating days of COVID-19, and I call once a week to make sure he’s still alive. I suspect he’s going to be the next of my friends to go, but you never know, it could be me.

This list was not planned, I just wrote about someone and someone else came to mind. There are hundreds more. We all have lists like this, but sometimes we forget how incredibly interesting they are. It’s been fun remembering.

Happy New Year

Forty-four years ago Mark and I hosted a New Year’s Eve party at our crumbling adobe in Placitas. To get everyone to leave at 2 or 3 in the morning we had to let the fire go out so it was too cold to snort cocaine in the bathroom anymore.

Who were these folks enjoying themselves in the bathroom? Among many disparate Anglo communities in the village—in the sixties and seventies there wasn’t much mingling between the gringos and the Hispano land grant heirs—we were the so-called “intellectual” ones, made up of artists, writers, and academics. There was crossover between our cohort and the Dome Valley crowd, who considered themselves the hipsters of the day, and the hippies with a New Age mindset who didn’t vaccinate their children. But the New Year’s Eve Party was pretty much confined to the group we partied with, went to literary readings at the Living Batch Bookstore, and if we had the discretionary money, snorted coke with.

That night, most of the music was Motown and other R & B records of the day: Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, Curtis Mayfield, the Isley Brothers, the Temptations. But we also had a pretty good collection of New Orleans mardi gras music of The Wild Tchoupitoulas, the Meters, the Neville Brothers, and Allen Toussaint, courtesy of our friends from down in the bayou (then a professor at UNM). I wrote a short story in my book Stories From Life’s Other Side called “Our Heart and Soul” that described a dance party at their house where we were told to leave our kids at the babysitter so we could smoke dope and get drunk with total impunity.

The house where the New Year’s Eve party took place was a four-room adobe with only three functional rooms: kitchen, living room, and bedroom. The bathroom was just a walled off room inside the living room, hardly large enough for more than a few coke snorters at a time. The year after the New Year’s Eve party the septic drainage pipes, made out of tarpaper, completely fell apart in the middle of winter and we had to dig up the leach field and replace them with PVC (we paid a $50 a month rent that didn’t include landlord maintenance). We started building a house on land I’d bought outside the village before I got together with Mark, but that took five years to be ready enough to move in. When I got pregnant with Jakob and my mother heard that we wouldn’t move into the new house before he was born, she burst into tears thinking about him crawling around on the mud floors of the rental.

Those were the days, my friend, but I only wish they’d never ended when I remember the fun we had that New Year’s Eve. Years later, after we moved to El Valle, we did get to go to a club on New Year’s Eve in Santa Fe to hear and dance to Joe King Carrasco play one of the best concerts ever, and we celebrated a few more at the casinos of el norte dancing to the Darren Córdova Band or Los Blue Ventures. Now, at the end of this 2021 year, full of much hardship and angst for all of us, I wish there was a great band playing in a great venue where I could go dance with Mark and all my friends once again. But at the ripe old age of going on 72 I have to find my joy in the fact that it’s finally snowing, with a major storm predicted, and tomorrow, New Year’s Day, I’m going to strap on my cross-country skis for the first time this year and head up the canyon. Happy New Year.

Revisiting the Vinyl

Mark and I gave away our turntable after the CD collection took over and everything got uploaded onto the iPod. The vinyl—everything from gospel and jazz to rock 'n roll and blues—remained in boxes in the loft. But once I told the boys they had to clean out all their stuff by the time they were 30, I decided it was time to clean out all the vinyl, or at least what I could manage to sell and give away.

Jakob went through the jazz to start his collection. I think I let David Correia take what he wanted. Then I found a collector in Santa Fe who went through not only the rest of the jazz but the rock ‘n roll, blues, and country. I can’t remember what he paid me—maybe $100 for the lot—but it was a relief to see it find a home other than the garbage bin.

I figured I’d never sell the classical, but after I put a notice in the Town Crier, our local newsletter, a man from Taos called to say he’d take all of it. I spent a nice afternoon with him at his sign making business and when I left he handed me fifty bucks.

I kept one box of records, which sat in the loft for another couple of years until I decided it was time to get another turntable and listen to them so I could figure out why these were the ones I’d kept. I found a used turntable at a thrift store, replaced the needle by ordering online, and was ready to go.

So here’s what’s in the box. Two records that Mark and I, respectively, brought to the relationship: The Loading Zone and Joy of Cooking. Both bands were from Berkeley and survived only a couple of years in the late sixties and early seventies. But they had some remarkable women in them: Linda Tillery of The Loading Zone, and Terry Garthwaite and Toni Brown, who led Joy of Cooking as guitarist (Terry) and pianist (Toni) as well as lead vocals (Terry’s voice is amazing). Tillery went on to a solo career, as did Toni and Terry, who in 1980 joined up with Rosalie Sorrels, another great vocalist, and monologuist Bobbie Louise Hawkins (former wife of poet Robert Creeley) to release Live at the Great American Music Hall. These albums represented a time and place for Mark and me as individuals and as a couple.

