Month: April 2009

Yanking. My. Chain.

(Written last night, posted today)

The universe is yanking my chain. Messing with my head. Freaking me out, man.

Because tonight, I might actually kinda sorta believe in the goodness of humanity.

That’s so not me. No, I think people are mean, and mean people suck. But tonight…I have a softer spot in my heart for the world.

I was on my way to the grocery store to pick up something for dinner. I waited in a left turn bay for the light to go my way. Out of the corner of my eye in the rearview mirror, I saw a small white pickup stomp to a halt at an odd diagonal to the left turn bay. Then the driver was out of the car and weaving around on foot in the opposite-side lane.

“Oh crap,” I thought, eyeing him in my rearview, “this guy’s messed up.” I immediately reached for my phone to call the police, and as I did I turned to look out my window to see what the guy was doing. Was he going to hurt himself?

Then I realized why he was making a weaving wavy line in the oncoming lane. Leading the parade was a Mama Duck and three little chicks tailing her every move, the guy madly following behind, making classic herding motions with his hands.

Obviously, the duck and young ‘uns had wandered into traffic and this guy was chasing them, trying to get them to safety, and waving off oncoming traffic at the same time.

Finally, Mama D got over to the curb and she hopped up. Three babies hopped and jumped in vain, unable to make the distance. The guy reached down, cupped his hands, and gently scooped up each baby and placed them on the sidewalk. When all were safe, he trotted to his truck and jumped back in.

This wasn’t a Teva wearing, hola granola, tree hugging guy, either. He was a tradesman, driving a worktruck and clearly had put in a hard day’s work on a freaking hot day.

And at the end of that day, he saved four lives.

I was stunned, and my heart felt warmth.

Then, while in the grocery, I went over to the bakery to pick up a few of my favorite cookies. They are baked on site and tantalize behind a glass case. A bakery employee has to help you get to the good stuff.

I stood by the glass and waited. The bakery employee was alone back there, on the phone, taking an intricate cake order. No worry, I got time. I can wait for delicious almond horns.

So I waited. I didn’t even feel impatient. It allowed me the chance to oogle all the other tasty cookies on display.

Finally, she hung up the phone and turned to me. She said, “Thank you so much for waiting, I’m so sorry!”

“No problem,” I said and ordered the horns.

She put a couple in a box then added one more. “One extra for having to wait,” she said, smiled, and sealed up the box.

I was stunned. I got rewarded for patience? Me, the least patient person I know?

Then on the way home, I arrived at a four way stop at the same time as another car. I was the car on the right, and thus supposed to be the first to go. That never happens according to the law in California, so as usual, I paused. The other driver, a teenage girl, gave me the wave. I smiled and waved back and turned left through the intersection.

At the next intersection, I arrived the same time as a huge SUV. I was on the left this time. I paid it forward, gave him the wave, got a smile and wave in return.

With a goofy grin on my face, I then made my way the final few blocks to home.

Sure, it’s a Monday, hotter than the hinges of hell, The Good Man is violently sick (Norovirus is the main suspect), Mom-in-Law got roughed up at her doctor, and the cat is hot and lethargic. By all accounts, it’s a sad day where I live.

But right now I feel…dare I say…optimistic about my fellow man.

Questionable fashion choices

So. It’s expected to be about 90 degrees here today.

I know, I know. I hear my New Mexico peeps saying, “pish posh, 90 degrees is a walk in the park!” and you are right.

90 degrees in Albuquerque is a fine day for a walk/run/jog/picnic/bike ride/what have you.

90 degrees here is intolerable. Because of one thing…

Humidity.

See, the human body was made to be an evaporative cooling device. Just like a swamp cooler, really.

From the Wikipedia entry: “Evaporative cooling is a physical phenomenon in which evaporation of a liquid, typically into surrounding air, cools an object or a liquid in contact with it.”

Right. I sweat. The dry air evaporates it. I feel fresh as a daisy. A sweaty daisy, but a daisy, nonetheless.

In the Bay Area, due to this large body of water, the uh, you know, Bay, we have a bit of humidity. Not much, mind you. Not Georgia on a hot summer night or Singapore all year round. But enough.

Enough that my finely tuned machine, calibrated to the New Mexico climate, can’t properly obtain “fresh as a sweaty daisy” and I just obtain sweaty.

But that’s not the point of my discussion.

The point is…it’s due to be pretty hot today. “Pretty hot” is something of a rarity around here. We get maybe two weeks, when all totaled up each year, of “good lord it’s hot” days.

The rest of the time, the weather is temperate and mild.

Because of this, few homes and businesses have any sort of air conditioning. I know, right? I almost passed out when I first moved here. “You want to rent me an apartment WITHOUT air conditioning? Do you want me to *die*?!?!?”

So in order to stay cool, people go to their drawers and the back of their closets to withdraw their “warm weather” clothes.