What else is in the box? I’m not sure why, as I prefer R & B, but the blues are well represented: the white guys who discovered black blues, like East/West, the Butterfield Blues Band (the first record I bought at Antioch); Blues Breaker, John Mayall with Eric Clapton; English Rose, the early Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green (Black Magic Woman); and the black guys they emulated, like I Need You, Elmore James; Trouble in Mind, King Curtis; Night Life, Luther Allison, and the really old time blues singers Billie and Dede Pierce and Jimmy & Mama Yancy.

The R & B I prefer isn’t as well represented, I guess because I have so much of it in iTunes and CDs. Laura Nyro’s Gonna Take a Miracle with LaBelle is a stunning revelation of the depths of her versatility as soul singer as well song writer (on her other albums). The other favorite is Pieces of a Man, Gil Scott-Heron. What could be better than The Revolution Will Not Be Televised? I gave a brand new copy of the record to Jakob for Christmas.

The only Grateful Dead music I’ve ever owned are the two albums in the box: American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead. Box of Rain and Uncle John’s Band are pretty catchy tunes, although Jerry Garcia’s vocal range is about as good as my baseball pitch, and I’ve never understood Deadheads. Some Dylan and Joplin rounded out the Rock ‘n Roll until I found The Best of the Everly Brothers at the thrift store the other day. Then Jakob gave me the Stones Let It Bleed for Christmas, with the best album cover ever produced and one of the greatest songs recorded: Gimme Shelter.

My other favorites represent the best of other genres: Black Snake Blues, Clifton Chanier of Zydeco fame; A Little More Faith, the Reverend Gary Davis of gospel fame; the Gypsy Kings of flamenco and salsa; and my all time favorite folk singer, Barbara Dane, who sings It Isn’t Nice with the Chambers Brothers. In fact, I’m going to put it on the turntable right now.

And finally, the most unusual album in the box has to be Grace Paley reading from her story collections “The Little Disturbances of Man” and “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” in her nasal Bronx accent. My literary and musical worlds conjoin there.

So that’s the story of what’s in the box, which isn’t in a box anymore but is lined up below the many shelves of my CDs, which I’ve been wondering what to do about as I start downsizing. But Jakob just informed me that he’s starting a CD collection—I didn’t know CDs were the latest retro thing—so I gave him the start of his jazz collection: John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, Pharoah Sanders Archie Shepp, etc. There are still hundreds left. There’s also a box of barely audible 45s that Mark and I collected as teenagers. I also found them up in the loft, cleaned them up, organized them by genre—Rock ‘n Roll, Rockabilly, R & B, and played them one more time. Remember You’re My World, Go Now!, I Go to Pieces, Laugh Laugh, and The Lion Sleeps Tonight? RIP.

David Gilbert Released, at Last

David Gilbert was released from jail this month after serving 40 years and 15 days for driving the get away vehicle in the 1981 Brinks Armory botched robbery where a guard and two police officers were killed. The Black Liberation Army stole $1.6 million in cash from an armored car outside the Nanuet Mall near the Hudson River community of Nyack. Gilbert, a former member of the Weather Underground, was unarmed but charged with murder, along with his partner, Kathy Boudin, who was in the car with him. Boudin pleaded guilty and was paroled in 2003. She’s now a professor at Columbia University.


Friends of David Gilbert emailed this photo after he was released. That’s his son, Chesa Boudin, on the left, who is currently the District Attorney in San Francisco, and Kathy Boudin, in the middle. Chesa was fourteen months old when his parents were arrested and was raised by Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, two other well-known former Weather Underground members.

Much has been written about Gilbert’s time in jail, by his son and by other reporters who documented the work he did on AIDs education and prevention. Disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo reduced Gilbert’s 75 years to life sentence so that he would be eligible for parole, which was granted in October. This is what Cuomo tweeted about Gilbert: “He has served 40 years of a 75-year sentence, related to an incident in which he was the driver, not the murderer.”


Gilbert’s sentence was an obviously politically motivated one. He refused to plead guilty and was disruptive in court. And what he participated in was, like much of the Weather Underground and other radical groups’ activities of the 1960s, strategically stupid and ultimately a failure. But Gilbert represents far more than an unjust political sentencing. We are the only Western developed country in the world that keeps people in jail for 40, 50, 60 years, for life. According to a New York Times article “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime,” more than 200,000 people are serving life sentences of 50 years or more. In Germany, fewer than 100 people have prison terms longer than 15 years. In the Netherlands, they seldom serve more than four years.