Herein lies the problem. In New Mexico, it gets hot a lot. Everyone has at least ONE pair of serviceable shorts, usually two or more. Something that people wouldn’t be upset at being seen in public with you while you were wearing them.

Not so in the area where it doesn’t often get that hot.

Yes, the first “damn it’s hot” day of the year means seeing shorts that are a bit tight and frightfully short.

I don’t mean on a cute girl, I mean on the overweight middle aged dad-man whose legs haven’t seen the outside of pants legs in decades wearing the shorts he bought for Spring Break back in college, thirty years ago.

This morning I saw a woman walking down the street in a purple bathing suit with the elastic about shot, thus hardly supporting her ample upper parts. This was paired with some lycra bike shorts, scarcely concealing her ample lower parts. She also carried a pack of Kools and smoked profusely. But that’s a whole other blog post.

Unless you are actually ON a bike, I’d like not to see the bike shorts, please.

Look, not all of my stuff is great to look at, but I have the decency toward my fellow mankind to wear a pair of shorts that don’t crawl up my heiney as I walk. My skin is pale from too many days under office florescent lights, but I make an effort to keep cool and keep my dignity at the same time.

For the good of all mankind.

Stay cool out there, ya’ll.

Never too late

Went to have my teeth cleaned and checked yesterday. Been going to the same dentist for twelve years, so I’ve gotten to be somewhat friendly with my hygienist.

She is amazing. A force to be reckoned with. Very handy and kind with a dental tool.

Over the years, she and I have been through a lot together. For example, I recently got married, she recently got divorced.

She’s has been seeing a new guy for about a year now. The first blush of love has worn off, and they have hit a rough patch.

Yesterday as she scraped at my teeth and gums with a metal pointy object, she caught me up on the latest.

“I’m not even staying over at his place anymore, I’ve been back at my apartment,” she said, angrily.

“I do things for him! I know what he needs and I give it to him. Why can’t he do the same for me!” she huffed. : scrape, scrape :

“He just makes me so MAD” she said, while jabbing the beejeezus out of my gums.

When she gave me a moment to rinse the blood out of my mouth, I said, “you know, my husband has told me that often enough men really appreciate it if you’ll just *tell* them what you need. Give him a little guidance and I bet he’ll be happy to provide what you want. He just wants to make you happy.”

“But why doesn’t he just *know*?!?” she wailed.

“Because he doesn’t. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you need,” I said, gently.

She thought about what I said, muttering aloud to herself with one foot on my forehead and both hands shoved in my face, jabbing at my teeth unmercifully.

“Maybe you are right, maybe I need to be willing to say what I need more. Maybe I’ll go over to his place tonight to watch the hockey game and we can talk.”

I grunted.

For some reason, people like to use me for therapy.

.
.
.
.

Oh…

Did I mention?

My hygienist is 60 years old.

Never, NEVER too late!

Oh man, now I’m stuck in here…

The wayback machine, that is.

After my post yesterday, I got an email from my best good friend. Turns out she was in the wayback machine yesterday too, but for a whole different reason.

Still a resident of Las Cruces, over the years, she’s given me an on site report on all the things changing in that sleepy college town. Yesterday she saw a sight that made her incredibly sad and she had to tell me about it in email.

Remember how I talked about NMSU being a land grant college?

What that meant to a business major such as me, is that if you walked down the hill toward the Ag College, you would find a big open pasture in which actual cows roamed around, grazing on the actual college campus.

With the wind from the right direction, you were reminded, frequently enough, that you did, in fact, attend an agricultural college.

Personally, I always liked that. Tied us to our roots. Kept us humble.

Once upon a time I even had to help round up a truckload of calves that were being moved to a different pasture. Those buggars had managed to break free. Tiny criminals. If you know anything about calves, you know they don’t naturally have that herding instinct yet.

It was like herding jello. Or the Tasmanian devil. Or some combo therein.

Sadly, the cows haven’t roamed the campus of NMSU for several years, and that open land went pretty much unused.

Until former university president, Michael Martin, agreed to annex that pastureland to the City of Las Cruces for the purpose of building a convention center. In exchange, the university gets money back from events hosted there.

I’d heard this was coming. My friend and I talked at length about it when I visited in February.

As of yesterday, ground has been broken. Construction is underway.

They made my best friend cry. That makes me cry.

There is some quote about not going quietly into that good night. But anymore, I’m not sure it’s worth the calorie expenditure to holler into a hurricane.

Change must happen. At the end of the day, it’s not about the memories, it’s about the dollars. As an NMSU trained businesswoman, I should know better.

Photo by Clay Mathis of NMSU. Source.

Get outta the wayback machine!

It was Fall, had to be. Slight crispness to the evening air. Anticipation thick as the fog of Aqua Net in the Chi Omega house.

It was 1989, probably. Or somewhere close to that. The campus of New Mexico State University. I was a sophomore, maybe a junior, I can’t remember. Doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that I was getting ready to go to a dance at Corbett Center.