But that doesn’t stop people calling for more blood. In the ABC online report of Gilbert’s release, they quote Rockland County Executive Ed Day: “Former Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Parole Board should be ashamed for allowing this domestic terrorist to walk free on our streets. There’s no reason that David Gilbert should not have to face the full consequences of his heinous crimes, no matter how much time has passed.”


So once “a domestic terrorist” always a domestic terrorist. Once an 18-year old gang member at the scene of a murder, always an 18-year old gang member despite the fact that you’re now 60 years old. In the NYT’s article, one of the authors was a contributor to a 2014 National Research Council report that “recommends a return to a principle of parsimony, the sensible idea that a punishment should be only as severe as is required to prevent future offending.”


Mark Rudd, another former Weather Underground member who has repeatedly abjured his participation in the group, wrote a memoir some years ago that talked about meeting David Gilbert at Columbia University when he enrolled there as a freshman. Gilbert was several years older, already heavily involved in political organizing, who Mark described as one of the smartest and gentlest men he’d ever met. So, ironically enough, maybe the twenty-something David Gilbert, who made a tragic mistake when he was 36, is essentially the same David Gilbert who’s now 76 years old, free to walk down the streets of New York for the first time in 40 years.

Henrietta

Henrietta spends a lot of time at the ReUse Center at the dump—or transfer station, as the county prefers to call it. While she’s not one of the official volunteers who oversee the donations and try to keep things tidy, she acts as if she is. When I’m there she lets me go through the bags and boxes that people bring in as donations but then goes around rearranging all the shelves of jeans, kids’ toys, shoes, household goods, and blouses. Which is fine with me except that she talks incessantly while she does it: “What do you think this thing is?” she asks about the ab trainer (it took me a while to figure out what it was), or “This is a really nice blouse but I don’t have any place to wear it,” and “This book looks really interesting but I can’t really see well enough anymore to read books.”

Up until last week she was still driving her car even though she can’t see well enough to pass the driver’s test (she has macular degeneration in one eye). Then another driver smashed into her car when she was turning into her driveway and dented the side and wrecked the alignment and she’s waiting to get enough money to fix it. He didn’t have insurance and she didn’t have a license. Now she gets dropped off at the ReUse Center by her caregiver or a friend and gets someone to pick her up or waits for Tommy, who runs the transfer station, to take her home at closing time. It’s a long day for someone who can’t sit down because she’s not strong enough to push herself up out of the chair. So she wanders around the center examining everything and telling whoever’s there what she’s observed.

She also tells us that she was born in Wyoming where her dad worked for the railroad but then he died and the kids scattered across the county and Henrietta ended up in New Mexico. She never married and never had kids and lives alone in a trailer in Peñasco where she brings all the stuff she takes home from the ReUse Center even though she tells me constantly that we all have too much stuff: “I have 25 pairs of jeans in my closet and even if I bring 15 of those pairs here for other folks to have I still have more jeans than I’m ever going to need.”

I’ve never seen her in a pair of jeans, just loose fitting pants that cling to her very skinny legs. Her hair is long and gray and she’s missing a bunch of teeth but her eyes are big and round and compelling. She gets shots in the one with macular degeneration (her caregiver takes her to Santa Fe to the eye doctor) and hopes that it will get good enough for her to get a driver’s license.

I’m afraid that Henrietta is hanging out with a tough crowd, though. She told me last week that the young man who was just arrested for running over another man with a truck and leaving the scene sometimes comes to her house and asks for rides or money or food. He’s known for wandering the streets even though he has a home in one of the villages. When Henrietta tells me that she doesn’t understand what happened, that he’s basically a “good boy,” she points at her head with a finger and says, “but there’s something not right up here.” The police came to her house looking for him after the murder.

Henrietta is 76 years old so she’s had a lot of time to learn to work the system. Life’s going to be even harder, though, without a car and probably push her further into the crowd of other lost souls. Henrietta believes that with God’s help she and the others will be taken care of no matter how difficult things get. In the meantime, at her home away from home, she sorts and rearranges and talks and talks and talks and the volunteer souls who aren’t really lost ones, just kind of annoyed ones, listen and glean what they can from “life’s other side.”

It Takes a Village . . . or It Should Take a Village

It’s been eight months now that the hounds across the road have been howling and barking and crying day and night, first in the horse trailer where they were born, then in the kennels where they’ve grown into full sized dogs. They’re owned by a thirty-something born and bred in the village who played with my son Max when he was three years old. A week ago, I confronted him, for the second time, that these hounds that he will sell to bear hunters in the fall were driving me and everyone else in the village crazy and we couldn’t take it anymore. About 30 minutes later he said, “OK, I’m taking them to Córdova. This conversation is over.”

How we got to this victorious moment reveals much about village life that dispels any romantic notion one might have of solidarity and community spirit—on both sides of the disagreement. The young man, whose grandfather was once the unofficial mayordomo of the village, able to navigate disputes and render solutions based on what was most beneficial to the community, thought he could do whatever he wanted to do in his own best interest despite its terrible impact on his neighbors. In turn, his neighbors let him get away with it for eight months because they were too wimpy for any kind of confrontation or too afraid of retribution. Yes, retribution. What form that retribution might take I don’t know, but the fact that they feared it is completely demoralizing.

Maybe they’re thinking of the mom of the hound owner and the daughter of the benevolent mayordomo. She hasn’t spoken to me since her dad died 12 years ago, until she came out and yelled at me while I was in conversation with her son that this was my entire fault because I’m the one complaining. Of course, she hasn’t spoken to just about everyone else in the village for almost that long. Who knows why, other than the just plain fact that she doesn’t like any body.

As for solidarity in the community, after my first request of the young man to move the dogs failed, several of us decided to start a petition, or “formal letter,” asking the hound owner to move the dogs up behind his house, off the road, where any activity set them off on an hour’s long howl. We already knew, after consulting county officials, that the owner was in violation of the dog control ordinance against incessant barking, and that he’d neglected to get the required permit to commercially raise hounds. We didn’t mention that in the letter, we just asked him to be a good neighbor and move the dogs. Contacting the county would be the fall back.

Then the village’s spinelessness emerged. After passing the letter around, some started questioning the efficacy of a petition, others said they wouldn’t sign, and others hemmed and hawed about not wanting to make an enemy of the young man. When the petition author (I edited it) wrote me to say she was reconsidering our action, I’d had enough. The next morning I found my neighbor out on his tractor and convened our meeting.

This isn’t the first time people in the village have demonstrated their deep-seated fear of confrontation. After the unofficial mayordomo of the village died, the dark side took control of the acequias and most everyone quit going to the meetings rather than challenge their governance. We muddle along, whining and moaning over decisions made without our input and without our endorsement. So the whining and moaning over the hounds shouldn’t have surprised me. I had my minor victory, so far without retribution, but it’s not much consolation for the lack of the proverbial “it takes a village.”

Burials, not Funerals

Yesterday, Jakob and I buried our 14-year old dog Benny—Jakob had him for four years, I had him for six—below the garden, under the willows. It was the fitting end to a gentle death at the vet’s: a sedative to go to sleep, then a lethal injection. I’m glad we physically dug the hole, laid him in it, gently covered his face with a sheet, and filled the hole. I’ve buried some of my animal friends before, and cremated others, but this felt especially right. Today, I went to the Catholic mass for a sweet neighbor named Teresita Montoya. Her death at 66 could have been avoided. She didn’t know how to take care of herself or how to navigate the medical industrial complex, and she died of a heart attack from an avoidable infection. But it’s her funeral I want to talk about. Over the course of my 30 years in El Valle I’ve been to many masses at the local church: funerals, christenings, confirmations, feast days, Christmas posadas. The latter are the only ones I enjoy, a festive recreation of the birth of Christ with carols and good cheer. But frankly, if I never have to attend another mass I’ll be happy.

This one, for Teresita, at the church in Peñasco, was especially depressing. I doubt the priest had a personal relationship with her. No one from the family spoke, no one delivered a eulogy (I did find out her daughter spoke at the rosary). It could have been a mass for anyone.

Twelve years ago I delivered the eulogy for my buen vecino, Tomás. He’d been the mayordomo of the El Valle church many times over the years, the priest was his longtime friend, and I got to tell stories about this wonderful but complicated man who accepted my family as the good neighbors we wanted to be when we moved here, only the second fulltime Anglo family in El Valle. Then we went to the camposanto and more people told stories and we laughed and cried and laid him to rest.

After Teresita’s mass, we went to the El Valle camposanto—at least they buried her here—where again, no one other than the priest and the funeral director spoke. They lowered her into the ground while the rest of us milled around whispering with friends and acquaintances we often see only at funerals. Teresita’s husband, my friend Nelson (they were still married but lived in separate houses and got along great) told me that the funeral cost him over $8,000: travel from the Burque hospital to the funeral home in Taos, care of her body, conferences with the staff, a fancy casket, printed handout cards, etc., etc. It made me think about Mark, whose care by the same funeral parlor cost around $2,000 because we cremated him and had a wake, not a funeral, where we talked about him—a lot.

I wish we could deal with our human deaths like we did with Benny: humanely, simply, personally. This blog will probably seem sacrilegious to many of those who were at the mass today, who are comforted by the ritual of the Catholic Church. For me, I found comfort in the gentle treatment of the vet, the ride home with the body, the quiet scene under the willows, and the time spent with my son. Hey guys, that’s what I want when the time comes.