The woman who would become my best friend for what is now over twenty years was the driving force that night, and many just like it. Her parents had met at a Corbett Center dance, so she was especially incentivized to go scoot a boot and see what’s doing. Family history.

I nervously pulled on my too shiny, too new, gray goatskin round toe ropers and jeans that didn’t really go with the boots, but were at least long enough to be acceptable. “You should buy some Rockies,” I was told, and they were right. I would, later, in quantity. But then I had neither the money nor the courage. I wasn’t sure what I was going to get into, I just knew I was going to be there come hell or high water.

It wasn’t my first Corbett dance. It wouldn’t be my last. This story isn’t about one actual night, more an amalgam of a lot of great nights.

The gaggle of high-haired women walked out the back door of our home, a sorority house containing twenty-eight women of different backgrounds, and one understanding house mom. What bound us together was our choice of educational institution. A land grant institution. To the uninformed, that means an agricultural college.

It was a short shuffle over to Corbett, up the stairs to the third floor where they had the ballrooms. Pay the entrance fee. Five dollars I think? Maybe less back then. Get a stamp on your hand. Look around, see who is there already. Talk about who you hope shows up.

Hear the opening strains of music. Usually The Delk Band. A group of musicians, brothers, and their dad on fiddle. I went to school with most of the boys. I remember one of the Delks was cute. I remember one of the Delks was the drummer and back then had a tendency to speed up the tempo as a song wore on. Hard to dance to a wildly varying tempo. But we did it.

They were our people, and we embraced them. And we danced. Oh did we dance.

The two-step. Not the Texas double up kind, no. The slow kind, keeping time to the music.

And a waltz. My favorite, how I love to waltz. The rhythm of waltz-timed music still beats my heart a little differently.

The polka. If done right with the right boy (he had to be tall because I’m tall and otherwise we’d just bump knees) you felt like you were flying, feet hardly touching the ground.

Then of course the Cotton-Eyed Joe (stepped in what?) and the Schottische, played back to back, often enough. Linking six or eight of us, arm in arm, facing forward, laughing our fool heads off.

The ladies, my friends and I, would stand on the sidelines and take a look at the scene. My best friend would always get asked to dance first. She’s beautiful and a great dancer. Who could blame the boys for flocking to her blue-eyed, dark haired gorgeousness? Not me, for sure.

As I got better at dancing, I got asked often enough, too. The boys liked the girls who could dance, who liked to dance, who didn’t turn up their nose at dirty fingernails and cow sh*t on their boots.

There is something special about dancing with a boy who knows how to dance, a strong lead, who looked you in the eyes while we danced. The boys who had the right fold in their hat and smelled faintly of Copenhagen and beer and Polo cologne.

I got to know those folks. All of them, the boys, the girls, the dancers, the musicians, the laughers, the people who liked to swing each other around the dance floor.

They became my family. We traveled in packs, dancing until we were sweaty, then heading outside into the cool air to take a breath, drink a beer, laugh a lot and occasionally find someone to spend a little time with.

Well not me, not then. I was still too awkward and mixed up to attract much in the way of boys at that point. I was more “one of the guys” than one of the girls the guys would chase. Don’t feel bad for me though, I eventually figured it out. (cover your eyes, mom)

Over time, we all aged a little, got to be over 21 and started to migrate from dancing at Corbett center to dancing at the local country bar. It was fun but seemed a little more complicated. Add more than a couple beers to the night and weird things happen.

But still we danced. By that time, I’d moved off campus and lived with my friend from TorC. She was crazy and fun and taught me a lot (cover your eyes, mom), and she loved to dance as much as I did. She coined the phrase “big bar hair” and learned me how to get it, and keep it, despite dancing so hard sweat ran down your face.

Then we all aged a bit more, and we graduated and found respectable jobs. My best friend, her husband (a fine dancer, I must say) and I are all actually employed in the same area that’s listed on our diplomas. One might scoff at country folks, but all three of us hold a Master’s degree in our chosen fields.

Now, on the verge of turning forty, I find I still miss those days, mightily. I wished I’d enjoyed them more at the time. The stress of school and classes and “what do I want to be when I grow up” cast a pall on my days.

My own fault. A worrier by nature, a tendency I fight tooth and nail every single day I take a breath.

When I’m having a bad day, when I doubt myself, when I realize I don’t fit in at my new place of employment, when I don’t feel heard or understood or very well liked, I can always go back to those days in my mind and smile.

I can’t get together with my best friend and her husband and NOT talk about those days. Magical. I’m blessed to have been able to have them. Once upon a time, I knew where I belonged.

______________________________

(photo found via Google. That is, in fact, Mark Delk and if I’m right, that photo was taken at Dickerson’s Auction Barn…another location for a lot of good nights of dancing….)

This historic journey brought to you by the song “On A Good Night” by Wade Hayes. The song popped up on my iPod set to shuffle during the morning commute. The song itself was burned off a CD while visiting my best good friend in the world just a couple months ago. Damn you Wade for putting me in the wayback machine!